Mark's musical adventure

We stopped in Austin, Texas because I had this weird urge to go see the statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan. It's pretty big.


The night we got here, both Les Claypool and Fu Manchu were playing in town. Decisions decisions decisions. After weighing the options, I settled on Les Claypool - I've seen him before and it was a great show!


This time was excellent as well and even the opening act was good. It was Tim Fite. I'd never heard of him, but he was pretty rockin'. When Les came on, he had a bit of a strange assortment of characters with him: namely a xylophone/marimba/percussion guy, and a saxophonist who used heavy effects on his sax (I've never heard a distorted saxophone before).


There were several amazing xylophone solos, which, believe it or don't, is NOT sarcasm! Les also played a variety of basses, including one that looked like a banjo that I'd never seen before.


He also played an upright bass while wearing a pig mask.


There was an awesome and interactive version of D's Diner (Who wants to go to D's Diner? I do. Who wants to go down to D's? Me!), and he closed the show with a cover of the Black Sabbath song Electric Funeral. Here's a short snip.

Les Claypool vs. Fu Manchu? Les wins.

Bombs and dunes

On our way to Roswell, New Mexico, we were driving along the highway and saw this:


The longest military convoy EVER. I wonder where they were going?

We soon found out where they were coming from:


They were coming from a gigantic missile testing range and accompanying military base nestled in the flatlands of New Mexico. White Sands Missile Range is the largest military installation in the United States, and is three times the size of Rhode Island. The first atomic weapons tests in the world happened here. It's a kind of intimidating place to drive through! The highway we were on goes straight through the middle of the base and is apparently sometimes closed when missile testing (including nuclear!) is taking place. Eek!

And yet, on the very edge of this military compound, lies an area of great natural beauty. We stopped in at the White Sands National Monument, which is full of (duh) white sand that's made of gypsum. Let me tell you, this sand is REALLY WHITE. I know it's a stupid thing to say, but it's striking. At one point the paved road ends and you're driving on packed down sand and sand drifts have been plowed away from the road, and it all looks like snow, only your windows are down and your feet are bare and still you're hot.


Off in the distance you can see normal sand:


We went hiking around in the dunes and although it was a hot day we took off our sandals for the entire hike. The sand was very soft and cool to the touch even with the sun beating down on it. It was such a pretty place to be in. The world is full of neat things.

Roswell that Ends Well

Roswell, New Mexico, is one of the most magnificently cheesy towns I've ever been in. There are blow-up alien dolls outside many of the businesses, and alien murals, and "Area 51" this, and "abduction" that, and so on.


The thing about this town is, it's famous, but the thing it's famous for is not very tangible. So they have to just put up gift shops and themed eateries, but it's not like you can tour a UFO. So the attraction mainly consists of the gift shops, which is odd. One enterprising gift shop made a cheesy "black light immersive art experience", themed on UFOs of course. We went in it. Pure cheese, and twice as stinky. Mark has just asked me to say that he liked it. (nerd.)


There is the International UFO Museum, but there's not any solid evidence of anything, so the museum is just a bunch of written displays full of people's opinions and some plastic models of stuff. Here's an alien autopsy:


The hilarity factor of this museum is not to be underestimated, however. One diagram of a crop circle earnestly describes how the crop circle pattern obviously represents how the soul is connected to the body. Oh, yeah, obviously. Because everybody knows exactly what THAT looks like.

A lot of the museum consisted of newspaper clippings of the big Roswell incident where the ufo/weather balloon/whatever crashed, and also affidavits from the people involved. There was one gem among the humdrum exhibits - behold, What to do if you see a UFO:


Anyway. Enough of that. We sadly didn't see any real aliens, or spaceships, or anything. We DID find an exciting "Cowboy Church" near our campsite. Who knew that cowboys conducted their own specific religious stuff?

Tombstone!!

Goodbye, Pacific Ocean. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day...


Well, we left Mexico a bit early. Mexico was great, but everything else in Mexico that we are interested in would have required at least an additional two solid weeks of driving, and we just didn't want to sacrifice that kind of time. We think we will fly back in a few years and visit one or two carefully chosen spots in the southern region of the country.

Also, our poor truck and Boler were taking a beating on pot-holes and giant mutant killer speed-bumps from outer space that have only invaded Mexico. We actually broke a few things during our drive to the border, which confirmed that we'd made the right decision. We've got thousands of miles to go; can't do it with busted equipment!

Anyway, We are now in Tombstone, Arizona. What a cool town. It reminds me very much of Dawson City, Yukon. Does that sound weird? It's true.


