Vegas, Baby

Okay, so there is no way we can come to Las Vegas and not get down the strip to see the sights.  Again, John and Denise were our very gracious guides.  They knew where we could park the truck and what time different things were happening in several of the casinos.

We started out on Las Vegas Blvd, aka The Strip in the late afternoon.  So as we walked from the parking lot of Excalibur (the one that looks like Camelot Castle), the sun was beginning to get low enough to throw long, cool shadows on the side of the street we were walking on.  This is the side that has New York, New York and the Omni.

Standing on the foot bridge over Las Vegas Blvd looking down the strip.  New York, New York on the left side and MGM Grand on the right.

We wove ourselves in and out of casinos for about a mile until we came to the Bellagio.  The slot machines and gaming tables don't really do that much for me but the size of these places blew me away.  And most of them spared no expense at making their creations architecturally interesting.

Around these parts, size IS important.  I don't know how many stories tall this lion is but those tiny little shapes below him on the sidewalk are people.



As big as the lion is, even he is dwarfed by the hotel he is associated with.  The MGM is virtually an indoor city unto itself.

Paris' casino is beneath the base of the tower, incredible architecture inside and out, but the hotel is the massive white building behind the balloon.

Our arrival at the Bellagio afforded us the opportunity to see the last few minutes of the fountain show that is presented several times a day.  I had hoped to be able to be down on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, which is right up against the fountain, and at night so that we could enjoy the lights as well but we're going to have to make that a to-do item the next time we are in town.



 

Another attraction inside the Bellagio, besides the casino, is a conservatory of sorts.  They have a large room just off the hotel registration desk that is a botanical garden which is themed to the season or holiday at the time. 

 

 With it being October everything was decked out in a fall and harvest theme.  Like everything else in Vegas, this place was over the top.  Flowers so numerous and perfect you had to touch them to make sure they were real.

 

On one end of a display there was a large cornucopia with a huge mound of pumpkins and gourds, each one impressively large in its own right, pouring out.

The big pumpkin in the center is a five hundred pounder.

 On the other end of the cornucopia is this creature.  One of the most impressive paper mache creations I have seen.

 

Directly across from the cornucopia creature is this "living" tree.  Another creation of the artists at the Bellagio. 

 

This old tree's face was plenty expressive just on its own but when it started talking and moving the crowds started gathering.

 

The fall display also included this two-story tall water mill.  I was told that this structure is not part of the display all the time, they build and raze it with each change of the theme.



 

 One last photo on the way out.  The plaque in front of the pumpkin reads; "740 lbs". 

Our exit from the Bellagio found the sun setting and just enough time for a portrait of it.

We started our return walk down the miracle mile as light of day waned and the dazzle of neon and LED took center stage.  I was really enjoying the architecture of the half-scale Eiffel Tower. 

Even at half-scale this thing is 541 feet tall.

Back on the foot bridge the Excalibur was showing a lot of color.  The iPhone is not the best camera for these kind of pictures but it is what I had.

 

When the night rolls in and the lights come up there is lots of sensory input.



 

 A little bonus was that on our walk through the parking lot to the truck we were treated with a great view of the Luxor pyramid beam.

A Las Vegas I Never Knew Of

Who doesn't know about Las Vegas, right?  Well, it turns out there is a lot about the Las Vegas area I had no clue of.

Our friends, John and Denise from the North Rim came by one morning to take us around and show us the sights.  They were naming off nearly a dozen different places that surrounded Las Vegas but unfortunately with the government shutdown they could only point at most of them from a distance and tell us what we were missing.  But there was at least a couple of places that we could get close to.  One of them was Mt. Charleston.  No more than 45 minutes from where we had the camper parked there is a mountain with enough elevation that it had a developed ski slope and ski lodge.

In my last blog I mentioned a storm that had been hanging over Mt. Charleston.  That storm dumped up to 7 inches of snow on the ski area.  That view from our campground makes the slopes of the whole Spring Mountain Range where Charleston Peak is look like the desert landscape of the valley below.  The ground appears to be bare save some cacti here or there and some sparse brush.  But only minutes after turning off of highway 95 we're back into ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and bristlecone pine.  Nothing looked like anything I had expected when thinking of Las Vegas.

Small valley in the Spring Mountain Range.

Charleston Peak, 11,912 feet.

We got out and walked a short trail near the ski slopes.  It was weird, after being in the desert for the last several days and just minutes before, it was a little disorienting to be standing with my feet in snow and looking at a chair lift.

We drove a good deal of the roads that were open in the Spring Mountains.  There were some quaint campgrounds just off to the side of these roads. 

