The campground we had chosen was the Oasis Las Vegas RV Resort. Its appearance is very grand with a large marbled entrance to the reception area, a fountain at the front, a theatre, restaurant, meeting rooms and a large swimming pool and surrounding area.
We had plans to see a number of places and things to do while we were in Vegas, but one of the most important items on our list was to have our washing machine repaired. Although it was only a few months old it had stopped working when we were in Williams, however being such a small town there was no service company available for repairs. As our arrival in Vegas was on a Saturday, we needed to wait till Monday to arrange a service.
Sunday was a beautiful day and thus we headed towards the Las Vegas strip to have a look at the casinos. Grace remembered Vegas’ factory outlets from our previous visit there in 2001, so that was high on her list of places we “must-do”. Unfortunately for me, on the way to the strip Grace recognised this shopping mega-haven so we called in...for a while.
Having XY genes, I’m not much of a shopper, I go in, see what I like, pay for it and then leave. Not so for my female family; comparisons are required. Hence, four hours later we left this bargain bonanza, confident and happy in the knowledge of how much money we had just “saved”. We still had a couple of hour’s daylight to explore and drove to the south end of the strip and parked in the car park of the Mandalay Bay casino.
Naturally our girls have never seen the inside of a casino before so the sight of hundreds of people, thousands of poker machines and gaming tables was a new experience. I asked Chantelle what she thought of all this glitz and her reply was, “it’s OK”. I’m sure I was more excited when I first saw similar sights, but I wasn’t 10 years old. I told them the best sights were yet to come because the poker machines and gaming tables were not the reasons we wanted them to explore the casinos.We travelled on the monorail from the Mandalay Bay to the Excalibur, the brightly-coloured castle looking building and entered through the basement level where all the children’s games and play areas are located. That was much more interesting for them; however, they were disappointed when we told them this still wasn’t the reason for us looking inside these casinos. Excalibur is on a corner and opposite was New York New York, diagonally opposite was the MGM Grand.
If you’ve been to Vegas you’ll understand, these are probably four of the least attractive casinos for the girls to be introduced to, bearing in mind their age. They’re grand on the outside but leave little on the inside for the imagination to excite young children. Somewhat deflated, we left these venues late in the evening and although they looked more exciting at night with all the colourful lights, first impressions had been cast. The monorail ride and walk back to the car was quieter than I would have expected; still, tomorrow’s another day.
I called the washing machine service company the next morning and they couldn’t give us a precise time or day when they’d be there – either Monday or Tuesday. Hence, we needed to review what we were going to see and crossed Death Valley off our list as that is a very full day of travelling (about 3 hours each way) plus sight-seeing. We decided instead it was a good opportunity to concentrate on schoolwork for a couple of days.
The service guy arrived on Tuesday morning, pulled apart the washing machine and found a rubber hair tie caught in the water pump but couldn’t get the machine to re-start properly. From experience, a timer times out when you do something wrong and you need patience to sit and wait for it to time out before being able to try again. Clearly, he had pressed a few things incorrectly as he sat watching and waiting for over 30 minutes. At $160/hour I didn’t want him sitting, watching and waiting for too long because I can do that for no labour cost. He agreed and left with the machine in the middle of the bedroom floor, but needed to return another day once we confirmed the machine was working correctly, reposition it and replace the door frames etc he had removed. About 10 minutes after he left the machine kicked into life and cycled correctly. I called the service company to re-book him and again, they couldn’t confirm a day or time other than to say, sometime during the following 2 days, but not today.
This left us free to explore Vegas on Tuesday afternoon as we needed to wait in the Sierra for Wednesday and Thursday for him to return. The delay in returning meant that we needed to cross off more places to see, so Hoover Dam and the Valley of Fire National Park were deleted – a very frustrating time indeed.
Deleting these destinations did have an upside though. It allowed us more time in Vegas so we searched local things to do and see. Despite the expense, we booked a helicopter flight on the Thursday (we’d delay the mechanic’s arrival if necessary) to see the Grand Canyon, flying over Lake Mead and Hoover Dam along the way, landing on the canyon floor and flying back through the Valley of Fire and along the Vegas strip before landing. We also booked tickets to see David Copperfield after the flight for his late afternoon show.
