I was really fortunate to join one of my very best friends in Las Vegas for a writing retreat last NaNoWriMo. We stayed in the fabulous Caesar’s Palace and garnered a LOT of very strong opinions by the end of the trip.

So these are our tips. The do’s and don’ts for staying there:

1 DO: WALK ACROSS THE STREET AND SEE BEATLES LOVE

So obviously I’m pretty bias, but just as a show itself, t is INCREDIBLE! I’ve never seen a Circ Du Soleil that has unimpressed me. The Mirage has been bought out by a new owner and there’s some whisperings of Beatles Love ending. So if you have the chance, I highly, highly recommend seeing this show before it slips out of existence.
And I’m going to tell you this because no one told me this. But the cheaper “nosebleed” seats aren’t far from the stage at all! And in fact you get a little bit better vantage point than those in the front row. The performance to Within You, Without You is worth the fifty bucks alone. Absolute chefs kiss.

2 DON’T: EAT AT THE FORUM FOOD HALL

When I got to Caesars I was pretty hungry and wanted “a quick bite” before holing up in the room and writing. So I went to Bobby Flay’s to get a burger.
First off, the menu should have tipped me off because they have this thing called The Crunchburger. Which is a plain cheeseburger with potato chips squished on the top. It made me laugh because allegedly my late father-in-law used to do this so often to the disgust of his children, that my husband complains every time I buy Sour Cream and Cheddar chips and calls them “fart chips”.
I did not in fact order the famous Crunchburger. I ordered the “Brunch-burger”. Which was a plain cheeseburger with a fried egg and bacon.
When I went to pay, the card reader malfunctioned a literal four times. And I hope to all that is good and holy that it did not charge me more than once, because this brunch burger meal was already THIRTY DOLLARS.
They give me my buzzer and I sit at a table and start writing while I wait for that thing to go off. I waited and waited and waited. I waited for forty five minutes before I was like… alright. Why did I come here for a “quick bite”?? I could have gone to a sit down restaurant and paid the same and waited less time for my food.
I eyed someone in line. A young girl dressed in granny-core. I thought okay if this sixty-year-old sixteen-year-old gets her food before mine comes out. I’ll know something is wrong with my order and it’s not usually this long of a wait.
Lo and behold, Granny Moses gets her crunch burger instantaneously. So I went up to the pick up counter to ask them what was going on. They just never even had a ticket for my food. Like I have no idea what happened. The card reader eventually worked, I had a receipt to show them.
I mean, I got my burger. An hour after I ordered it. So… a ticket malfunction isn’t necessarily the restaurant’s fault. But it was still a bummer.

3 DO: GET A MASSAGE AT AVALON DAY SPA IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD QUA BATHS AND SPA

It’s really difficult to find the price for Qua Baths and Spa online. So I’ll out them here. A basic massage and facial costs $450 for a hotel patron. So we got a Groupon for a couples massage at Avalon Day Spa for $48 each.
And it was really great! They included a scrub and a hot stone massage. It was great. My masseuse even cracked my back. I felt like jelly afterwards! I highly recommend them. It’s a ten minute drive from Caesars. The area is a bit sketch and our Lyft driver said a lot of the massage parlors actually offer “happy ending” massages. But this place was legitimate and great!

4. DON’T: EAT AT THE FORUM FOOD HALL

Alright, even after I got my brunch burger it was … not good. The cheese was liquid nacho cheese which gooped all over my pants. The Bobby fry sauce was full ick. You’d think my starvation of waiting an hour would have made this mediocre meal taste better, but not really.
I also want to complain about the soda. I paid five full dollars for a medium drink. Went over to the robotic dispenser to discover that there were only four options. And they were all weird. You could either have Pepsi, Diet Mountain Dew, Black Cherry Mountain Dew or Lite Lemonade. I tried Black Cherry Mountain Dew first and it came out as pure soda water. (I guess that was the most popular of the strange four choices?) So I took a diet Mountain Dew. Then later found out that across from my room was a vending machine that had bigger bottles of normal Mountain Dew for less than half the price of the food court.

5. DO: TAKE OUT A SECOND MORTGAGE ON YOUR HOUSE TO SHOP AT NECTARS

I am NOT SPONSORED OR AN AMBASSADOR OR A PERSONAL FRIEND. This is just my honest experience with these products.
My friend had gotten there the night before I arrived. And she told me she went to this luxury bath supply store downstairs. Now, admittedly, I was totally skeptical when she was passionately sung it’s praises. I have NEVER spent that kind of money on bath supplies. (And neither had my friend). But she said they gave her a free sample so I thought that was worth walking in there.
While my best friend was at a business conference I went to that shop, which smelled AMAZING by the way, FULLY intending to take the free sample and get out of there. I was only in there for fifteen minutes and I already had one hundred dollars worth of products in my arms. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT HAPPENED.
But that was single-handedly the best bath of my entire life.

Here’s my text exchange with my friend when I got out:

ME: What the actual F luxury did I just experience? Is heaven missing their bath products cuz I think so. Excuse me Bath Products did you fall from heaven? Because that’s the only explanation here.

HER: LOL Okay worth every penny right? Absolutely out of this world.

