We continued our stroll around the Bellagio. Everything was so incredibly ornate... from top to bottom!

Above our heads in the main lobby was an 18-foot long "chandelier" called Fiori di Como.

It was created by glass sculptor Dale Chihuly and is comprised of 2,000 hand-blown glass blossoms.

Smoking was rampant, both outside on the streets and inside the casinos. This sign only pertained to a tiny, open lounge area. Suffice to say there wasn't any noticeable difference in the air quality there.

This is the world's largest chocolate fountain! It is over 26 feet tall and circulates 2 tons of chocolate at 120 quarts per minute.

White, medium and dark chocolate flow like water.

Mmmmm.... chooooocolate!

More Chihuly glass

We made our way out via a long hallway lined with shops. The casinos seem to be divided into several main sections... gambling areas, shopping areas with very high-end stores and dining areas.

A moving sidewalk carried us down to the street below.

View of the Vegas Strip

We stopped briefly in Planet Hollywood but weren't really impressed.

Water misters lined the streets in a meager attempt to help keep people cool. It was definitely warm out!

We decided to go into Paris Las Vegas. The hotel/casino was started in 1997 and took two years to complete... at a cost of around $760 million. It includes a half scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, a Montgolfier balloon and a two-thirds size Arc de Triomphe. The hotel is 33 stories.

The real Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile (Arch of Triumph of the Star) honors those who died in the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars. The real one is also big enough to fly a small airplane through!

Originally they wanted to do a full scale Eiffel tower, but the airport was too close, so it is only 541 feet tall.

A highly detailed facade

This is a model of the very first hot air balloon (which is the oldest successful human-carrying flight technology). It was created in 1782 by the Montgolfier brothers.

Inside was incredible! One can't take photos of the gambling area (that whole "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" thing) but the shopping areas were fair game. The whole interior was created to feel like it was evening... and outside! Even in just a short visit, we began to get disoriented with our sense of time. In theory this loss-of-time feeling is done to encourage people to gamble for hours and hours and hours without even being aware of how much time (or money) they have spent.

Is the outside inside? Or the other way around?

Only a few subtle shadows on the ceiling give it away.

Souvenir drinking vessels seem to be a popular theme.

We headed back into the heat and made our way down the LINQ Promenade toward the giant ferris wheel.

Passing the Flamingo...

... which did indeed have some impressive big birds!

The LINQ Promenade is an open-air mall packed with stores, restaurants and other forms of entertainment.

The High Roller is a 550-foot tall, 520-foot wide Ferris wheel. Construction began in 2011 and the ride was opened in March 2014.

While they looked rather small from down below, each of the 28 passenger cabins could hold up to 40 people!

We briefly thought about going, but price and time changed our minds.

By now we were beginning to feel the heat. We looked at a couple places to eat but everything was quite pricey. What happened to the cheap, all-you-could-eat buffets of the past? Eventually we sought refuge in the cheapest place we could find... McDonald's. We took our time cooling off in the air-conditioning and refilling our drinks several times.

Our salvation

Next came perhaps my favorite place of all... The Venetian. Perhaps that is simply because I love Venice (Italy) so much, but either way, it was very well done.

The luxury hotel and casino rests on the site of the old Sands Hotel, which was imploded in in 1996. At $1.5 billion, it was one of the most expensive resorts of its kind when it opened. Its famous features include San Marco Square (including the St Mark's Campanile or bell tower of St Mark's Basilica) and Rialto Bridge (the oldest of the four main bridges spanning the Grand Canal).

The bell tower and Rialto Bridge

The gondola... another of Venice's famous images. While mostly just serving tourists nowadays (both here and in Italy), the gondola used to be the chief means of transportation through the canals.

The winged lion is the city of the symbol and represents St Mark or Mark the Evangelist (first century AD) who was one of the original disciples or apostles of Jesus Christ.

Entering the Venetian