Total Driving Distance: 239 miles (trip total: 3,701.3 miles)
States Traveled To: Arizona, Nevada
Main Activity: Hoover Dam, Las Vegas
the view of our hotel from our dirty car windshield
We took our time getting ready the morning of Day 11. We couldnt check into our hotel until 3 pm and we didnt have anything to do until then. Our KOA in Williams, AZ was one of the best we stayed in. The night before, we swam in the indoor pool and relaxed in the jacuzzi. The only complaint would be the showers. Since water is scarce in Williams, the KOA has to import all of their water so they instilled a mechanism in the showers similar to one in a public bathroom sink. Where you usually turn the shower on, there is only a button that will dispense water for 5 seconds at a time and believe it or not, holding a button down while you are taking a shower turns out to be sort of a pain. But by the grace of God, we survived.
The KOA had a great little cafe at the front that we ate at before we left. I had some great French toast with bacon and Liz had a plate of potatoes. We both had an extremely hot cup of coffee to go with it.
The drive to Las Vegas was not long at all (when compared to some of the other drives we have been on). It took about three and a half hours to get to the Hoover Dam (30 miles from Vegas), a place I wanted to take a tour of. We stepped out of the car to take a couple pictures and 105 degree dry heat just about killed us. We stayed outside for about 3 minutes before we felt like we were suffocating and sprinted back to the car.
The $7 parking and extreme heat kept us from stopping for a Hoover Dam tour. We drove thirty minutes and finally arrived at our hotel, the Stratosphere.
After checking in, we went straight to our room on the 15th floor, collapsed on the bed, and turned on the TV. Unfortunately, our TV only had about twenty channels: 10 or so news stations, usa, tnt, tbs, and about 7 channels dedicated solely to advertising our hotels and random stuff around Vegas. So TV got old...fast.
We did laundry (for free!) on the 6th floor, then watched Family Guy and The Office before finally getting ourselves out the door to see Vegas at night.
Our only plan was to walk around the Strip and see Harry Potter at midnight. We walked across the street in front of our hotel (after checking out the casino in our hotel) over to the Sahara Hotel where we hopped on the Monorail. We rode it all the way down to the MGM Hotel which is near a theater. Here we are on the Monorail:
Once we reached MGM, we headed straight for the beautiful bathrooms where Liz took another picture:
We missed the midnight showing of Harry Potter but there was another at 12:30 that we went to. If you havent seen the movie, you should go see it. It was our favorite of all the Harry Potter movies and definitely one of the best movies of the summer. We've already seen it twice and want to see it again.
When we left the movie theater at 3:45 in the morning, we were upset to find that the Monorail had stopped running at 2. And since MGM is on one side of the Strip and the Stratosphere is on the other, we had quite a bit of walking ahead of us.
We certainly saw the Strip that night. 3.6 miles of it. The temperatures were in the high 80s that night and we were tired. It was a long, long walk, but we finally got back around 5 in the morning. We saw plenty of Vegas that night, including some of the weirdos walking around in the wee hours of the night. We saw plenty of lights, but we would have preferred to have been out a little earlier than 5 in the morning.
Ah, Vegas, Sin City, the city built on losers...good times. Are there really weirdos there?
ReplyDeleteI like your dam pictures. Too bad you had to pass on the dam tour because of the dam heat and the dam $7 parking.
Liz, you look beautiful as always, even in the 100+ heat.
And HP is definitely worth seeing again and again.
Love y'all:)