Vegas Baby, Vegas - The Introduction

So these next few posts will document the 'Vegas Baby, Vegas' trip, which contradictorily missed Vegas completely. It all started out as a joke about six months ago when cruising St Kilda Beach in Melbourne with the boys, throwing out ideas for Syme's bucks day. After seeing 'The Hangover' a couple of weeks before, I mentioned "why don't we just go to fucking Vegas?". Ha ha ha very funny, how sweet would that be, but impossible. Although after another few weeks it dawned on us - what is actually stopping us from going to Vegas? We all had leave due, and everyone had been saving some coin so technically it wasn't out of reach. We bounced the idea around to discover that yes it was possible, Vegas would be pretty awesome, although everyone that was a contender for the trip had other places in the world they'd rather visit than Vegas. For me, South America was my number 1 pick; Timmy's was sailing in Croatia; Syme wanted to check out Oktoberfest in Germany; Chuck was Asia (maybe). So we did a bit of research, put our heads together and had a vote between the four peeps on our desired destination. It ended in a deadlock of 2 all, split between Croatia and Buenos Aires. Chuck announced that the decider would be ten flips of a coin - with heads representing the Northern Hemisphere, and tails representing the South. I pointed out that ten flips doesn't really work as a tie-breaker mathematically but this was brushed aside...
So we flipped the coin, and amazingly heads came up 5 times in a row. A tour of the Balkans (finishing up at Oktoberfest) it was - the Travel Gods had spoken. We kept flipping out of curiosity, heads actually came up 7 times in a row. Amazing.
With the destination locked in, it was time to research flights. Syme and I did a fair bit of work and found some reasonably cheap tickets flying into Athens and leaving from Munich. Excellent. Booked our flights (minus Chuck, who got kb'd from taking leave because of a big project at work finishing the same time we needed to go), renamed it from 'a bucks trip' to 'a holiday' (as having a three week bucks might be a bit much...) then counted down the days until we were away.
Sure enough the four months between ticket purchase and departure date flew by, before we knew it Syme, Tim and myself found ourselves at the airport with unbridled amounts of PTE: Pre-Trip-Excitement (on September 3rd, 2010 - my 31st birthday), cracking our first holiday beer. Let the good times roll...