Las Vegas Neon Boneyard Review and Pictures

After work today, we went out to the Neon Graveyard. It's been on our bucket list and it was the only touristy thing we wanted to accomplish on this trip. I also found out it's actually called the Neon Boneyard.

Our experience was not great. Which is very disappointing. This place has so much potential! Here's how it plays out.

They treat it like a museum. The tickets actually call it the "Neon Museum." But you're not allowed to wander or explore like a normal museum. You're required to go with a tour guide...

...and you're not allowed to stray from the group or even lag behind to take pictures. Right. Like I'm going to allow a ton of people to be every one of my pictures. Needless to say, I lagged behind as much as I could.

I wasn't alone though. Isa stayed back with me too. :) Oh, did I mention it was crazy hot and sunny? It was.

Sadly, absolutely no video. :(

The tour guide's cadence was jarring, so it wasn't pleasant to listen to. She would ask questions, but not really play off the answers very well. It was like a recording that asks questions and then keeps going regardless of what you said. It was extremely informative though. We learned a lot.

Like that when the government was doing atomic bomb testing in the Mojave desert, a lot of casinos would sell "Atomic Vacation Packages" and they'd bus people up to the top of a mountain to watch the bombs explode in the distance.

We also learned about the different "periods" of Las Vegas. First there was the "sawdust on the floor" old-western casinos. Then there was a big push to clean up Vegas and bring more families out, so hotels and casinos started doing "themes." The Mirage was the first one to have a loose theme - Polynesian. But Caesar's Palace was the first to make the theme the central part of everything they did.

The Stardust was "outer-space" themed. Eventually they ran into financial troubles and changed their font to Helvetica and it's said that was the nail in the coffin because they strayed from their theme.

Obviously, we took the daytime tour. It's less expensive than at night, but they told us that only 7 of the signs actually work. The rest are lit up by strobes along the path.

And there are so many smaller signs and random letters strewn about that I feel like you'd miss a lot if you came at night, since they would be in the shadows of the larger signs.

They also don't let you bring tripods or monopods or even different lenses if you have an SLR. You get one camera. Not even a phone and a camera. One.

So unless you have a REALLY good camera that can pretty much see in the dark or has really good image stabilization, I'd say go in the daytime. Because look at this scene, with only one light to light up this entire section, I doubt it'd be very easy to shoot at night.

They arranged the letters in "Moulin Rouge" to spell "in love." Except it's actually "in loue." She made it sound like it was a coincidence. Right. I'm pretty sure those are bolted in place. That was on purpose.

The only sign in the entire park to actually say Las Vegas is the Las Vegas Club sign.

Overall, it was definitely worth seeing, but not quite worth $18. We wish they would have given options, like $10 to just walk around and take pictures. Then $6 for an audio guide. Put a placard by the major signs with a little blurb (like paintings in a museum) and a number to enter on the audio guide to learn more about the history. Then they don't have to pay for a tour guide and if they're really worried about people touching stuff, just put a few guards around the park like a real museum.

And then you can allow video because you won't have to stress about people recording the tour guide. I'm seriously really bummed that I couldn't make a YouTube video out of this. :(

This day's not over yet! Keep reading here: Leaving Las Vegas

Snorkel Adventure in Klein Bonaire

For those of you who think all I do is go to the Caribbean and play all day long, here is some fodder to support your argument.

For the record, there was no ship in port today and the store was closed. So we couldn't work. This was my first full day off EVER on a Caribbean business trip. And we made the most of it. Check out the video of our experience here, or scroll down to read more details.


"We", by the way, is Justin and me. Justin is the Regional Sales Director for this area. We decided to team up on this trip to get more done and it's been highly productive. You'll see him in pictures below.

After a great breakfast at our hotel, we picked up water, sunscreen, and snacks at the supermarket and then headed downtown. We took the water taxi "Kantika di Amor" across to Klein Bonaire at noon. In the picture above, we're standing on Bonaire, but you can see Klein Bonaire in the background, just above the roof of the boat. ("Klein" is Dutch for "little" - it's a little island).

