Wanderlust Wednesday: Las Vegas Edition

This link up with Kate, Emily, & Kerricouldn't have come at a more perfect time considering I just got back from Vegas on Sunday (and I'm still riding the struggle bus 3 days later). I went out there for my best friend's bachelorette party and let's just say, Vegas kicked my butt.

*Warning picture heavy post*

We flew out Thursday evening and landed in Vegas around 10:30 pm, but this didn't prevent us from getting ready to head out for the night. We were staying at The Venetian so we stayed in our hotel and went to Tao. It was a really fun atmosphere with great music until we left at about 2:30 am, I haven't had a late night out like that in what feels like years!

On Friday we woke up (slowly and painfully, but hangover free) to get ready to head out to brunch at Hash House a Go Go. The food was amazing and I definitly recommend checking it out if you have one near by. I ordered the Tractor driver combo which was eggs, potatoes, and quite possibly the biggest pancake I've ever had in my life, like no joke I got barely 1/4 through with the thing. 

 When we were thoroughly stuffed, we headed to our Stripper 101 class at Planet Hollywood. This was such a fun activity, especially for a bachelorette party, but I definitely recommend doing it even as a girls night. Our instructor was really great and has perfected her skill, and let me tell you that you need some serious skills and muscles to do what she was doing. We learned the basic stuff, but it was a ton of fun and such a fantastic workout, we're talking sore for a week afterwards...this clearly means I need to get my butt to the gym. Since we were at Planet Hollywood already we decided to walk around to the different shops and slowly make our way back to The Venetian to get ready for dinner. 

We made reservations at Buddy V's restaurant inside The Venetian and if you're wondering who Buddy V is you may recognize him as the Cake Boss from TLC. The food was pretty good, but the service could have honestly been better. I felt we were underserved considering we were a large group of girls (12 in total) and we were celebrating a special night, but that's beside the point.

 After dinner, we made our way to Excalibur to see Thunder from Down Under. Now I had seen this show the last time I was in Vegas and it was probably better than the first time just because of where we were seated. We were smack dab in the front of the stage so we got to see a lot of the action. It was quite a show and all of us girls left there laughing and smiling big. They did introduce one of the newest members of the show that night and even let us take pictures for 30 seconds (no photo/video is allowed during the show)...this guy was definitey a good looking guy. After Thunder, we headed out to Omnia Nightclub to try to get in to see Calvin Harris, but the line was ridiculously long and we decided to call it and go back to the hotel to play some fun bachelorette party games. I'm so glad we did this because we all got to bond and have a grown up slumber party.

On Saturday we woke up bright and early (which was fine with me because I woke up to winning $100 off my Chicago Bulls bet from the night before). 

After we were all ready to go we headed over to Caesar's Palace to have breakfast at Serendipity 3. The food was pretty awesome, but rushed since we had to head to SLS to meet up for our pool crawl.

 Our pool crawl was such a fun time and the first pool we were at was definitely my favorite. We started the crawl out at the beach club at the SLS, FoxTail. It wasn't packed at all because it was still pretty early, but we ended up getting a cabana for free to hang out in poolside. Before we knew it, we had to head out to the next stop on the crawl, the Welcome to Las Vegas sign. They had a fun party bus filled with some awesome partygoers, which made the experience even more fun. After snapping pictures at the sign, we headed to the second pool on the crawl. This pool was kind of a bust and we decided to just call it and head over to the party at Wet Republic after hearing about Krewella being there. The pool party was super packed, but a lot of fun. When we decided that we were well and pruny, we headed to The Cosmo to grab some secret pizza. This pizza is pretty awesome and if you have the chance to go there, GO! 

We went back to the hotel to shower and get ready for the night. Some of the girls were flying out that night so they all got ready to head out and we got ready to head to Encore to see David Guetta. This was definitely a once in a lifetime experience because I will never do that again. It was an awesome show and all, but the crowd was just too insane and being stone cold sober didn't make the situation better. We stayed until about 2 am and headed back to our hotel to sleep.

Sunday we woke up much slower because we didn't have anything planned. We had a late afternoon flight so we decided to get some more pool time in. We didn't want to do anymore pool parties so we decided since it was the nicest day to hang by the hotel pool. I was excited because this is when I got all my tanning in, and I only had to lay out for about 45 minutes to get it. After packing up all of our stuff, it was time to head to the airport to go back to reality. Our flight ended up getting delayed by 2 hours because of the storms in Dallas so we didn't touchdown in Chicago until 11 pm. Let's just say having to go into work the next day was not the least bit fun and I still haven't gotten used to the time difference.