The Howell Family: June 2012

The beginning of June, Scott and I took a little trip together to Las Vegas. It's not a place that would be first on my list of romantic places to go, but Scott needed to go down there for an interview with a client he was hoping to acquire, so I tagged along. We went a few days before his day of "business" and did some playing.

We stayed at the Luxor hotel.

The first night we were there, we had dinner at our hotel, then decided to walk up to the end of The Strip and back.

We watched the dancing fountains at The Bellagio...

And we watched the pirate show at Treasure Island...

From this vantage point, it's a beautiful city...

But when you are down in it, the only words that I could use to describe it were filthy and evil. There are people standing every few feet along every sidewalk, trying to hand out pornographic images of call girls. They shove the pictures right in your face, so you have to just look straight ahead and just keep on walking. There are billboards everywhere, advertising shows with women mostly naked. And then there are the people walking the streets who are dressed so immodestly, you just want to shut your eyes. After our first evening there, we knew we didn't want to spend any more time in the city, so we headed up to Hoover Dam.

We went on the Power Plant tour. It was fascinating. We got to go down underneath the dam.

Then we walked around the outside. It was VERY windy.

That night we braved the city again to attend "The Phantom of the Opera" at the Venetian. It was amazing! We were right in the middle of the third row, so we could see all the actors' expressions. It really was fantastic.

After Phantom, we ate dinner inside the Canal Shoppes at the Venetian. It's decorated to look like the streets of Venice. They even had real pigeons flying around. We had the yummiest gourmet pizza...

And the dessert was perhaps the most delightful thing I have ever tasted (salted caramel gelato, dark chocolate gelato, a dark chocolate cake, and meringue on top). It was to die for...

The next day we went to the temple.

As we finished our session, we were walking around the grounds and happened to run into Scott's cousin who is a security guard there. He gave us directions to his mom's house, and we went there to visit for a few hours. Scott was hoping his potential client would get into town early enough to have dinner with, so we held off on dinner till we were sure they weren't going to make it in time, then had a late dinner just the two of us..

Breakfast the next morning was from a crepe restaurant in our hotel. Once again, very good food. (Scott went for savory, and I went for sweet).

Then it was off to the big interview. It was with a mining company in Nevada, and Scott has been hoping to pick them up as a client for about a year now. His boss and their company's lawyer flew down on the company plane that morning to join Scott in the interview. After the interview, we all hopped on the company plane and headed home. The next day, Scott got the message that his company was the one they picked. We are so happy! It's a big account and will be really good for us financially. So, not only did we get a wonderful trip away just the two of us, the trip was also profitable.

Last month Scott took the three older boys on a father/son campout. Owen was pretty sure he should have been going, and tried to climb in with the boys. But Scott requires them to be able to sleep at night and not have diapers to change, so Owen had to stay home with the girls.

Scott was supposed to fly out for Chicago early Saturday morning, but he was able to change his flight till just afternoon so he could take the boys camping that night before. Since I wasn't there, I don't have any great stories to tell from it, but I do have some great cell phone photos that Scott took.