ME: I’m about to become a nectar hun like wtf.
ME: Hey Hun! Have you tried Nectar? I don’t even make a commission I just want you to experience euphoria.

HER: Pseudo MLM just to spread the word

ME: Nectar missionary. Spread the true word omg

HER: I STAND BY THIS. My new religion.

So you should get something from there. They have locations at Caesars, The Mirage, The Venetian, MGM and LINQ. I highly recommend the sugar scrubs and my friend highly recommends the body butter. We got products in “sugar crush”, “cool cactus” and “lavender”. But all the scents are amazing and they even let you customize. I love these products so much I use them almost daily now and bought even more.

6. DON’T: EAT AT THE FORUM FOOD COURT

I thought it was this one off deal you know. That maybe Bobby Flay’s just wasn’t for me and that happened to be a not-good-lunch that day or whatever. So when my friend and I came back to the hotel after our massages, we planned to grab something to take back to our rooms and hang out there for the rest of the night. But we had no idea what was in store for us.
We went back to the food court. And got in line for a Chinese food place which I’m not going to say the name of. I ordered a sweet and sour pork bowl and my friend ordered noodles. When I saw the guy ahead of us take his food I was like… I really hope that’s not what I just ordered. It was like pink blobby cubes in a sad looking rice bowl. I remember trying to decipher what it was. Tofu? Kinda looked like spam or something.
Well, good news was I didn’t have to wait an hour this time. Bad news was I ordered the pink blobby cubes.
I was starved right? So I thought meh it’ll probably be fine. On closer inspection the pinkish blobs were pineapple chunks (um… in a pink sauce I guess). So we took our food up to our room. Which BTW is a total maze through the casinos. We might as well have walked to Mordor and back.
And as soon as we get there we find out that my friend had not been given the noodles she ordered. Instead, she had been given the same pink blobby cubes.
We tried to eat it, man. We tried. It was horrific. The onions, dude. Something was really off with those onions. And the pork. I was literally Googling “Is gray pork okay to eat?” It’s like I just kept picking around the ingredients until finally I was trying to eat the rice and even that was yucky.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I bit into my friend’s egg roll. As soon as I bit in, a hot and STRANGE liquid FILLED MY MOUTH. I actually spit out the egg roll and was like, “Dude… is this gross to you too?” And she was like “YES THIS IS HORRIBLE.”
Keep in mind, we had just spent like thirty dollars each on this. It’s not like we could just throw our hands up like ‘Oh well’ and get something else! But there was no chance in hell we were going to be able to finish that food. We were both SICK. I couldn’t even smell the stuff anymore I had to take it out to the hotel hallway and throw it away. THE AFTERTASTE. No joke. It just never went away. I had to brush twice.
So I would maybe just skip the forum food court if I were you haha.

7. DO: EAT AT PRONTO INSTEAD OR GO TO THE FORUM SHOPS AND EAT AT TREVI

ON THE OTHER HAND. If you DO want a quick bite, every single thing I had at Pronto was exquisite. It’s closer to the Palace Towers if you’re staying there, so you don’t have to walk to Mordor and I really highly recommend their gelato. I got it a couple of times. One scoop is pretty generous and costs $5, which was pretty inexpensive compared to everything else going on at Caesars.
If you want a REALLY fabulous lunch or dinner. You need to walk down to the Forum Shops and eat at Trevi. It is GORGEOUS. I ordered the mushroom risotto and my friend had the steak. GIRRRRRL WHEN I TELL YOU!! Not only did we both clean our plates, but we sopped up every drop of the juices with our bread. The owner came over to our table and said, “He needed to hire us as dishwashers” lol.
Trevi. It’s worth it. I promise.

BONUS: Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum.

I have mixed feelings about this place. If you know me, you know that I’m majorly interested in the macabre, the paranormal and spiritual oddities. But this wasn’t totally what I thought that it would be. So I’m going to be very honest about the things I disliked and then you can decide for yourselves whether that bothers you or interests you.
I was expecting a lot more fun paranormal haunts. I mean… it’s a HAUNTED museum. But what this place actually is, is half ghosts and half serial killer memorabilia. Now, if that’s something that fascinates you personally, that’s awesome because Zak’s museum has a massive amount of that stuff. For me… I don’t know. I felt that the presentation was disrespectful to the victims of these tragedies. I felt that I had unknowingly funded the exploitation of their deaths. That’s just my personal opinion. There’s also several real human remains at the museum and a few of those felt exploitative as well.
The other half, the supernatural stuff, is demonic, satanic or cursed somehow. Which is exactly what I expected when I bought the ticket so I’m not complaining about that. I’m just putting it out there that in case you are particularly affected by that sort of thing. This is spiritually a very heavy gunky place. One girl in our group who “doesn’t even believe in ghosts”, started crying and had to leave the tour early.
There was also a really weird component in the attic where you walked through a clown haunted house. I really, really love haunted attractions but that seemed so odd for some reason. I think the kitschy-ness kind of made the haunted artifacts feel less legitimate.
But of course this is all completely subjective. Obviously, no one is going to make the kind of ghost museum that I want, because Grandma the friendly ghost isn’t going to sell tickets as much as Ted Bundy’s murder kit. So I’m neither recommending it nor discouraging you from it. The Museum is what it is. I mean, it’s Zak Bagans.