This is a western town with wooden boardwalks and old-fashioned building facades and neat saloons. We saw "Texas Kate" do a wild-west show full of dog and horse tricks, and the awesome thing is, all the dogs, horses, donkeys, and goats in her show are rescue animals!


She highlighted animal rescue a lot in her show - it made us happy. The horse she's riding on was actually sold, emaciated and miserable, to a slaughterhouse. A friend of hers bought it from the slaughter people and now it's a trick-riding horse! Hooray!


We also saw Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and all those guys shoot each other. Cool.





Near the end of the day we saw a poster for a blood donation clinic and, not having anything better to do, we went. I got nixed because of my newest tattoos so it was Mark that got bled. Spectacularly! The girl accidentally sent his blood shooting into the air when she poked his vein with the needle, and it came down all over his clothes. Woops! She gave him a free t-shirt, and now he can say he shed blood in Tombstone. (Don't click on the picture unless you want to see some of the blood close-up.)

Tomorrow the plan is to go to Roswell, New Mexico and get abducted by aliens. Should be fun. Wish us luck.

The Rule Nazis

We didn't make it over the American border from Mexico until it was almost completely dark, so we decided to stay in the first place we could find for the night. Karen found us an RV park withing a 10 minute drive of the border, so we pulled in around 7:30pm. As we drove down the lane to the park, I noticed a sign on the side of the road that said "produce trucks prohibited". What? Under what circumstances would that be necessary?? The office was dark when we pulled up so we went to the door to see what the procedure was for late arrivals. There were a million notices posted all over the door and also on a bulletin board beside the door. One said that late arrivals were welcome to find an empty spot and put a (somewhat steep) site fee in cash in an envelope that was provided and slide it under the door. Another notice said that the bathrooms for the RV Park were always locked, but that we could get a key from the office if we gave them a further cash deposit.

So...

Theoretically, I pay a big fee to park in the RV Park overnight. I don't have access to the bathroom because the office is not open. We are planning on leaving first thing in the morning, so we might not even get to use the facilities before pulling out. What, exactly, am I paying for?

We drive on into the park, debating. After going over the park's many precarious speed bumps, and reading the multiple postings about speed limits and produce truck prohibitions, we reach an empty site. The thing is, we don't want to drive any further that night. Hmm. We wander on foot out of the park to the nearest gas station. No restroom. We walk to the NEXT nearest gas station. No restroom. There are no other businesses open, and at this point I am angry at the rule nazis that run the campground. We retreat to the Yukon Ho and decide that we will NOT put our money in an envelope for someone else to have unless we get something reasonable in return.

At 10pm, we hear tinkling chimes in the distance that get louder and louder. We recognize the "Popeye the Sailor-Man" theme song, and watch out our window as an ice cream truck drives slowly into the RV park and stops, music jangling. Did I mention that it was 10pm? And dark out? At least it wasn't (gasp!) a produce truck.

We wake up early and drive out of the campground without stopping at the still-closed office.

Ooohh! What rebels we are! If it makes you feel better, we didn't plug the Boler into the park's power supply, so we used no resources.

Stupid rule nazis.

Junk Food Round-Up

Let me introduce you to Manzana Lift. It's apple-flavoured pop, and we are both slightly addicted to it. I'm really hoping I can find this now and again in a Mexican specialty grocer in Nova Scotia (assuming a store like that exists in Nova Scotia). This is the "golden" variety, but the best kind is the original reddish kind.


We have also tried lime-flavoured pop, which tasted like unsweetened lime-flavoured sparkling water. Mark kind of liked it and I kind of didn't.

For some reason, one time Mark bought a bottle of sangria flavoured pop that didn't actually contain alcohol. I'm not sure why. it tasted good, but it's no Manzana Lift.

We have not been so lucky in the candy category.

Today Mark brought some candy called "Pulparindo" back to our campsite. It tasted like blech.


I'm not surprised, as I don't enjoy eating pulp, and I also don't usually eat the rind of any fruit. So a candly called "Pulparindo" doesn't inspire confidence, right off the bat. It lured me in by looking a bit like caramel, but the pulpy texture and the sour yet spicy taste just didn't work. I'll stick with the sweet loaves of bread from the bakeries, thank you. Mark ate the Pulparindo but claimed not to like it that much either.


