Our last day in Vegas was a long one. We decided to travel over to the Grand Canyon for the day. We had reserved our trip well in advance and received an e-mail right before we left saying we would not be picked up at our hotel. Instead, we were to meet at the Monte Carlo by ***6 AM*** to catch a shuttle. Monte Carlo was the next casino up the street from MGM but on the opposite side of the street. Our shuttle was picking us up at the entrance on the totally opposite side away from The Strip. We had to get up before 5 in the morning. UGH!

Our shuttle arrived and we rode to a North Las Vegas airstrip. When we booked our trip, we were supposed to leave at 7:30, but unbeknownst to us, this had changed a few days earlier to 8:30. A full two hours from the time that we got there and we had brought nothing to do. Thankfully, the gift shop had playing cards, so we bought a deck and played gin rummy. We didn't actually take off until after 9 AM. The flight to the Grand Canyon took about an hour, but the tour was really cool. The Grand Canyon is beautiful. We saw several wild California Condors at our first stop flying around. Apparently the squirrels in the area are pretty feisty. We were told to stay away from them because they were aggressive. I read a sign that said about 30 bites requiring medical attention were reported every day. Personally, I think this is where squirrels go to train for the impending world invasion.

According to the web site of the tour company that took us to the Grand Canyon, we were supposed to be back at our hotel 7 hours after being picked up. For us that would have been 2 PM. By 12:30, we had not finished the tour and it was at least a 90 minute trip back to the hotel. Part of our tour included lunch. Unfortunately this was at a pretty bad buffet. I've had worse food, but compared to what we'd eaten all week, this was pretty yucky. We didn't leave to go back to the airport until after 1:30. We were supposed to meet outside at 1:20, but there wasn't a bus there for us. The trip was going from bad to worse. After finally getting a ride back to the airport, we had to wait around for them to find our pilot to fly us back. I think we actually started our flight around 2 PM. I slept most of the way back because I was exhausted. After we landed we hopped in the shuttle to go back to our hotel. They wanted to drop everyone off at their actual hotel which was nice, but as luck would have it, we were scheduled to be dropped off last. We eventually got off the shuttle at a different casino and took the monorail back to MGM. Rush hour traffic on a Friday in Vegas is ridiculous. Had we stayed on the shuttle, it's possible we wouldn't have gotten back until 5 PM.

For our last night in Vegas, we went up to Circus, Circus. We had dinner at a great Mexican restaurant called Blue Iguana. Unfortunately, they didn't have any of their namesake on display. After dinner, we went to the amusement park there. I rode the roller coaster twice. It was supposed to be $6 for a ticket to ride, but they never took my ticket. It was pretty good for an indoor coaster: two vertical loops followed by two corkscrews and a spiral at the end. After the amusement park we stuck around to see the Flying Poemas trapeeze group before going back to our room and packing up.