Mandalay Bay and the Elephant in the Room?🐘

When we were in Las Vegas in March we stayed at The Luxor, but the Mandalay Bay casino/resort wasn't very far away from The Luxor.

My son and I visited the Shark Reef Aquarium in the Mandalay Bay casino/resort in the morning before going to watch our team The Sharks take on the NRL 4 x premiers The Panthers that day/night -

Match Day in Vegas 2025: The Sharks vs The Panthers?🏉🦈🐈🏈🎲

The elephant in the room as we walked through the Mandalay Bay casino/resort was, 

"In 2017, gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire from the hotel's 32nd floor, killing 60 people in attendance at an outdoor music festival nearby. It is the deadliest shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history."

I knew about the shootings, but I didn't know exactly where the outdoor music festival took place.

I figured it had to be across the road from the Mandalay Bay casino/resort where two towers (elevator shafts?) had been partially built.

But as eerie as it looked to me, this wasn't the site of the shootings.

The shootings took place right across the road from The Luxor.

I don't have any photos of that site, as I didn't realize my mistake until I read up about those shootings, after we had left Vegas.

All the resorts/casinos on the strip have a theme and the Mandalay Bay casino/resort is named after the city of Mandalay in Myanmar made famous by the exotic tropical romanticism of the poem "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling.

When I told my son about the poem and the city, he said he had never heard of the poem, or the city and I told him that I thought the city was in Burma.

I couldn't believe he had never heard of either the poem or the city.

We did hear about the city when we were back in Australia and saw the news of the devasting earthquake.

Inside Mandalay: BBC joins rescuers
searching for earthquake dead in Myanmar

Never having been in an earthquake myself, that was something that was on my mind as I traveled through the west coast of The USA, especially when I was in San Francisco, Vegas and LA. 

But I was worried more about the cyclone that was heading for my home state of Queensland and city of Brisbane, where my home was, when I was in Vegas that weekend, thinking I might not have a home to go to when I got home.

Welcome to the USA?🛫🛬

I even read about an earthquake that hit my home state while I was in Vegas.

Luckily for me that cyclone didn't hit the city very hard and my home was OK when I got back to OZ.

But what a strange trip it was in the USA.

A wall of elephants in the Mandalay Bay resort/casino

Elephants perform an "alert circle" to protect their young

Flying home over The Gateway Bridge in Brisbane

There's No Place Like Home?🛫🏡🛬