AntSol Travel

South Strip: New York-New York & MGM Grand

After walking around the Marriott Grand Château in my previous post, I went back and did some writing until everyone was ready at noon, time for lunch. We walked to the New York-New York Resort to get lunch.

New York-New York Resort, part of the MGM Resorts, and home of Shake Shack, a counter-service burger restaurant. The burgers were okay, and the service could be a better system to retrieve your order, as you use your first name and initial, which still be mixed up, and you have to be inside to get it since they won’t call names out over the speaker if you are outside. 

New York-New York recreates the city’s experience with tower high-rise facades, pretzel & pizza stands, brownstone row homes, the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, and even a rollercoaster. Wow, now only it can be this walkable everywhere.

After lunch, New York-New York hosts the Hershey Chocolate World store, they have a variety of merchandise and candy from their chocolate lineup, even Hershey Bars that are exclusive to the stores: cotton candy, cookies n’ mint, birthday cake, and hazelnut. 

Then we crossed over the street to the MGM Grand Resort the largest hotel room count in a single building at over 6,800 rooms, the latest casino floor space of 171,000 square feet, and the largest sports book with TVs on nearly most sports games & horseraces. However, we mainly just went there for the restrooms and to look at things there. 

Then went out to the street where MGM Grand leases street from space to many stores & restaurants. We got a huge daiquiri as you can carry open containers of alcohol in Clark County, where Las Vegas & the strip are based in. Be aware of your surroundings as there are many people in cheap character costumes & showgirls wanting to pose for photos for tips, which my family members accidentally did by an Olaf, and they were scared by Olaf ever since. (File photo not found.)

There are two other flagship stores we visited M&M and Coca-Cola: M&M has four floors to get a variety of M&Ms in bulk quantities of all colors, dispensers with one that looks like a slot machine, merchandise, and even an m&m racecar! The Coca-Cola store was like the other two stores with brand merchandise, die-cast cars & trucks, various can & bottle-shaped merchandise, the polar bear-themed mercy, and the upper level for more merchandise and paid samples of various Coke products. After that, we headed back to the Marriott to rest up a bit before heading to the Vencian for dinner & the concert.

 

After resting for half an hour, the Marriott had their drink of the day: cranberry gin and Lemonade, you can donate to the Children’s Hospital as well. We had cranberry gin, which I liked, so much that, some of the family did not like it, so I drank theirs. Then I show my family the pool areas since it has been four years since we have been there and was a bit confusing to navigate the resort. Finally, we headed back to the unit to rest a bit more before we depart for the Venetian.

North Strip: Navigating our way to the Venetian & about the Venetian

Just before six, we left the Marriott to head up north on the Strip to get to the Venetian Hotel for the Foreigner concert. Walking the strip on Las Vegas Bluvebard was a mile on crowded sidewalks and the packed street on Saturday night. To avoid pedestrians from crossing the street and clogging up traffic, there are elevated walkways in which you have to go up elevators & escalators, which less than half of them work, which should be a huge ADA complaint issue as someone using a wheelchair for mobility can go up the Strip. Much of the cars on the road are taxis, probably just guests just going up the street and going to another resort. Probably having an elevated tram or monorail that goes up and down Las Vegas Boulevard would help ease congestion. There is the Las Vegas Monorail, however, it is buried inside all of the eastern side resorts, forcing passengers to get confused about where to navigate out. 

After thirty minutes of navigating crowded walkways and broken-down escalators, we finally made it to the Venetian Las Vegas, a Venice, Italy-themed hotel. It was built on the former Sands Resort that was demolished in 1996 and opened in 1999. It is owned by Vici Properties, who owns & leases the majority of MGM & Caesars branded properties after Caesar’s had a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017. Vici is considered a real estate investment trust (REIT), a company that purely owns real estate and then leases or has management contracts for the day-to-day operations of its investment portfolio. The Venetian is managed by Apollo Management, which manages the second-largest hotel in the world with 6,092 rooms & suites between the Venetian and all-suite Palazzo towers. It is home to the Canal Shops, a recreation of the canals of Venice with high-end shops & restaurants, and complete with gondola rides at $40 per person. It is also home to the Venetian Expo, with 2,250,000 square feet of event space, it is 450,000 square feet bigger than the Anaheim Convention Center at 1,800,000.  Venetian Expo is home to many conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and the Hospitality Show, an industry conference for the hospitality industry, for which I am hoping to get a press pass for June. 

It was 6:30 pm, and we needed to find a restaurant to eat at before the show starts at 8 am. There weren’t a lot of quick service options or sit-down restaurants without a wait time. Then we found CANALETTO AT VENETIAN LAS VEGAS, a higher-end Italian restaurant with pizza, calzone, pasta, and more. I had a calzone with mushroom, ricotta, ham, and drenched in tomato sauce. It was really good! My family members got pizza, pasta, and an appetizer as nothing looked too good at the moment for them. After that, we quickly walked through the Canal Shops to the Venetian Theater for the Foreigner concert!