Wednesday, June 1

 

We got out of the Stovepipe Wells motel around 10:30 and headed out of Death Valley towards Vegas on 190. A little ways past the intersection with the road to Badwater we had to stop and wait for a pilot-car to take us past the restoration of the road after the past winters severe flooding. At Death Valley junction, which was a dusty and half-desolated little village, we got on the unmarked cut-over road to Pahrump, NV. The road was more or less empty but in fairly good condition, paved and even. Then onto NV-160 and towards Pahrump, a little town that didn’t feel very inviting at all. To confirm, I got chased away by the local high-way patrol when I stopped to snap a picture of an unusually large dust-devil. Well, at least he didn’t give me a ticket…

The landscape just south of Pahrump was littered with Joshua-trees but I was too lazy to stop and my wife snapped a few, not so grandiose, pictures with a revealing sense of motion in them. The road was now a fairly crowded four-lane highway and meandered down towards Vegas and we made it in to the “Excalibur” by about 2pm. Quite a difference to drop the car-key to the valet crew on the 10-something lanes wide driveway and get into the multi-football field large lobby/casino of the hotel after the last few nights style of accommodation.

After waiting too long for the bell-boy to bring our luggage, my wife and I hung out by the huge pools while the kids got wet.

We took a walk over to the neighboring Mandalay Bay hotel after dinner and after walking, it seemed, several miles in the gigantic hotel we found that the entrance fee to the shark aquarium was way overprized, so we decided to get out and get in a cab for a little sight-seeing on the strip. After being denied by the first jerk in the taxi-line, we managed to get honored by the next, well driver… Hmm, I thought the whole idea with driving a cab is that you simply get paid for driving customers but it seemed that these guys were yearning for something more sublime to devote their time to…

Anyway, we decided to stop at the Mirage to take a look at Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers. It turned out that only one was on display and it was only depressing to watch the restless and stressed animal wander back and forth in its enclosure.

We went and picked up our laser-cut three-dimensional portrait in a crystal-block and with the kids in the room, we had an overprized beer in a cheesy bar with an equally cheesy band while overweight people were mechanically pulling the levers of the blinking and pinging and ringing machines all around.

Previous day

Story index

Next day