17th June - On to Vegas

Today we are heading for Vegas, it is about a 4 hour drive from Pasadena so we are going to take the shortest route as determined by the Sat Nav.

We grab breakfast in the hotel room and head off before 10am.

As we are letting the Sat Nav take us there via the shortest route it is straight on the freeway. We have only been on the freeway for about 5 minutes however before we hit a traffic build up due to an accident at some road works that takes us about 20 minutes to clear. At about midday we stop at a small shopping centre with a Target as Lisa needs a comfort stop, so we decide to grab something for lunch, we do not need much after the big breakfast we had. Lisa and Baggage each buy themselves a new book also, Baggage get Miley Cyrus’ Miles to go and Lisa get Marly and Me, both books they had been looking out for.

We stop a couple of times more on the way to Vegas once at a reasonably sized shopping mall that seems so remote from anywhere you wonder where all it’s shoppers come from and once at a service area in the desert, it probably ranks as the nicest service area we have found in the entire trip, it is fairly new and exceptionally clean.

The drive is amazing, the scenery as you drive across the desert a combination of mountain backdrop behind flat featureless plains. We climb up a couple of times and then descend into deep wide valleys, with temperature differences between the summit, where we see about 82 degrees, and the valley floor, where it is approaching 100 degrees. Lisa captures the spirit of the drive on video in a few places, we will have to see how well that comes out as the camera was bouncing about a bit with the movement of the car.

We arrive in Vegas just after 4pm and find our hotel easily. As we are arriving in Vegas in the light we do not get the highest level of impact from coming across this pool of life in the desert that you get when you come across a blazing beacon after driving for miles in the absolute night. It is still a sight to behold however and unless you have been there you probably cannot fully appreciate how out of place it seems to be.

After check-in to get to our room we have to walk through the casino, it is at the heart of all the Vegas hotels, after all that is why most people are here. One thing hits me straight away, there are rows and rows of slot machines, but not people sat on the stools with buckets of quarters and the jingle of coins filling the air as I have seen in all movies depicting Vegas, it has all gone paper based, you put your bills in to buy credits, play the credits and get your winnings out on a ticket, though I am not to get one of the latter at all whilst I am here!

After chilling for a while at the hotel, we are staying at Treasure Island, one of the many on-strip themed hotels, we head out to have a look around and get something to eat.

On the way out of the hotel we find that one of the hotels free shows, The Sirens of TI, is about to start so we decide to watch it. It is one for the adults rather than the kids, but then that goes for the whole of Vegas, a bit of a raunchy show where a boat load of Sirens (women of the sea) repel a boat load of pirates through a number of scantily clad dance routines. All good fun.

From our hotel we head across the road to the Venetian where we find a nice noodle bar and decide to stop here for our supper. After we have eaten we decide to go for the indoor gondola ride through the canals in the Venetian, OK so it is not real, the canals are in reality no more than an elongated pond, the gondolas are powered by electric motor and the gondolier is only responsible for steering the boat and singing under a painted sky, but Baggage loves it and it is another form of transport to add to her list.

After our ride we wander through the shops in the Venetian and then go to Wallgreens, which is between the Venetian and Treasure Island, to grab a few basic supplies to have in our room. By the time we get back to our room it is time to think about going to bed.

As we are settling down to sleep we hear a train horn and on looking out of our bedroom window, we are on the back of the hotel on the 29th floor, we see a train track not that far away carrying goods traffic. Memories of Hummelstown last Autumn come back when we were kept awake at night by the sound of the goods trains at the unmanned crossings and we dread a bad night’s sleep, however even though we hear a few more trains before we get to sleep they do not really bother us once we have settled down.