You can tell that these places are accustomed to being full-up, it was eerie seeing everything empty and barricaded.  If we were to come back here to camp we would have to do it in a tent.  I did not see anywhere that our 5th wheel would begin to fit.

Regardless, we would come here again.  Temperatures here on the mountain run about 20 degrees cooler than in the valley and there is enough vegetation to keep the dirt on the ground when the wind blows.  Hiking trails are numerous and run from easy to difficult.

Our new digs and aarhhg, electronics!

Our exile from the North Rim first landed us in a nearby campground about 45 miles away in Jacob Lake.  It was a nice, privately owned campground in the Kaibab National Forest but a little on the pricey side to stay very long as well as freezing, way below freezing.  We were there just long enough to wait for our UPS packages to arrive and then we jetted out of there to lower costs and higher temperatures.

I have a cousin in Las Vegas we wanted to see and we had planned since the beginning of summer to exit the North Rim via Las Vegas no matter what our destination was.  But let me tell you, a campground that fits our preferences in and around a city like Las Vegas is a rare thing.  However, we lucked out and found something that looked interesting in the suburb of North Las Vegas.  It is a county park but it is not just your average park with a golf course, duck pond, grass and picnic tables.  It has none of those, no grass whatsoever, no jogging trails, no trees.  Instead it has golf carts that don't carry golf clubs, graveled terraces up the foot of the mountain, a couple miles of arrow-straight sidewalks, clay pigeon throwers and a pro-shop that rents shotguns and not golf clubs.  The whole place is one, giant shooting complex!  They have trap, skeet, rifle, pistol and archery ranges spread out all over a couple hundred acres of the foot of Sheep Mountain.

The RV park consists of a long, single row of 80 RV pads.  There is a wide asphalt road running the length of both the front and rear of the sites, which are pea gravel on hard pack.  Each pad is a good 80 feet long and every pad has 50 amp electricity, 90 psi water pressure (thank goodness I have a pressure regulator), and sewer. 

The RV park is no picture post card itself but the surrounding mountains are pretty nice.
This shot was taken standing about a third of the way down, looking west.

 

Turning around and looking east from the picture above this one.  That is our rig sitting there all by itself.

 

 

Looking north, towards the shotgun range and Sheep Mountain.

On our arrival there were only a couple of shooters.  This guy was at a skeet station.

RV sites with shotgun range in background.

 The experience of being in our RV and hearing nearly continuous gunfire for hours at a time is a totally new thing for us.  But all goes quite just about sundown.  They are going to have a large tournament this coming weekend.  I expect that they will turn on the large and numerous lights and continue shooting into the evening for that event.

Something else that is pretty nice is the view.  We are oriented such that our rear picture window looks south to Las Vegas.  The daytime view is pretty good with the city back-dropped by high desert mountains.

When the sun starts to set the view gets really interesting.  Since there is virtually no vegetation on the mountains, the jagged edges of these young mountains cast sharp shadows and the view changes every few minutes.

Once the sun drops all the way behind Mt. Charleston, attention turns from the surrounding mountains to the city.

Although nature still had some wow of its own to show off.

We have been at this campground for a few days now.  The first couple of days the weather has been glorious but today a front moved in and it got about 20 degrees colder, seriously windy and storm that has been hanging over Mt. Charleston all day.

The news this evening reported that the ski area of this mountain got about 5 inches of snow today.

Despite having been here several days, we have not really gotten around to exploring our surroundings.  I have been spending an inordinate amount of time emailing, on-line chatting and phone calling technical services for my satellite dish, DirecTV and my wireless router radio.

I won't go into the gory details but after months of thinking that my lack of a good signal from the satellites was due to obstructions, it was probably a faulty piece of equipment from the antenna factory all along.  After finally finding some RV installation specialists today and paying them $150/hr to come out and use diagnostic equipment to track down exactly what the problem is, they found it and reported it to the antenna manufacturer, Winegard, who immediately put practically a whole new antenna and all the electronics to operate it, on a truck to me.  Scheduled to arrive next week.  And all in full warranty, they are even going to pick up the tab for the diagnostic work.  For this to be a happy ending I just need the next fix to work.  I'll hold off on pulling the champagne cork until I see it work the way it is supposed to.

