Las Vegas

Tuesday October 13 2015

We left our storage lot campsite and St George Utah today for a relatively short ride of 125+/- miles. Our destination is a Thousand Trails RV Park in Las Vegas, Nevada. What a surprise we had on I-15 as it passes from Utah to Arizona and then Nevada. The road snakes its way through a spectacular mountain pass, it's a scenic wonder to rival any National Park. 

We arrived at Thousand Trails early in the day, check in went smoothly and we set up on our assigned site. The sites are narrow, our RV pretty much goes from one side to the other with our slides out. If someone parks next to us there's no way we could put our awning out. The whole park is gravel with the exception of the paved roads and a few little patches of grass at the end of the rows.

Thousands Trails is like a RV timeshare, they have about 80 parks scattered around the country. They are all old and vary greatly in quality. You can't give this TT demerits for the gravel and lack of grass, this is the desert southwest and the other RV parks we've visited here in Vegas have the same ground surface and shortage of grass. 

The biggest detrimental feature is the narrow sites, that and the barbed wire topped block wall that surrounds the park. The security wire varies from straight barbed wire to razor wire to Concertina (coiled) wire. The neighborhood outside the wire doesn't look threatening to me, but they didn't install it without reason. On the other hand, this park has one of the nicest adult lounges we've seen in any park.

We went to the lounge to watch the Democratic presidential debate on CNN as there is no cable TV supplied at the sites. We got to see the first hour before the nights scheduled entertainment started. The performer Dick Woolbridge is unique in that he is deaf. He had a 40 year career as a professional musician before losing his hearing. He now performs opposite of the standard form of singing to the music. He sings from memory and plays guitar to the music. He has a portfolio of almost 400 songs that he has learned to perform this way. The neat thing about it is he hands out his list to the audience and performs any request from it.

Wednesday October 14 2015

Today we drove across town to find the Orleans Hotel which is the location of the reunion we are going to attend next week. We drove through part of the lower strip before eating lunch at a Jason's Deli. I was surprised to learn the Jason's franchise is not headquartered in California, but is from Beaumont Texas. I mean a Texas sandwich shop should have things like “Big chunk of cow on Texas toast with slab of mesquite smoked bacon and smothered with BBQ sauce”, Right? Jason's has sandwiches with all those strange contents nobody ever heard of, or ever imagined they would see on a sandwich. My sandwich had antibiotic free chicken smothered in fresh Basil Pesto and I think spinich leaves! Can somebody please tell me, what exactly is pesto? It sure sounds to me like something invented in California! Do you think I'm exaggerating, below is the listing for Millie's lunch.

After lunch we ran some errands at the post office and Walmart before driving through several of the RV Parks on this side of town. There are four or five of them along this section of Boulder highway. They are all about the same, straight rows of gravel RV sites with asphalt roads.

In the evening we watched Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson in Last Chance Harvey on DVD.

Thursday October 15 2015

We went to a big casino/hotel complex called Boulder Station which is just up the street from the RV Park. Money wagered in slot machine= $1, winnings= $0, we didn't come to gamble, there is a movie theater in the complex. We got it right this time and saw the movie, “A walk in the woods” starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson. This is the movie we intended to see in St George when we mistakenly saw “The Walk”. It was OK, Millie gave it an 8, my rating was 6.5. Scenery was excellent, as was the acting, I just thought the plot was kind of weak.