After wintering at our hovel in Ben Lomond, Nancy and I and our two dogs prepared to begin our second major Thor Challenger motorhome trip. We planned to visit the magnificent national parks in southern Utah and explore the beautiful scenery of Colorado. This would be a more modest circuit than our tour of the entire country last year, and we felt that we were both more prepared than before and more capable of slowing down and smelling the roses. Naturally, the projects we had put off to the last minute took longer than expected, and our onboard preparations didn't go as quickly as they might, so we departed on Saturday, May 5, about a week later than originally planned.
Motorhome travel allows you to commune with nature, to be as one with your environment, to channel your inner John Muir or Henry David Thoreau. So our first important stop was Las Vegas, Nevada.
Ah, Vegas. Where what happens, stays. Where a giant billboard promises to deliver hot babes to you, phone 696-9696. Where a storefront advertises "half-price lawyers". Where real estate prices have fallen so precipitously that we drove by apartments showing pictures of rotweilers and advertising "big dogs welcome."
When we first visited Las Vegas around forty years ago, the business of the town was almost entirely casino-based games of chance. It was cheap to stay and eat and be entertained there, and those low prices were intended to lure gamblers. I remember seeing Jerry Lee Lewis and Count Basie in casino lounges for the price of a couple of drinks. There were almost no gourmet restaurants back then, but plenty of inexpensive buffets.
Times have changed. Every celebrity chef has multiple restaurants in town, and you can eat very well in Las Vegas, but the prices are as expensive as anywhere in the country. (We had our one dinner out at Firefly, a great small plates restaurant.) With some exceptions, hotel accommodations aren't cheap. Every casino has a lineup of shows, but nobody was playing during our visit who would have been a headliner during the early years - no Sinatras or Streisands or even Wayne Newtons - in fact, no high-priced star power. There were multiple Cirque du Soleil shows and nudie reviews, and a number of second-tier musical programs, and I'm sure that many of them were entertaining, but I didn't see any shows that would draw me to travel to the strip. So obviously the Las Vegas power players decided along the way that there was a lot of money to be made in the tourism industry, and they began charging accordingly.
The architecture is, of course, astounding. Some is chintzy, but much is beautiful. We walked up and down through the new Aria hotel-casino and it looked state of the art, inside and out. Next door the even newer Cosmopolitan was extremely pedestrian in appearance, and it's difficult to understand how the investors could spend such massive capital without hiring a brilliant architect.
One thing that didn't change was that one or two days in Vegas was enough for us to be ready to move on.
Leaving Las Vegas, pulling off the freeway to fill up our motorhome with gas, a couple of liquor bottles mid-coach fell out of a cabinet, spilling a little of their precious product. Not only that, but as we were getting ready to pull into a service station, the smoke alarm went off. Nancy removed the batteries, but it continued screeching. The dogs were frantic. We searched for a second smoke alarm but couldn't find one. Finally we noticed a blinking red light in the little carbon monoxide alarm panel near the floor. Pressing the button gave relief for only a few seconds, then the beeping began again. Nancy had the brilliant insight that it might be the fumes from the spilled alcohol that were triggering the alarm, and that turned out to be the case, most likely, even though the unit was supposedly designed to sound off only for the presence of carbon monoxide or propane. Those maddening beeps went on for the twenty minutes it took to fill the gas tanks, and for some time after, with Nancy sitting on the floor by the alarm, pressing a button every time it began again. Eventually it stopped, and since you're reading this blog, we didn't die as a result of carbon monoxide or propane poisoning.
We've concluded that a good motorhome trip doesn't really start until your first onboard disaster. So we've gotten that out of the way. Next stop, Zion National Park, in Utah.
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