Believe it or not, Jo and I have been married for six years. To celebrate we decided to use the gift card we received when we donated to NPR and go to Terra Verde at the Green Valley Ranch in Henderson and have a fancy pants dinner.

We got all dressed up (I even wore a tie!) and drove on down to GVR. The promenade was decorated for the Holidays with a big tree and a lot of lights along the walkway. It was really quite pretty.

Terra Verde was beautiful in its simple elegance and wonderful service. After browsing through the menu, we each decided to have the fixed menu: a pre-set three course meal that included $10 for wine. Jo had the caprese, linguini in clam sauce, and panne cotta. I had the bruschetta, chicken masala, and the chocolate indulgence dessert. Everything was amazingly well prepared and extraordinarily tasty. We spent a lot of time just chatting and enjoying each other’s company. There was no rush to eat and leave. In fact, our waiter told us just to let him know when we were ready for each course and he’d get it started. It felt as if we were his only table (we weren’t) and we noticed that all the staff treated every table the same way. We even overheard our waiter tell another customer that if she didn’t see what she wanted on the menu, just to let him know what she did want and the chef would happily whip it up for her.

This was also our first experience with the newest wine service style. You can still order wine by the glass or bottle, or they can give you a preloaded card that you slide in to a machine and select how much and what kind of wine you want based on price per oz. It was fun going around looking at all the bottles and deciding how to spend the $10 on the card. We saw one red wine that was $34 for two oz. Our waiter told us the restaurant often sells the empty bottles for $200. EMPTY. BOTTLES.

After dinner we drove down to the Bellagio to see the conservatory all lit up for the Holidays. They line out the small space with red and pink poinsettias and design small winter scenes in each section of the garden. There were scenes of Santa visiting a small cabin in the woods, polar bears at play and a model train weaving its way through the legs of a giant rocking horse. This year the Conservatory is dominated by a monstrous, yet elegant, tree. We took a long time walking around and taking pictures, both for this blog and for Jo's travel blog (where pictures of the conservatory abound!)

We’re off to Ocean Shores on Thursday to spend Christmas with my parents.

Here’s to you and yours during this festive season!

-Cory