Day 148 - An Exciting Day of Stuff

OK, so we repeated yesterday’s early start and this time completed the two bus trips that took us to 2900 E Tropicana Ave where we found our destination.

After making our payment we had a short and surprisingly nerve-racking wait until we were both put with an instructor and then led, with our ear defenders and eye protectors, down a corridor and into a large booth that we had all to ourselves. Here Danny was told he was up first and was presented with his first weapon of choice – The .44 Magnum. The instructor loaded the chamber and then explained to Danny how to hold and fire the Dirty Harry handgun. A thunderous, even with the ear defenders on, BANG was followed, for some strange reason, by a scream from Corrie as the trigger was squeezed! Once Danny had fired all 5 rounds from the 6 chambers our instructor emptied the spent shells and then reloaded with a further 5 bullets. Danny was quite impressed by the accuracy of this gun even though it had a huge kick back due to its incredible power.

Now it was Corrie’s turn with her Glock 19 9mm. She was visibly petrified to say the least though the instructor explained everything she needed to do very well and soon she was ready to shoot. 20 rounds later and she was done… and not too soon by the look of it! Corrie explained how nervous she was and that it was not something she’d try again in her life. Corrie had expected to enjoy shooting a gun but the power, noise and  fact that these things are deadly changed her feelings and she was quite happy to have just done it the once.

Danny, however, was having fun and it was now time for him to use the Remington 870 12 gauge shotgun. Danny went to town on the zombie target with this one. The gun was so accurate that every part of the zombie the instructor told Danny to aim for, he hit. This gun packed a punch though and Danny will probably have a sore patch by his shoulder later on!

The third and final gun for Danny was the fully automatic MP5 9mm where Danny had 50 shots to spray. This gun had the red dot sight to help with aiming though Danny felt this was the least accurate of all the guns he’d shot due to the recoil. This gun is meant to be very accurate so maybe it was just Dan’s technique! The instructor told Danny to empty the remains of the clip at the target all at once and so he did. This certainly looked like fun for Dan though this soon meant that we were done here and it was time to leave.

Mixed opinions here; Danny loved it and Corrie… not so much. We know some people have strong feelings about firearms; that they’re deadly and are used to kill people etc etc. We were just shooting paper targets, not people and it really did open our eyes to how scarily deadly these things are.

We then made our way to one of the many Tix For Tonight stalls where you can get great discounted show and dining tickets. The downside to these places is that there is always a queue and so we had to wait a while to get our tickets sorted.

Next, we went back to the hotel for a couple of hours to relax and get ready for the two performances we’d booked for this evening!

We arrived at about 18:30 and got ourselves seated for the 19:00 performance of Cirque Du Soleil’s Ka. This show was incredible; the multifunctional moving stage, the performers, the costumes and make-up etc etc. This was well worth seeing and we both wanted more now, which was good as we’d got another show due to start at 22:00 and so we quickly made our way from MGM down to The Venetian.

Our tickets to the Blue Man Group turned out to be central front row seats! The first 5 rows or so were all given ponchos to wear throughout the show too which was slightly disconcerting! The 3 blue men, along with their backing band, put on a fabulous show. This had a bit of everything and was: very humorous, fun, lively and odd all at once. There was audience participation and lots of percussion music, along with quite a lot of mess! We won’t ruin it for potential viewers of the show but this was a really ace performance. At the end of it the blue men showed up in the entrance hall and Corrie got her photo taken with one of the trio before we went back to end our very late last night.