The water taxi takes about 20 minutes to get across to Klein Bonaire and they drop you off at No Name Beach. The front of the boat drops down so you can just walk off onto the soft sandy beach.

For only US $15 return, it's a great service and makes for a cheap and awesome day trip.

No Name Beach, from what we hear, is the only true sandy beach in all of Bonaire. As this is the first and only beach I've ever been to on Bonaire, I can't dispute that. All boats bring their passengers here because it's the only spot on the 6+ mile circumference (about 10k) of the island that doesn't have coral reef protecting it.

So we walked up to the north end of the beach and snorkeled around. It was nice, but not spectacular. Lots of fish, a few corals I'd never seen before. But the colors weren't as bright as I was expecting.

So we played on the beach for a while and ate some food and then hiked down south to Buoy B (No Name Beach is at Buoy A. It's a rough walk.

You walk south because the current (albeit a weak one) runs north. So when you finally get in, you can drift (slowly) back to No Name Beach for your ride back. By this point, Justin had seen a turtle and gone off to swim after him. Later I found out he swam into an eel. I kept going because I wanted to see more of the reef.

So the reef runs pretty much unbroken around the entire island (except for No Name Beach). However, there are small sections every once in a while, maybe 5 to 10 feet wide, where you can swim through it. As you can see in all of the water pictures above, the light blue/teal water is the shallows. Then the dark blue is the deep ocean. The reef divides the two, with no middle ground whatsoever. The second you cross the reef, the bottom drops out and it's very intimidating. Only snorkel Klein Bonaire if you're really confident in your swimming and snorkeling abilities. Because once you cross the reef, you can't get back in.

So if you run into trouble out there, you don't really have any options. Because if you try to swim through the coral, you'll end up in worse shape than whatever the problem was you were swimming away from. Plus there's fire coral here, which I had never seen before, but it's COOL.

I saw tons of fish and lots of different types of coral. Besides the regulars - Parrotfish, Sergeant Majors (the zebra striped fish, there's one in the pic above), a few French Angelfish (love them!), the Blue Tangs (Dori from Finding Nemo), and all the others - there were a few sightings that got me particularly excited.

First, turtles are always exciting.

This was the third (of four) turtle I swam into today. He was the most photogenic and least camera shy. I also saw a sting ray (always fun) and a flounder. But my personal favorite from today was a giant purple lionfish. Let me rephrase that. A LIONFISH.

When I first saw it, I thought it was a fan coral. But when i saw it move, I knew. And had to get a closer look (it was about 35 feet below me - my camera has a depth gauge). When it saw me dive, it retreated into a nook in the coral. I couldn't find him when I got down there, so no pic. :( [It looked just like this.] It's probably for the best though. They're so venomous and I'm stupidly curious, so things could have gone downhill quickly. And remember that part about not being able to get back to shore because the reef blocks the path?

By the way, Lionfish aren't native to the Caribbean so seeing one here is rare. They're an invasive predator that destroy everything and kill all the fish and are basically the worst thing to happen to life in the coral reefs. But my goodness are they pretty.

I got back to the beach and found Justin and we took our pic on the beach for the corporate newsletter (Justin is in Del Sol flip flops, shorts, shirt, and hat. I'm in Cariloha sandals and shirt, Del Sol shorts and sunglasses - we were definitely reppin' our brands).

We caught the 4:30 water taxi back to Bonaire, quick dropped off our rented mask, fins, and snorkel at Dive Friends, and then went back to the hotel for showers and de-sanding our bits and pieces.

We caught the sunset...

...and grabbed a bite to eat at the PureOcean restaurant at the Divi Flamingo resort.

It was a great day off. Now it's back to work.

Welcome to Cappadocia

We took an overnight bus from Denizli last night which dropped us off in the center of Göreme at 6am. That's before sunrise. Which in Göreme, is actually a good thing. Göreme is the most popular town in the Turkish region of Cappadocia, and Cappadocia is popular because of its crazy terrain, and the best way and best time to see that crazy terrain is in a hot air balloon at sunrise.

