Viva Las Vegas!

I arrived in Vegas a little early as part of my own personal "stop to smell the flowers" program.

My wife and I checked in to a gorgeous suite at the Mandalay Bay with a 120-degree view over the Beach Pool and the entire southern end of the valley. Truly breathtaking. If you have clients who want to live large while in Vegas, Vegas is ready to accommodate them.

We visited with an old friend who's doing some very interesting things with streaming video. It's one of those Web 2.0 technologies that has some real potential for home-based travel agents and I hope to investigate further and report here on what I find.

Then we took off north of "The Strip" to the Valley of Fire, where there are no flowers this time of year but still plenty of color. The amazing multi-hued sandstone formations here were sacred to the Native Americans who hunted and lived there. They are gone now, but their haunting pictographs remain to puzzle archaeologists. More recently, the area was used as a hideout for bad guys of various descriptions, just like in the movies. In fact, you can see the remains of a movie set that used this other wordly setting as a back drop.

Valley of Fire makes a great one-day excursion from the flesh pots of Vegas and, with an admission charge of just $6 per vehicle, the price is right for gamblers down on their luck.

Back on the Strip, we caught up on our Cirque du Soleil viewing. "O" is an old friend for me, new for my wife, and it's just as wondrous as it was last year. "Mystere" was new for both of us and I think it is perhaps the most sensuous of the Cirque shows I've seen (the tawdry "Zoomanity" included). The acts in "Mystere" are absolutely awesome and together constitute something of a hymn to the human body.

It occured to me that there must be thousands of people who would love the magic of Cirque du Soileil, have enough money that they wouldn't blink at the premium price, and yet would never, ever think of coming to Vegas. Maybe there's a market for Circque tours to Vegas that have everything to do with high-end entertainment and nothing to do with the other attractions for which Vegas is justly noted.

But now it's back to business. The three-ring circus that is the Home-Based-Luxury-Travel-Institute-Expo-Conference is about to begin. I hope to blog it regularly during the week.