Introduction...

Early 2004 we came up with the idea to celebrate Christmas and New Year in Las Vegas. We thought it’d be great fun to go there with some friends and have some fun.In the end only Arnold & Florence joined us for this, but we had a great time as these pages will show.

Originally Vegas was to be the starting point of our 4 month trip around the world. We had done all the planning; Michel had arranged to get 4 months off of work, Inge handed in her resignation and the tickets had been bought. Wanna see where we would have gone? Have a look at the tickets we had booked with STA Travel, an excellent English travel company specializing in RTW tickets.

But then we found out late October that we were pregnant…. And after we found out at the end of November that we were going to have triplets we new that we had to do some hard thinking about this trip. After first looking into going for 2 months, then only going for 1 month, we decided not to take unnecessary risks and cancel the whole trip.

Instead we decided just to book a return trip to Vegas. After some puzzling we booked tickets through Elmar Travels, to fly to Vegas on Christmas day and to return on 4 January. These days proofed to be the cheapest. And now: Las Vegas!

Christmas Day 2004

This was the longest Christmas day ever! It lasted for 33 hours as we left Amsterdam at 10:35 and got into Las Vegas at 16:15 local time which is 9 hours earlier as Dutch time. It was a very long and boring flight. We had a 90 minute stop over in Minneapolis, after which we had another 3½ hrs flight to Vegas.

We took a taxi to our hotel, Treasure Island, checked in and had freshened up a bit and met Arnold & Flo for drinks and snacks at the Isla bar. We managed to stay awake until 9 pm at which time we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore.