Read earlier entries from April.
Today we left snowy Williams for Vegas but we're making a one-night
pit stop here in Cal-Nev-Ari. We came on Route 66 most of the way. We
saw a few isolated ranch houses in the middle of nowhere, and nothing
the whole way until the border.The only big thing we did see were classic cars from the 50's & 60's (and even older). We saw Corvettes, Mustangs, Thunderbirds, Pontiacs, Buicks, and Fords with rumble seats. The majority had fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. They were taking part in the Route 66 Road Rally.
A little while later we went to MGM Grand. Instead of employees, MGM has "cast members." I gorged myself with the best lemon chicken I've ever had.
That place was huge! It's the largest hotel in the world. We were there during about 200 jackpots. All the one-armed bandits were tuned to the same pitch so you couldn't tell if it was yours or not.
At the arcade, there was a girl who threw away at least $100 to get 1,000 tickets for a $10 stuffed bear and a $20 lava lamp. She would get about 10 tickets per token and I played skeeball and got about twenty tickets from four tokens. I found some more on the floor so I got 58 in all. I got a bracelet for five and a puzzle for 50.
When we left, we saw New York, New York, with the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty; Caesar's Palace; The Luxor, with a life-sized sphinx out front; and the Excalibur. Every one of them had about 15 restaraunts.
[We added our final photos to the April page today.]
There were some actors who walked around dressed as Ferengis and Klingons. One Klingon commented to me, "The only good tribble is a dead tribble, so you might as well eat them before they spoil."
We walked down the DS9 promenade reproduction and went in all the shops. One shop had tribbles that squeaked when you squeezed them, and if you pulled the string they jittered. They had all kinds of Star Trek clothing and I pressed myself a United Federation of Planets quarter.
We went on a ride where you're supposedly captured by Klingons but the Enterprise-D immediately beams you aboard. You take a tour of the bridge and go down some decks in an elevator. You get jounced around in the elevator which has nothing to hold onto. You take a corridor that leads to a docking bay and get in a "transport vessel." It leads you about 10 feet forward but inside it's like a mix between an IMAX theatre and a motion simulator. After they "land" you in the basement, a man from the "cleaning crew" comes up saying, "Hey, what are you doing here, it's closing time. If you're wondering, Star Trek is upstairs," so we went back upstairs to the promenade at the ride exit.
In Treasure Island's show the Hispaniola pirate ship won the battle in the outdoor lagoon. However, they missed the H.M.S. Britannia with cannonballs 75% of the time. All the British sailors jumped overboard and the captain went down with the ship. When they raised the H.M.S. Britannia, the captain was still on the deck looking for his hat that had floated away to the other side of his ship.
At the Mirage show, they put a red light behind some water jets on top of a outdoor waterfall to make it look like a volcanic eruption. They also put propane trails across the water and lit them. I felt the heat coming off the trails from hundreds of feet away. I thought the propane jets were a little overkill, but other than that, it looked real.
I played with Ashley and ate lunch with her. We spent our day in the pool. I've played with Ashley every day since Williams.
We took the tram to the Excalibur, ate, and then saw a juggling act by Brian Erle. He messed up several times but it was free!
We took the monorail from MGM to Bally's and walked to the Flamingo Hilton (I wonder why there's two, the Flamingo and Las Vegas Hiltons). We went to the wildlife courtyard of the Hilton. There were guinea hens, swans (black, mute, and unknown that had a black head and neck and white body), giant fish, cygnets, wood ducks, flamingos, and some turtles including one albino.
After that we went to Caesar's Palace Forum Shops. We saw an F.A.O. Schwartz Trojan Horse. There was a huge fish tank holding about 100 saltwater tropical fish and two stingrays in a courtyard. There were three fountains called Atlantis, The Fountain Of The Gods, and Festival Fountain.
We saw the fountains at the Bellagio. Someone said they shot 11 stories high. They played music and the water shot and swirled with it.
We went to M&M world. They sold make-your-own-mix M&M bags. There was also a 3D animated movie about how "Red the M&M" lost his "M" on the roulette wheel and went through all sorts of crazy adventures trying to get it back. There was every kind of M&M merchandise for sale from the M&Ms themselves to an R/C race car.
We walked to Caesar's Palace to catch the shuttle but missed it by less than a minute, so we walked 1.1 miles back to the Tropicana. It was about 9:00 PM when we got home and we were so tired.
We went to the Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge. Furf swam for about an hour in a lake. We had lunch there and Furf wouldn't eat his.
