|
|
                                              
|
Sunday 13 May 2001 - Monday 14 May 2001A long and tiring 360 mile drive to Longstreet Inn, Casino and RV Park, in the south-west corner of Nevada just about 100 yards before it becomes California. The Inn ...
... is a little oasis in the middle of nowhere ...
... it has chalets, a large RV park which costs a massive $10 per night including cable TV, a lake and fountain with ducks, a restaurant and of course the casino. At the time of our arrival it had about twelve guests, who must have been outnumbered by the staff by about 3 to 1. Its main season is in the winter, but I suppose they can't throw the staff on the street in the summer so they don't have a great deal to do. The exciting casino action consisted of one man feeding quarters into a slot machine. The following day we crossed the border into California to visit Death Valley which was why we came to this forbidding place. The temperature was about 100°F, so we were surprised to see lush strips of grass, bushes and even palm trees as we approached the visitor centre, the reason being that this part of the valley is on a fault line and has abundant if hot springs. You don't want to do too much walking in Death Valley in the summer as temperatures can exceed 125°F and rainfall is 2" per year, so we drove around stopping off every so often for photographs of the moon-like scenery ...
... a walk round the old borax mine ...
... which only lasted for about five years at which point they found deposits which didn't need a journey of 165 miles by mule train to get them out, and the Devil's Golf Course, a region of dried salt and other minerals about 250' below sea level ...
... which gets its name from the ghastly surface which is full of holes and which also contains delicate hollow golf-ball shaped salt formations, a couple of incomplete examples of which can be seen here ...
We took a 24 mile drive on a dirt road through Titus Canyon, which someone we'd met at lunch had highly recommended and claimed was a piece of cake even in an ordinary car. Ho ho. This was the first and hopefully only time when I've used the low gear ratio 4-wheel drive on the truck, and very glad it was there too, especially on some of the steep hairpin bends. It was beautiful though.
Within the Death Valley National Park area are a few ghost mining towns, including Rhyolite ...
... where we saw our first Joshua Tree ...
Like other ghost towns, this one is slowly being taken over by artists; we particularly liked this sculpture of a miner and his pet penguin ...
Towards sunset we went round the Artists Drive to see the Artist's Palette ...
... which is supposed to be spectacular at this time of day, but unfortunately the clouds came over and muted the effect a bit. Sorry. If you're in this part of the world, Death Valley is an absolute must.
Tuesday 15 May 2001 - Monday 21 May 2001Retraced our steps to Las Vegas and stayed at the Silverton Casino RV Park. Las Vegas is a monument to money, greed and bad taste, just as we'd hoped it would be. The major casinos are themed and named after exotic faraway or mythical places: Luxor ...
... New York, complete with Statue of Liberty, Manhattan skyline and Coney Island roller coaster ...
... Bellagio's, which has superb fountains synchronised with music ...
... and Paris ...
The interiors are equally grandiose: this is where the leg of the Eiffel Tower disappears to inside the casino, next to the slot players ...
... and the whole place has a pseudo-French flavour, including waitresses with striped jerseys and berets. However, there are no small white poodles, open air urinals, clouds of Gitanes smoke, insane drivers or French people being rude to foreigners, so they haven't got it quite right yet. Speaking of urinals, I saw one suave cosmopolitan gambler in the urinal (or toilette as they're signed here) taking care of business with one hand while he chugged a bottle of beer with the other; one day I hope to be this sophisticated. Oh, and here is a modest corner of Caesar's Palace ...
... and a gondola arriving at St Mark's Square, Venice on the third floor of the Venetian; the sky and clouds are artificial, by the way ...
The city is pretty spectacular at night too: this is Excalibur, for example ...
Food is plentiful and cheap, with nearly all the casinos doing an all-you-can-eat buffet of excellent quality for about $6 - $7 in order to attract your custom. Apart from the gambling there are numerous top-class entertainments and shows; we went to a House of Blues gospel brunch at the Mandalay Bay, the Blue Man Group at the Luxor (not sure about in England, but over here they do the Pentium TV adverts), an art exhibition at Bellagio's, and saw The Mummy II, possibly the worst film ever made, at the MGM cinema complex. Over the next few weeks we could have seen Tom Jones, Mark Knopfler, the Steve Healey Band, Spinal Tap, Dolly Parton, Paul Simon and zillions of others - every taste catered for. All in all Las Vegas was everything that we had hoped and expected. My total gambling comprised putting five quarters in various slot machines for a total return of seven, so we even came away with a profit. When we could tear ourselves away from the fleshpots, we managed various trips to other places around Nevada:
... where we did a slightly truncated guided tour as they were about to perform a load test consisting of shutting down a third of the transformers and bringing them up again. As we returned to the car park there was a strong smell of burning insulation in the air, so maybe it didn't go as well as they'd hoped. The main achievement in the construction of Hoover Dam is not the engineering one but the fact that they brought it in two years early and several million dollars under budget: not something that you see nowadays in any field.
... which has lots of red rocks and some white rocks. Enough said.
... which is terrific and has much better painted desert (see above) than the National Park version in Arizona. It also has some nice naturally sculpted rocks: this is one of the Seven Sisters ...
... here's some that looks like Swiss cheese ...
... and here are some petroglyphs which look more like a tattooist's sample sheet (I'll have a Mexican wave and two small horned sheep please) ...
After this we're going to Utah. We understand that this state has more spectacular scenery than the rest of the south-west put together, which is saying something; there's even been some talk about making the entire south of the state a National Park. We'll see.
|
