We spent 10 days at Ventana Canyon resort in Tucson Arizona, followed by 4 days in Las Vegas. In Tucson we visited the Pima Air and Space Museum, the Desert Museum (tons of animals and creepy crawlies), took a private jeep tour into the Sonoran desert with a real live cowboy as our guide (there's a pic of us kissing under a mistletoe tree that was growing there - I'll try to get it scanned on) and went to Old Tucson studios where they filmed Little House on the Prairie, High Chapparal and films like the Quick and the Dead. We hired a Mitsubishi Spider convertible but most days it was too damn hot to have the hood down - it was over 100 degrees most days and when it was cloudy, we thought it was great! The locals thought we were mad! We went to some shopping malls, I spent a LOT of money in Macys on clothes and shoes (what else!?) and at nights we normally went for a drive or went out for dinner. We had the grand total of THREE alcoholic drinks on honeymoon - people think we're mad when we tell them but we're not really big drinkers at home so it's not unusual!

Las Vegas was an incredible experience. We flew in at night and although Billy didn't get to see the strip as we were sitting in a row of three seats with Billy in the middle and a cowboy named Taylor at the end feeding Billy beef jerky and out of date "nutrition" bars with far fetched stories of how much money he had and how many women he had, I saw the whole thing from the window and it was awesome. It was a lot bigger than we'd imagined, but we soon discovered that everything was big! We stayed at the Venetian which is incredible, it has a shopping mall with a canal running through it and gondolas on it, it has Madame Tussauds waxworks etc - Las Vegas itself though is really, really tacky. You can't walk 200 yards without getting flyers thrust at you for prostitutes, there are vending machines in the street selling porno mags and I had to go back to the hotel room and get changed one night as I had a dress with quite a big split in it on and guys were just openly leering - I thought Billy was going to kill one guy who literally stopped right in front of us and began undressing me with his eyes. It made my skin crawl......men out there have absolutely no respect for women - they go out there to gamble and have sex and every woman is fair game - the cocktail waitresses in each hotel have virtually no clothes on and there are prostitutes in every hotel which doesn't help matters. The hotels themselves are out of this world though but it was 106 degrees which completely floored us. I had a bad back for part of the time but we still managed to see most of the strip. The Mirage has a dolphin area which was great, together with an animal garden with tigers and lions etc - the home of the animals used in the Siegfried & Roy magic show. The pirate ships at Treasure Island, the dancing fountains and gardens at the Bellagio (setting for Oceans Eleven) the erupting volcano at the Mirage, all of these and more made for some incredible sights.

I am glad we didn't take a beach holiday, but the travelling time, coupled with the heat, really took it out of us and we've agreed that our next holiday will be to somewhere like Italy..........any suggestions?

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Love & light,
Alli x

Married Billy on Saturday 20th July 2002 at Barony Castle, Peebles and want to do it all over again!

Expecting our first child on 22nd April 2006

Love isn't about finding someone perfect....it's about learning to love an imperfect person....perfectly.