My other time-sink has been the WiFi Ranger (WFR).  In simple terms this is a wireless router, but it is really much more.  It has an external antenna mounted on the mast of my aerial TV antenna and it can seek out and latch onto wifi signals about a quarter mile away with a clear line of sight.  As long as I have a password I can join a network.  This comes in pretty handy when a campground has an office-only wifi.  Most times I can get on right from my rig and not have to schlep my gear down to the office to do email and blogging.  But recently the WFR seems to have forgotten how to establish a connection with certain kinds of signals.  I have been working with the mfr. since about mid-Sept but it has gotten really intense since getting somewhere that I have a good cell phone signal.  I have not seen light at the end of the tunnel with this one like I think I have with the satellite dish.  I have a(another) phone call scheduled with technical services tomorrow afternoon.  Being on the phone and having 4G available for my jetpack, they should be able to remote in and take control of my machine and see what needs to be done.

In-between the above I have been trying to get all our devices updated after having been isolated for about three months.  The iPad had about 16 apps that needed updating, along with its OS.  Both iPhones had apps to be updated and their OS's.  By the way, I am not sure iOS7 is a good thing.  But anyway, both the laptops are way behind on updates from Microsoft, as well as virus definitions.  I still have a ways to go before they are all caught up.  With the WFR not working it is taking forever because I have to take each device over to the clubhouse and sit there and wait for it to do its thing.  I suppose I could hook up through my jetpack but my data plan is only 5GB.  The updates I am dong, and with so many devices, I would blow through that in no time and start getting charged astronomical prices for every bit of data above my plan limit.

But at least everything is moving in the right direction.  I am thinking that we will be far enough along that we have made a date with another couple to go exploring Mt. Charleston and Old Town Vegas.  It was pure dumb luck that we happened to pick the exact same campground that this couple we worked with on the North Rim are volunteering here at the shooting complex for the winter.  They worked this park last year and know their way around so they graciously volunteered to be our tour guides.

The winter adventure begins.

The Grand Canyon is in the books for us.  Now we are turning our attention to what is next.  And for now next means intercepting our packages that are on their way to the North Rim.  So far we have plucked one out of the system.  The folks at Jacob Lake Lodge very graciously agreed to put up a note for the UPS driver to please leave any packages for me there, and he did!

I was tracking a second shipment and saw that UPS had turned the package over to the US Postal Service in Page, AZ.  What?  UPS transfers packages to the post office?  It turns out they do.  So now I will be camping out at the lodge or campground mailbox to see if I can convince the person delivering the mail (a rural contract employee driving his personal Prius) to give it to me instead of driving it all the way out to the rim.

In the mean time, it is cold out here!  Our temps have been dipping into the high twenties for a couple of nights and last night we got down to 21 deg.  My water hose had frozen solid the night before when in the high twenties, glad I changed it out to my heated hose yesterday.

Our new digs look a lot like our previous ones at the North Rim, sans asphalt.

Lots of ponderosa pines.  It must be a rule or something around these parts that you cannot have a level RV site.  There was not one at the North Rim and there is definitely not one here.

In some ways this campground is more rustic than the North Rim but I am happy to say that their electricity is superb.  We have not had any drop-outs or brown-outs.

There is one, lone aspen in the campground and it is in the site adjacent to ours.  It is showing off its fall dazzle.

All in all, not a bad place to be although I am accustomed to getting a sewer hook-up and WiFi for $36/night rate.  Such is the cost for the services we have out here a long ways from nowhere.

Goodbye North Rim....for now.

In my last post I said we had to "get crackin'", and we did.  I charged the battery on my drill, put a ladder in the truck and a bag of hand tools.  Kelly came by and we caravanned the 12 miles out to the entrance station to board it up and pull all the equipment out.

I had questioned my rationale for keeping a heavy power tool.  This is one time I am glad I procrastinated and did not jettison it along with other items that were questionable for carrying along as a fulltimer.

 It is as if the buffalo knew something was up.  They had only made a couple of appearances all summer long up by the entrance station.  The last two days the park was open the whole herd just hung out to watch the circus leaving town.

Just as we approached the entrance station, about a third of the herd decided they had had enough to drink at the water hole on the right side of the road and needed to be back on the left side.  Never mind that Big Gulp was coming at them at 40 mph.  Its their road and they know it.

So we enjoyed the display of beastly power and attitude, what's a few more minutes, the entrance station isn't going anywhere.

As we followed them across the road we spotted a small herd of mule deer at the edge of the meadow.  Seems everybody is coming out to watch the exodus.

With our last chore for the park done we headed back to the campground to finish packing up our rig.  We have learned that some cold and windy weather is headed our way so we have decided to try and get out and moved to our new spot before it hits.  We are now shooting for a Thursday morning departure instead of Friday.

