CuRVWander

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...

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 de...

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 whatsoeve...

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 ...

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 the...