We got to the Little A'Le'Inn. There was a sign saying, "Welcome to Rachel, Nevada. Population: Humans 98, Aliens ?" We bought a gift for Russell (can't say what) and an alien paratrooper toy.
We saw some burros that might have been wild in front of a gravel mine.
We saw some salt flats. The salt looked like snow, crunched like dry snow, but it was salt (must be snow in disguise). We walked around an abandoned salt mining operation and in a small hole, we found some bones and teeth from an unknown animal. Whatever it was, it had huge flat molars, giant incisor teeth, and large vertebra.
For animals we saw Steller's jays, magpies, deer, mallards, and a red-winged blackbird.
There was snow five feet thick coming off all of the A-frames' roofs.
We saw meltwater rivers/waterfalls and signs saying "Snow Chains Required," "Watch For Sliding Snow," and "Watch For Falling Rocks."
We went on a hike and saw 75+ giant Sequoias or redwoods. We saw "Mother and Son," the "Siamese Twins," the walk-through tree (there was a photo of a car going through it), and a lot more.
We saw a cute little grey shrew running around in a fallen hollow tree trunk that was as tall as I am.
The paper says that some of the oldest trees live through 100 fires and they need fires to germinate. The bottoms are made so burning trees will roll off a standing Sequoia.
On the way home we had a deer jump out in front of us and I saw a Bullocks Oriole.
[As you can see from our map, we've sped way up and Kevin's diary is now slightly behind our trip progress...]
We saw Mt. Shasta, which is one of the top 10 highest peaks in the contiguous USA. We ate at a Bavarian (German) restaurant and I had a Polish hot dog (kielbasa dog).
At this campground we have a river behind us and a pond at the campground office with geese.
I also met my Mom's cousin, Richard, who has a boxer named Willie. Willie's clothes were hilarious. He had little leather socks which he didn't like, so when he ran he was high-stepping. He also had a little sweater.
We ate out at a Thai restaurant. A lot of the food was close to Chinese, only everything came with a bowl of peanut purée sauce. It was all good.
There was a Red-Winged Blackbird that had a nest in the campground. Whenever someone walked by he would divebomb them.
We saw the Washington State Capitol, and the dome might have been marble.
There are peepers (frogs) in this state park and they are loud.
We saw the Chittenden Locks that connect Lake Union and Puget Sound. There was a fish ladder that went up around the locks into the lake for the salmon to breed.
We went to the Archie McPhee store. We saw boxing puppets, alien poppers, and other pieces of junk.
We saw the Aurora St. Bridge Troll. The troll is a concrete sculpture with Mylar tape over one eye. It even smells like a troll back there. He had captured a VW Bug encased in concrete in one hand.
We've seen a lot of totem poles everywhere.
We took a day trip to see the Pacific and there were freshwater
streams running into it. There was an island off the coast called
Destruction Island. We saw sea stacks at Ruby Beach. They look like
rocks the size of school buses on end jutting out of the sand.
We had a tailgate party for a birthday party and everything was good. We had grapes, salmon, crackers, bread, meat, cake, pretzels, peanuts, and more.
We saw "The Monarch" (a Sitka spruce) on our way into the Hoh Rainforest. It was 500 to 550 years old, 250+ feet tall, and 121/2 feet in diameter at chest high.
There were club moss, shelf fungus, and oxalis everywhere. Oxalis looks like inch-wide clover and shelf fungus looks like little shelves coming off a tree trunk. We saw elk tracks and one bear track in the mud. There were ferns everywhere. The rainforest gets over twelve feet of rainfall a year!
East of the Cascade Mountains the land is flat and a lot drier. The land here reminds me of Portales, NM with all the farms. They had signs on the fences telling the names of the crops.
Today we went to the Rocky Mountain Elk
Foundation. They had a diorama of all the animals of the elk
country. We saw a video of elk lives and all the dangers they have to
face (human encroachment, grizzly bears, wolves, hard winters...).We saw eight Whooping Cranes (endangered) flying close overhead to Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta. We're now on the east side of the Continental Divide.
I went gold panning. I got about $1 worth of gold and 30 garnets. :-) First you picked out a bucket, then they put it through the cradle, then you panned.
We walked around Virginia City, saw some cabins, and looked in the storefronts.
There were a lot of metal statues in Ennis, including The Happy Angler, a pack of bears, and some packhorses. We ate at the Ennis Café, where they had buffalo burgers.
Continue on to June.