It was a whirlwind of activity but Cyndee got all the inside stuff ready to go and I the outside stuff.  When the sun came up on Thursday I was back outside pulling the covers off the tires and getting our frozen food out of the freezer in the cache.  We had just done a large shopping trip in Flagstaff only days ago, expecting to need a months worth of food and now we have nowhere to put it.  If I could get some dry ice that would do but we are more than a four-hour drive, one way, to the nearest dry ice.  I think we'll be cooking up "left-overs" for the next few days.

But soon enough everything had found a place for the 45 mile trip to Jacob Lake and I was getting Big Gulp in position to hitch up.  For those of you that have followed the blog you know that I have been worrying about this day since our arrival.  After a lot of wiggling, we finally got the trailer positioned on the pad.  One thing was for sure, we were not backing out the same way we came in.  Unless somebody with a forklift or tractor came along there was nothing I had that would be able to turn itself in a manner to get out the path we came in.  I tried to talk the park service into removing two or three ponderosa pines but I would have made better progress beating my head against a wall.

And on top of that, the truck was at such an angle to the trailer that the hitch was in a bind and would not release.  I had to pull the pins that held the Binkley head to the towers and use the trailer's landing gear to lift the whole head clear of the truck.  I then was able to get the head to release from the kingpin and carry it by hand back to the hitch where I re-assembled it. But now it was time to hook back up.  Would I be able to get a clean coupling or have to improvise like I did when decoupling?

Since there were no forklifts, tractors or tree removal I am forced to off-road through campsites and the woods to get out.  About a month ago we started eyeballing possible exit paths and came up with what we thought would be workable.  It required the moving of a boulder and that no campers be in three surrounding sites.  The no campers thing is a done deal, they have all been run off, all I have to do now is move a boulder.  It is definitely too big for moving by hand so I pulled out my trusty 2" nylon tow rope and headed for the Polaris.  I wrapped the rope around the boulder, connected the other end to the little hitch on the Polaris, put it in low range, engaged the 4WD and started putting a strain on the tow rope.  As nylon ropes are prone to do, it began creaking as it stretched and shrank from its 2" diameter to 1".  But then the boulder started to move and once it started sliding it was a cake-walk to pull it completely out of the way.

Picnic tables were moved too and soon we had a clear, if not crooked path to the way out.  I backed Big Gulp in through the intended path out, kind of a practice run.  But it also afforded me a much more "square" approach to the kingpin.  I was able to get under the trailer and get a clean coupling.  In the picture below you can see that the designed way for me to depart was around a 90 deg turn.  With that big ponderosa on the inside of the turn and a 1,000 lb propane tank on the outside (that is the blue-green thing at the bottom of the picture), there was no way I was going to exit by "design".

So this is my (only) choice for exiting.  I will have to dodge a power pedestal, trees, low-hanging branches and a fire pit.  I hope my and Cyndee's calibrated eyeballs measured everything correctly.

The orange cones on the driver side is an open trench, there is a power pedestal just in front of and to the left of the passenger side.  If I get clear of those then there are some low branches on the driver side and that black object in the middle of the image is a concrete and steel fire pit.  As soon as the last wheel clears the fire pit I will have to make a hard turn to the right of the image.  My bumper will be a fraction of an inch away from a tree when completing this turn.

No more pictures at this point.  Cyndee is doing some serious hand signaling and running from side to side in rapid succession checking every point to make sure I don't do something expensive as I ease forward through the maze.  She is in total control, I can't see most of the things that need to be avoided, I just do what her hands tell me to.

Success!  Whew!  We are both relieved, hadn't felt that kind of stress since the last time we had a lay-off at work.  Now it is a leisurely 45 mile drive to Kaibab CampeRVillage in Jacob Lake.  And I do mean leisurely, I did not get over 25 mph for the first 16 miles.  Why not?  There was absolutely no traffic behind us, we were not holding anybody up.  We were enjoying one last look at the aspens as they were just beginning to put on their full fall colors.  We did this all the way out to the Country Store, about 4 miles outside the entrance station.  There we stopped and said our goodbyes to the two couples that ran the store and we had come to know in the last two months.

We made it to our new home base about lunchtime.  Great folks here at CampeRVillage, went out of their way to make it as easy as possible to get in our site and get hooked up.  Immediately after, we headed for the Jacob Lake Lodge to make arrangements for them to intercept our UPS packages and get a bite to eat.

As we drove the one mile from the new campground to the lodge we saw one of those big, portable DOT signs from the back, right at the intersection where the road to the Grand Canyon starts.

Our summer adventure is over.