What happens in Vegas... I share with you!

After years of dreaming about doing such a thing, and months of planning and waiting for it to be official, last week I finally went on a vacation with girlfriends - to Las Vegas!! I've mooned over the idea of taking a girls only trip for ages, with many different girlfriends, fantasizing about road trips, all-inclusive resorts, backpacking treks through Europe, etc. I always had the best intentions of following through, as I'm sure my friends did, but for whatever reason these trips just never panned out. But, I got lucky this time, and a group of 6 girls (2 of us with children!) managed to actually coordinate an out-of-country vacation - together! 

Las Vegas is the perfect place to go to with a group of friends. Especially if you're all women. If you're a woman the perks area never-ending, and people will trip over themselves trying to get you into their clubs. The whole point of Vegas is to get women drunk by offering them open-bar promos and VIP access, which of course brings in the men, who spend an obscene amount of money trying to get with these impared women. It's all so obvious, and honestly pretty friggin' exploitive and immoral, but really, when the line-up to get into any given club if you're not on the guest/promo list is hundreds of people long, you'll take the freebies when they're offered to you. Luckily, our group was savvy enough to take advantage of the perks without falling prey to their true purpose, and we just laughed at how unfair it all was. Men, quite frankly, get gouged in Vegas. They even have to pay to use the pools in the hotels they're guests of! They pay $40 cover (on average) for bars, $10-15 per drink that would be $6-7 here, and if you're not "on the list" forget about getting in anywhere. It's not gonna happen unless you book and pay for bottle service, which starts at several hundred dollars and goes up into the 1000s without blinking. We felt pretty bad for the men who were clearly in town with their girlfriends/wives, and they were still getting completely screwed, just because it's been determined that all men want to throw their money away in attempts to lure drunk girls on vacation into sleeping with them, and these men need to be taken advantage of. Kinda sad.

Anyway, like I said, we took advantage of the perks of our gender and hit up some of the best clubs: Tao, Lavo, Moon at The Palms, Studio 54... and we had a blast dancing and gawking at the extravagance of the strip. We ate disgusting amounts of McDonald's and IHOP in the wee morning hours, laid out by the pool for a few hours each day, did some serious shopping at the outlet centre nearby (scored myself a sweet Coach purse for $99), and managed to do some impressive touring around taking pictures of all the iconic casinos and bars that before last week I had only seen on tv. Seriously, Caeser's Palace is unbelievable. It had talking, moving, marble statues! What the hell is that? And where else on earth could you find something so ridiculous? Only in Vegas.

I don't know if I would need to go back to Las Vegas anytime soon (or ever?). The lifestyle of drinking and tanning and not sleeping was pretty hard on my body - I swear I aged 5 years in as many days - but it was the trip of a lifetime, and I'll have incredible memories to look back on fondly forever. The girls I shared this time with were fun and crazy, and we experienced shockingly little drama during our time together. I can't imagine having done this particular trip with anyone else. :)