On the road again: Las Vegas, day 2

I slept enough last night that I awakened feeling a little rested, which after the previous night's minimal sleep was quite a welcome change. After some work and a shower, I joined our group at the appointed time, and we headed over to the Venetian for brunch at Bouchon. Damn but it was good, with every dish tasty and food spilling off the table.

Afterward, we dragged our food-clogged selves around the high-end shops, a trip that included a stop at the Louboutin store.

From there, we caught a cab to the Palms and the Ultimate Fighter Finale, the event we came here to see. The fights were almost all quite entertaining, with a handful being very exciting. The guy I had hoped would win it all--Jonathan Brookins--did so, which was a nice treat.

Dinner was at Craftsteak, where we'd also dined on the same night last year. The meat was amazing, the sides good, and we all had a very nice meal.

A little more work, and then I shall crash.

On the road again: Las Vegas, day 4 - of shoes and airports

You might think that the emotional high point of a day in which you ate lunch at Thomas Keller's Bouchon, watched an early evening performance of Cirque du Soleil's Mystere, which was the first Cirque show I saw many years ago, and enjoyed a wonderful dinner at perennial favorite, Fix, would be one of those events, but for two of our party, you'd be wrong.

For them, the peak moments involved the acquisition of shoes--not just any shoes, mind you, but the famous (I am told), red-soled, Christian Louboutin shoes.

Jennie found hers at the Christian Louboutin store in the Palazzo's second-floor high-end fashion zone. Lisa's spoke to her from a shop in a similar part of the Wynn casino. Both pairs of shoes found new homes and left behind very happy salespeople.

To be fair, the shoes did look amazing on the two of them. In the taxi home from dinner, Lisa and Jennie created a shoe taxonomy that defined Lisa's as awesome and Jennie's as weaponized awesome. From the uninformed perspective of a guy capable of judging only whether the shoes looked good on the person wearing them (and my judgment in even those cases is probably suspect), I have to admit their classifications seem fair.

As Kyle observed, none of us had ever seen either of them (or any other woman, for that matter) speak with such unrestrained lust about anything else.

Today is, by comparison, rather less interesting and eventful, which is as I like travel days to be: wake up too damn early after too little sleep, check out, taxi to airport, wait and work on the floor at the gate, fly, go home, work, settle back into life. When a trip ends thusly, I considered myself blessed.