Having learnt lessons from our first trip to the strip in Vegas, we decided to park much further north in the strip and walk from there. We chose a car park... actually that’s not correct, by accident and not design the Treasure Island casino chose us as I was driving in circles trying to find somewhere to park. Exploring the casinos from that end was great. We were disappointed Meryla chose not to come because the first impressions weren’t very good, but the four of us had a wonderful time looking about Treasure Island, the Mirage, the Luxor, Caesar’s Palace, Harrahs, the Forum Shops with curved escalators, statues and domed roofs. Unfortunately the wind was blowing too hard for the water fountains at the front of the Bellagio to be operating.
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| The Paris casino & hotel |
We walked almost all the way down the strip (it’s 3 miles long) to find the M & Ms shop. Four storeys of eye and tooth candy temptations. We bought a frightfully expensive few ounces of all of the 22 available M & M colours in a mixed plastic bag (once home and much to the girls chagrin, they were only able to identify 20 different colours) and stayed for as little time as we could because of the pleas of the girls finding all types of M & M gifts. Their merchandise included almost everything you could imagine, pens, pencils, key rings, hats, shirts, stuffed M & M dolls etc etc.
The very long walk there had been exciting because of the rainbow we’d just seen, but then reality hit – we had a long walk back now without a rainbow at the end! There were distractions aplenty to see, though some of them were very unwelcome – I couldn’t count the number of men and women (certainly more than 50) trying to hand out leaflets for “women on call who will visit you in your hotel room” or strip shows with naked and lewd photos, certainly not the impression you’d like young children to remember about Vegas. To be fair to these people, I wasn’t handed any directly because I was always holding one of the girl’s hands, but they were being passed to all and sundry around us.
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| The Venetian |
We stopped at the Paris casino for a very late lunch/early dinner and enjoyed the beautiful outdoor scenes inside – if you’ve not been there, the ceilings are very high and painted as you were looking at a beautiful blue sky with white clouds. The inside has been built to resemble French streets, cafés and restaurants.
The meal we had in the Paris was without doubt the worst meal we’ve had while in the USA. It was expensive and had clearly been sitting in a baine marie or under a food warming light since lunchtime. Once again, we found the gratuity to be included in the bill – seems where this happens you either have shocking food or service!
Wednesday was another schoolwork day and the mechanic arrived late afternoon to complete his work – a several hundred dollar lesson for us to ensure everyone’s pockets were empty before going into the washing machine :-(
Thursday’s helicopter flight was to last 2 hours which was made up of a 45 minute flight to the canyon floor, 30 minutes for lunch while on the floor and the flight back over a different path. We were to leave at 11.45 and needed to check-in 30 minutes prior – this early time was to allow us all to be weighed with our hand luggage and anyone older than 18 was required to provide a valid photo ID. The helicopter held 6 passengers plus the pilot so we were hoping to have the chopper to ourselves. Once we completed our check-in procedure we were ushered to the waiting lounge where we met a man sitting by himself.....oh bother, he was the 6th. He was a friendly chap who lived in a suburb of Sydney and was travelling with his wife visiting friends in Vegas; his wife didn’t want to take the chopper ride.
This helicopter ride was another of Grace’s fears she was facing and sitting in the front seat with windows all around and at her feet to the front didn’t help. We all put our headphones on and adjusted the attached microphones so that we could be heard and could hear each other. Seat belts were adjusted and tightened and we were ready to go!
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| Lake Mead and Hoover Dam |
Then with a whine the engines started, followed by bouncing from the main rotors slowly starting to rotate – faster and faster they went and the pilot remained unbuckled, sitting forward in his seat intensely watching the instrument panel. About 2 minutes passed with him staring at these gauges until he was satisfied with what he saw then he sat back, buckled up, put his headphones and sunglasses on, tested our internal communications, spoke to someone outside the chopper on a different channel, increased the engine and rotor speed and we slowly lifted off the ground and turned 90 degrees when we reached an altitude of about 1 metre from the ground.
