Vacations….that time where you go somewhere and basically take a break from your daily routine and life. Sounds glorious right? Want to hear something better? Taking a vacation WITHOUT your kids! That’s right, an actual vacation where you don’t have to hear mom or dad or cater to anyone, but yourself. Now we’re talking..at least we will be once we get through the prep. While it’s still fresh in my mind (this vacation happened back in May..yep) I’m going to tell you about our first vacation away from the kids.

Leading up to the Our Vacation….

My husband and I recently took a trip to you guessed it Las Vegas for our anniversary/birthday/motherfather day/ and basically any other holiday we could squeeze in there because you know, that place is EXPENSIVE!

Before I get into the stressful part of getting the trip ready I first need to give my husband props for planning and surprising me with the trip. He had sitters lined up and everything ready to book when he told me about the trip. Our main reason for going to Vegas was really for the Supercross finals. Ever since we got married and found out that the finals always fall on our anniversary we have been trying to plan a trip out there. Last year it almost happened for our 5 year, until our daughter broke her leg at the trampoline park and ruined our plans…ugh typical kids. Of course after that and with the medical bills we had to put that little trip on hold. But this year..oh yeah this year we were making it happen. Even if we had to put both kids in bubbles to make it happen.

So with the trip booked we had two months to prep. That meant getting schedules made (our son was still in school at the time), making sure our allergy ridden daughter had the proper list of things she could eat and places to stay away from, and then of course packing. Did I start this process immediately when we found out? Before you answer that I really want you to think about the kind of person I really am.. I mean I have written a few posts already so you all should get a sense of who I really am. Now you may answer. If your answer was yes, then I’m going to need you to go back and read my other posts. If you answered no or Hell no! then hey friend! Yeah I didn’t start this prep until the month, maybe even a few weeks before we left. Oh yeah I also forgot to mention I wanted to meal prep a few items for the family watching the kids to make dinner easy on them.

Things I did Before We Left…

*Write Out Schedules

*Make Approved food lists

*Copy Insurance card and add family to doctor forms

*Double check with neighbors that they can be used in case of emergencies

*Do a shitty job of grocery shopping

*Make multiple trips to the store before of my shitty job the first time

*Make Two meals out of Four that you actually planned on

*End up leaving money in envelopes so they can do their own shopping

*Pamper myself (that’s most important)

*Fail at shopping for nice clothes to wear

*Remember all the money we are saving up for is for the trip and I can’t buy anything nice for the trip

*Pack a bunch of what I consider nice clothes

*Cry and have a panic attack about leaving my kids

I think that covers it.

Now it’s time to go…

The morning of, we kiss our kids goodbye and reluctantly drive three hours to the airport to catch our flight. Of course we didn’t leave as early as we wanted to so we barely made it to the airport with enough time to grab a quick beer and some mozzarella sticks before our flight. We basically just needed something in our stomach to give a nice cushion for the alcohol we would be consuming. I need to add that this was our first trip together EVER so we had to take advantage of the fact that we didn’t have the kids with us. Don’t worry we were still responsible.

We get seated and we wait for the plane to take off. By the way the beer has not calmed my nerves at this point and all I can think about is that if we die our children are orphans (yes I’m a bit dramatic). I’m at the point in my life that I feel we should be traveling like the President and VP do. Separately to secure someone stays alive. Again I know I’m dramatic. So we take off and do you think my fears calmed? No, the take off was horrendous and I thought we were going to crash. I think we had a new pilot because it was ROUGH and I’m pretty sure the weather was fine (sunny, with little wind). Even after we got in the air we couldn’t sleep because the whole flight was rough. Since we couldn’t sleep we decided to enjoy another alcoholic beverage again to calm our nerves and also to actually enjoy it and we talked and laughed, couple things you can do when you don’t have kids asking you to do a million things. I should also add that at the moment I didn’t realize the importance of this drink until we were landing. As we start to descend everything seems to be going smoothly until we drop straight down, hit the tarmac extremely hard, and basically coming in hot to where I feel like we are about to flip. I know that sounds super dramatic, but from the looks of a few passengers and my husband, I wasn’t the only one worried.

However we finally made it!

The Trip…

So not to bore you I will keep this section as brief as possible. We stayed at the Tropicana which is on the main strip and is a pretty decent hotel. The pool looked really nice from afar, unfortunately though both of us never felt great on the trip (stomach issues) so We never made it to the pool. Also it closed everyday at 5pm so that also made it hard. It was fine though because the place looked packed every time we went to check, so I was fine not making it down there.

Our first Vegas meal was at Chili’s where we enjoyed quesadillas and I had two huge margaritas because aren’t you supposed to go somewhere that you have in your own city? Honestly we didn’t really eat anything fancy besides one Italian place that we ate for lunch our second day there. Buca Di Beppo and it was really good. They also took a cute little photo of you when you get there so that was nice. Everything else was pretty basic when it came to food. So not much to write home about.

The casinos were a lot of fun. I have never gambled in my life so getting to hit the slots was pretty cool. Another nice thing? They serve you free drinks while you gamble so we sat at the penny slots and enjoyed. I have to say even though we had fun on the main strip at the different casinos, our favorite part was Old Vegas. It was cheaper, and more of our scene. We ended up meeting with some friends who came down for Supercross as well and had a blast gambling with them. So I’m not sure if we enjoyed Old Vegas more because we had friends there or because it really was our scene. I’ll let you know when we make another trip, this time with more people.

Onto The Main Event…

Now for the main reason we went. Supercross! I have never been to a single race my entire life, however I have been watching almost every Saturday the past 6 seasons so I knew what a race looked like. My husband on the other hand used to race (not professionally) and he’s been to quite a few Supercross races in his day. However Vegas Finals were a first for both of us so that was pretty cool to experience. It was just as crazy as I expected. We went down to the pits to see where all the racers set up before hand and even got to watch a few practice rides. My favorite part? They had 8 year olds racing which was the cutest thing ever! There was even a kid from Tennessee so of course we had to root for him. He got third, but boy did he try.

It was hot, like super, super, hot. We are talking like 100 degrees. No amount of sunscreen that I put on would stop the sunburn I had coming. We even bought our son a hat as his souvenir and I wore it to protect my face. I know we are good parents. We tried to stay in the shade as long as possible, but eventually we had to sit out in the sun for the races.

The whole thing was amazing! We sat next to some really cool people and had an absolute blast!. You don’t get to feel that kind of energy sitting on your couch so getting to experience it first hand was pretty neat. We were going to hang out with those awesome people we met, but by the time we even made it back to the strip (The complete opposite side of where our hotel was) we were so tired we just wanted to get some food (chili’s again, with a margarita) and go lay down in our hotel room. I realize that makes us sound really old and I’m ok with that.

More adventures….

We didn’t just gamble while we were there. Monday we rented a car and drove to the Hoover Dam and tried to go see the Grand Canyon. We ended up going to the wrong side and it was too expensive for us. Even though we basically wasted a trip out there, the drive wasn’t that bad. We just had to make sure that we had plenty of gas because you definitely didn’t want to get stranded out there. The view was beautiful and we made the best out of the situation.

Mainly our trip consisted of us drinking, gambling, and watching Netflix in our room. A perfect parent vacation if you ask me. Did we miss our kids? Hell yeah! we face timed (thank God for face time) and we were always in the know of what they were doing. We may have been on a kid less vacation, but we are still parents and we still needed to know what was going on at all times back at home.

They did great without us, the flight home was a lot easier, and we made it in time to watch our son’s baseball game. I’d say overall it was a pretty nice vacation and after we take our kids on one, we’ll be ready for another kid less vacation.