20 years ago: Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA – c.11th November 2002

Part II of our honeymoon was spent in Las Vegas, five weeks after we got married. Things immediately got interesting when we landed in Philadelphia and went to check in to our connecting flight, to be told that “the airline went out of business yesterday”.

Fortunately, for $100 each, we could transfer to an outgoing US Air flight – if we were quick. We weren’t quick because US Airport Security was still painfully slow, over a year after 9/11, and the queues stretched back almost to the main entrance. Even more fortunately, we got through it all in time to take the last two seats on the replacement flight.

Here we are in front of the Bellagio’s lake, the home of their famous fountain display and a location in the recently-released ‘Ocean’s Eleven’. The even more recogniseable Caesar’s Palace is visible behind my right shoulder.

It had been an expensive year so we couldn’t afford to stay on the Strip itself. We stayed just off the Strip at the Gold Coast Resort, on West Flamingo, just the other side of Interstate 15.

We had a week of touring the casinos and various attractions, with a very moderate amount of gambling that reflected our we’ve-just-funded-a-wedding budget. We rode the rollercoaster at New York, New York and the Big Shot atop the Stratosphere Tower, we visited the car museum in the Flamingo, an Elvis museum…somewhere – and we didn’t bother with the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. I was also gutted tho learn that a bit of pre-trip internet research (it was only just becoming a ‘thing’) would have told me that Aerosmith were playing the MGM Grand…

One morning, I was. a bit too keen to hit the breakfast buffet at [name withheld] and I think I might have had something that had been there a few hours because by that afternoon, I was being violently ill – a lot – with suspected food poisoning. To make it more interesting, we’d booked on a flight over the Grand Canyon the next day.

Consequently, I’m now one of a select group of people to have been spectacularly sick in at least three bags in a small plane over the place consistently named as the Worlds Number One ‘Place To See Before You Die’…