Ahh, those Las Vegas bunnies!

We don't  often 'do'  traditional boxed Christmas gifts at our house. In fact, Joel still points to an elephant trek on Christmas Day through the jungles of Northern Thailand - now many long years ago - as the best gift I've ever given him.

So, it shouldn't be a surprise that this year we gave ourselves a trip to Las Vegas for the holidays. And, by holidays I mean:  Christmas, New Year and BCS "Bowl Week" with its dozens of play-off games marking the passage of  football season for another year.

Since we'd opened the college football season in Las Vegas back in September, it seemed fitting to head back to the comfort of its many casino 'sportsbooks' where we could be surrounded by frenzied fans sipping adult libations while cheering the on-field action, their heads whirling to watch sometimes multiple games being shown on as many as 50 television screens that wallpaper these areas. 

Note: we were't among the 230,000 New Year's Eve revelers who Vegas officials estimate headed to The Strip and Fremont Street to celebrate the arrival of 2011 despite temperatures dipping below freezing. And we left town as the estimated 120,000 attendees were arriving for the highly publicized International Consumer Electronics Show and the lesser talked about Adult Entertainment Expo.  

We opted to take the window of opportunity between NYE and the conventions when room rates drop and football games headline activities.  We spent our first couple nights at the Suncoast in Summerlin, about 15 minutes -- and light years -- from The Strip and its night life, Playboy Bunnies, glitz and glamour.

Late afternoon looking toward the Red Rock Canyon

But in this quiet Vegas suburb, a gateway to the Red Rock Canyon, there are plenty of wide open spaces as evidenced by this image taken from our room.  Out here when you say 'bunny' it means the four-legged kind; the kind that seemed to play hide-and-seek with us on New Year's morning, when bundled up Pacific-Northwest-style to brace against the 34-degree 'high'  of  the day, we took a long walk along the neighboring golf course.