We wandered up from the bus to our hotel, but apparently 6am is a little early to check in. They told us we could possibly check in at 10am though, and that's MUCH earlier than we thought, so we were happy about that. They let us drop our bags off and hang out on the restaurant balcony, which they said is the best place to view the balloons. It's not, but we didn't know any better. Yet.

Really only Butterfly balloons start up the valley where the Göreme Kaya Hotel is at. The rest start somewhere else. So after about 30 minutes we wandered back down into the center of town and then off to the right side looking for elevated points to get a good view. Eventually we found a road (we'd learn later, it's the road to the Göreme Open Air Museum) and off that road we found a path that you can get up to see great views (here's the lat/long if you're curious: 38.643872, 34.835599).

This is where I took this cool video...

A video posted by Brian Ciccotelli (@perfectlittleplanet) on Oct 9, 2015 at 12:04pm PDT

By the time the balloons had landed, it was still another 2 hours until we could check in. So we went back into town and found a coffee shop and ordered some hot chocolate.

It was nice to sit in the sun and warm up a bit. And that was some of the best hot chocolate I've ever had. It was hazelnut. Yeah, Nutella flavored hot chocolate.

Sipping hot cocoa killed off about another hour, so we slowly moseyed back to the hotel and got back around 9:30am and asked on the off chance if our room was ready.

"Yes. And we gave you a free upgrade."

What?! Yes please!

The only thing we wanted was to stay in a cave room - literally a room that was carved out of a rock. And boy did they deliver! And then some!

We walk in and this is what we see:

Yeah. We're not even in the bedroom yet! So we enter the living room/sitting area and Isa and I are trying to hide our excitement - we don't book hotels with more than one room. This is amazing. Down the stairs to our right is the bedroom. IN A CAVE!

So the sitting area is a stone room, but the bedroom is actually inside the cave.

How cool is that?! Obviously, WAY more room than we need, as this is bigger than our apartment in New York. But we are loving the luxury and space! Thank you Göreme Kaya Hotel!

As you may be able to gather from the above picture, I was tired. I didn't sleep well on the overnight bus, and frankly haven't been sleeping well this entire trip. And now I'm sick. So I needed to take a nap for a little bit.

[a little later]

When I woke up, Isa was watching Harry Potter. In a cave. I just can't get over that. We're staying in a comfy cave. :)

We decided to go to the Göreme Open Air Museum, which is a collection of cave churches. On our way over there, we ran into some Aussie friends we had met in Selçuk, so we teamed up and went together. Ollie (8 years old) and I (let's face it, I act like I'm 8) got distracted on the way.

The dogs here are fun. They follow you around and later, even act as tour guides. :)

You know how in Provo there are churches every few blocks? Well that's what this part of town was for the early Christians. There were tons of churches built into lots of the fairy chimneys. So you get in and walk along this large path and just check out each one of them.

The insides of the churches are painted beautifully and carved out with domes and naves and apses and arches. Most of them don't allow photography or video. But the less-cool ones do. Like this:

Or the ones that are outside because half of it fell down.

Among the churches are a few homes as well. Those aren't painted and decorated as much (at all), but they were still interesting. Here's us at a dining room table made of stone.

Isa, Hayley, Brian, and Ollie (Wayne is taking the picture)

Here's a banquet table.

And one with some art. Can you tell I was fascinated by these stone tables?

There's Wayne and Hayley chatting with Isa

After we toured through here, we cut up off the road and went exploring the abandoned fairy chimney homes.

There are SO MANY of these homes. This place must have been a pretty big city! We explored for over two hours in just one section and we didn't even come close to checking them all out.

Doesn't this house look like the Flintstones' house?

At one point, a dog found us and led me up to a sweet viewpoint.

I love hiking. I love exploring. This was FUN!

We watched the sunset over the Uchisar Castle (that's another fairy chimney - a giant one - full of carved out houses connected by stairs, tunnels, and passages).

And then we found some good food and went home. Bed. Yay! Another great day. :) (Even though I'm getting sick from lack of sleep.) :(