We were flying!! I couldn’t see Grace’s expression as I was behind her, but I reckon it would have been priceless. I’m sure if he landed the helicopter after this 3 feet high elevation Grace would have been more than happy to say she’d ridden in a chopper! Soon enough though we were properly airborne and headed away from Vegas towards the Grand Canyon.
The views were fabulous from our 2000 to 3000 feet high flight. We passed over Hoover Dam and although we couldn’t sense the size of the dam from the air, it was at least some compensation to see it following our cancelled road trip. Lake Mead is huge and it was interesting and easy to see how low the water level had dropped, and potentially how close to water restrictions Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other cities supplied by this lake have become.
We reached the Grand Canyon and weaved about various canyons before sighting where we were to have lunch. The area we were about to land on is owned and controlled by an Indian tribe as landing within the government controlled section is forbidden. These landing rights are negotiated annually between the Indians and helicopter companies that wish to land on the canyon floor. Nothing is supplied at all by the Indians in terms of services or toilets, but the land is theirs. 
A bottle of water was also offered and we walked about while eating as it was much too cold to sit.
Our allocated 25 minutes (the pilot reduced it by 5 minutes) passed quickly and we were ushered back into the chopper. Prior to our flight to the canyon, we were advised not to take photos or film until we were airborne. I asked if we could film the takeoff and he said “no problems”, hence I’ve attached our take off from the canyon floor. [update: unfortunately the server rejected the upload several times and I cannot upload the video]
During our return trip he played many popular songs to do with flying and I was tempted to sing along with some of them, but there was no way of turning off my microphone so I sang along silently. The pilot was a young man, married with a small child and he told us he recently bought a 3 bedroom house in Vegas that was priced at more than $400,000 three years ago, their purchase price was $120,000. There are certainly bargains galore to be had in real estate over here. |
| A section of the Valley of Fire |
Once we were safely back on ground we quickly made our way to the Chev and drove to the MGM Grand where we were to see the 4 o’clock David Copperfield show. Finding the theatre entrance was a challenge and we found ourselves weaving in and out of rows and rows of poker machines on different casino levels, past the live lion display and large crowd watching intently through glass windows for any movement until we finally spotted the queue which had already started moving indoors to be seated for the show.
Copperfield is a great entertainer and illusionist and some of his “tricks” were simply amazing. You have to wonder though whether or not there are people “planted” in the audience for a couple of things he did, but it seems unlikely by the way he chose them by first throwing a frisby or large balls into the audience, then having the everyone re-throw them again and again till he called out to stop and the person (12 people in the case of the balls) left holding the item was brought up on stage.I haven’t yet mentioned that today was Thanksgiving Day in the USA and unlike Canada who seemed to let the day pass without much fanfare; the Americans were very vocal about it. As we had missed out on the traditional turkey dinner in Canada, we wanted to find a good place to eat and had asked the staff at the campground reception about local restaurants. One lady suggested Dean’s Place located very close to the campground and once the Copperfield show had finished, I called them to see if they had any room for us.
We were extremely fortunate as it turns out because the lady in Dean’s who we spoke to needed to first check with the kitchen. There was just enough left of their special $9.95 turkey with cranberry sauce and all the trimmings for 5 people – we’d be there in 15 minutes I told her. The meal was without doubt one of the best we had had during this journey. It was a huge serving that also included desert for in the price and the amount of food we were allowed to take lasted us for 2 more meals.
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| And a great time was had by us all, well almost all... |
The weather had become an issue again as another very large low pressure system had descended on North America’s west coast. It brought with it extremely cold temperatures rain and snow and very bad driving conditions. I had a call from my son David who had been speaking to my daughter Kristy in Banff, and Kristy said that one of the mountains on which they were going to do some snow-boarding was closed due to the temperature dropping to -35°C.
Rain with possible snow showers and freezing conditions was forecast for Vegas over the weekend and as we were due to leave on Saturday, we once again watched with intent the weather forecasts. We wanted to head up to Yosemite National Park but they were already experiencing snow falls of more than 3 feet at the 3000 foot level, more than double that at the 5000 foot level and even worse at the top at around 8000 feet. Added to that were winds in excess of 40 miles per hour.
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