Vegas & NYC Recap

I've finally gotten around to figuring out my vacation spending! I pulled $750 from my Travel Fund to cover 3 days in Vegas and 7 days in NYC. I also used $250 from my 3rd paycheck in October for a grand total of $1,000.

Vegas
$400 cash ($80 hotel, $40 class, $62 Thunder Down Under ticket, remainder on food & drinks)
$18.08 snacks/fast food for the road trip
$25 gas

NYC
$110 cash (taxis, dinners, drinks, pre-Halloween party supplies, $45 open bar on Halloween)
$32.81 food (Trader Joe's/Dunkin Donuts/airport meal)
$10.75 transportation
$4.75 atm fees
$9.78 Duane Reade (makeup for my Halloween costume)
$270.11 shopping (I'll recap in a separate post)

Total: $882.84

Vegas was so fun and everything a Bachelorette party should be! 6 of us girls stayed in one room at the Mandalay Bay. The rooms there are huge and the bathroom easily accommodated most of us :) We went out to The Palms on Friday and partied until the early hours of the morning. On Saturday we went to brunch at the Paris buffet, took a private pole dance/lap dance class which was super fun, and saw the Thunder Down Under show in the evening. The show was a ton of fun and the Aussies are hot and hilarious! Be wary - they try to get your group to take a picture with them at the end and charge $20 per person! We opted not to get a picture. Also, don't pay the extra $10 or so to get "VIP" seating. The venue is very small and the men run all around it so you never have a bad view, plus our table wasn't even at the very front! After the show, we ran into a ton of club promoters wandering around the hotel and somehow managed to land free bottle service at one of the smaller clubs! We each pitched in $20 for tip at the end of another fun night of dancing :) The best part of the trip was making new girlfriends!

And now for New York. The city is my one true love! I can never get enough of it and it's my dream to live there soon. My dad was there on business and my mom tagged along, so I spent the first few days with them... well, mostly shopping all over SoHo with mom, hence all the shopping! She is such an enabler, but then again I got some awesome pieces and I feel like my wardrobe gets pumped up a notch whenever I go there to shop. :) We went out to some awesome dinners so the foodie in me was beyond elated and also saw "Billy Eliot" which was great! I spent time with friends who live in the city and had another friend visit from the neighboring states. Halloween was fun, even though one of the clubs wouldn't accept my CA driver's license as a valid form of ID (grr, bouncers!) so we ended up at a party where it was $45 open bar all night, sort of a rave but minus the glowsticks, no checking of anyone's IDs and no drugs - at least that I could see! There were some awesome costumes and the best part was that I didn't see a single Snooki all night. Oh, and you would think getting a cab at 3am on Halloween would be easy...no. way. It took us an hour and we had to pay $20 for a $10 cab ride after we begged an off-duty cab to take us back to my friend's place! That should have been prime fare time for them, but apparently not. I ate lots of bagels and got my fill of vanilla chai at Dunkin Donuts all week. Introduced my friends to the wonders of Trader Joe's (the new one in the UWS) where I was ecstatic to find out that the prices are EXACTLY the same as here in SoCal! That's the only place where anything has ever price-matched in that expensive city. Also, I swear I walked by Sarah Jessica Parker near Union Square! She had a hat and sunglasses, but that petite frame and her facial structure is recognizable to all SATC fans! :) Cannot wait to return to my favorite place in the world again soon.

Note to self: never again do back-to-back trips! I had an amazing time in both places but getting home at 9pm from Vegas, crashing and having to wake up/pack at 4am to make my 6:30am flight to NYC was exhausting...