Well, we started our New Year off with a bang! We flew up to Las Vegas for the weekend just for fun, and to take advantage of the fact that I’m not in school right now. We stayed at the Luxor because honestly, when else can you sleep in a pyramid? Here is our list of activities:

• Ate some good food (i.e. Chipotle)
• Saw the Zumanity Cirque du Soleil show
• Gambled $5
• Went to the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay
• Got roped into a timeshare schpeil (but got 3 free meals and tickets to aforementioned Shark Reef out of it)
• Went to The Fremont St. Experience
• Walked through some casinos including the Aladdin Planet Hollywood
• Found Erin a nice dress for the cruise
• Looked at all the pre-CES paraphernalia
• Picked up a nice little Peter Lik piece for our living room

Here is our list of transporation methods:

• Automobile
• Shuttle
• Airplane
• Foot
• Tram
• Monorail
• Bus
• Taxi

All in all, it was lots of fun, except for the end part where they put our luggage on the next flight and we had to wait in the airport for an extra hour and a half after our plane landed a half hour late and we got home at 1:30am.

We're about to embark on our 7 day Caribbean cruise aboard the Caribbean Princess and I thought I'd give a quick update on what we've already done here. We spent Friday in Miami, mostly touring various parts of the city via public transportation. We ended up in South Beach at about 3:30, and got to walk along the beach and see the famous sites. The weather was threatening rain the entire day, what a lovely day! Yesterday (Saturday) we walked the 1.5 miles from our hotel to the Pro Dive shop here in Ft. Lauderdale, and chartered a boat to go out diving to the sunken ship "The Rebel". The dive was only our 5th dive ever, and it was down to a depth of 100' besting our previous deepest dive by 40', and was our first wreck dive. We saw a Grouper that was about 4' long and 18" tall. We were only allowed to stay at that depth for about 20 minutes or else we might get the bends. Our second dive of the day was to the "Ft. Lauderdale Caves" reef. We saw tons of different fish, like we were swimming in an aquarium. It was our first dive without an instructor telling us what to do. Since the depth was only 30' for this dive, they told us that we should use "pop-up navigation" where, if you get disoriented, you just pop up back to the surface, and reorient yourself by locating the dive boat. We felt like old pros in the water by that time. We're headed to the port at noon today.