Lastly, although it's not junk food, I MUST comment about Mexican hot chocolate. If you ever have the opportunity to try it, do. It's amazing, and apparently differs from region to region. It's chocolate-y goodness, but it has spices and chilis and stuff added. Not to the point where it's hot in the spicy sense, but it's so rich and flavourful that you'll have the urge to have a quiet moment alone with it. And when your spouse of two weeks (who foolishly ordered coffee) asks for a taste, you'll want to tell him to get his own, but you'll share because that's the grown-up thing to do. But secretly you'll still want to tell him to get his own.

Easter Snorkeling

Easter celebrations are getting absolutely insane. The main road in San Carlos has become a sort of moving party with people in trucks, cars, and ATVs cruising slowly along blasting music, hanging out of windows and sunroofs, and shouting at each other and nobody at all. I'm not sure where they're all coming from - the town is not big but the road has been PACKED with vehicles since late Thursday/early Friday. They tend to taper off a bit for siesta every afternoon, but then there they are, on the road again, until very, very late at night. Oh, and the sidwalks and beaches are jammed with people too. I guess celebrating Easter mainly consists of hanging out in public and having a party.

We ventured out today to go snorkeling at a cove on the other side of town. It was awkward but fun (walking into the water with big fins on your feet is hard!) and we saw some pretty tropical fish, sea urchins, and what I think might have been a dead seagull. I retreated to the beach long before Mark did, as I couldn't see all that well without my glasses on and it was freaking me out. I kept seeing dark blobs under the water, and if Mark was near, I'd ask him what it was and he'd look at it and reply with nonsense like "a carpet" and I knew it wasn't a shark. But if Mark wasn't near, it was just a dark blob...a dark blob that might have been a shark! So I collected seashells on the seashore after that and he snorkeled some more, perfectly capable of detecting sharks with his sharp eyes.



After that we went to a restaurant near our RV park and unknowingly ordered big bowls of raw shrimp swimming in very tasty cold broth (camarones aguachile). We loved it - it was pretty much Mexican sushi and of course I'm down with the sushi! There was A LOT of it too, for cheap.

The day before, we got "toritos" because they sounded like maybe a tortilla or maybe a burrito, but certainly something Mexican. Turns out, it was peppers stuffed with whatever you wanted (we got shrimp and fish) served in a kind of spicy soy sauce marinade. Who knew! (Not us.) It was really good; here's a picture.

Mark's Random Ramblings

Backing up a bit... all I could think of while we were driving aimlessly around Nevada was the line in Fear & Loathing: "Can't stop here... this is bat country!"


While we were in Las Vegas itself, there was really not much Fear or Loathing at all. Except after the second buffet of the day, having outdone myself both times... I'm pretty sure that feeling could be classified as loathing.

I was blown away by the quality of the free shows available to anyone walking along the strip in Vegas. We saw the pirate show at Treasure Island - it was a full scale production with pyrotechnics, choreographed dancing, and even a sinking pirate ship. Crazy! We also saw the water show at the Bellagio, and I was again floored. These shows go on several times a night, and some of them all day long too. It's nuts that they can squeeze the tourists for so much money that they can pay for all the extravagance.


We also checked out the Fremont Experience. That's where there is a roof over the street and there's what they (casually) refer to as a "light show" on the hour. I was expecting patterns of light bulbs and stuff, nothing special. In actual fact, it's a huge video screen several blocks long and as wide as a street. The first one we caught was a psychedelic music video for Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird. Here's a short video clip that captures what must be about the least interesting snippet of the video. I repeat: least interesting. The rest was even cooler. I hope you appreciate it - I almost fell over backwards when trying to pan to the end of the screen.

When we got to Yuma, we saw a couple of these little water shacks. Their biggest selling point: Salt-free. As opposed to all that heavily salted water people normally settle for. Also, their price was "5 for 50 cents". 5 what? Who knows! It didn't say anywhere. There were lots of people using them though.


The first business establishment I noticed in Mexico was this one:


I wonder what kind of a place it is... Probably some kind of bird museum.

In another fine example of Mexican signs that cut straight to the chase, here are some fantastic pet instructions. Don't be so subtle guys, and let us know what you really mean.


While we were strolling the beach at our campground in Santa Rosalia, we made friends with one of the random dogs running around. She was just a pup, and was begging food from people, and chasing us around, and generally being a nuisance. As we walked along, she ran up to someone's RV site, and grabbed a sandal that was lying on the ground and started running away with it. A man came chasing after her (a fat sunburned American fellow who stood little or no chance of catching her, of course), so we caught her and gave the guy his sandal back. About 2 minutes later, she grabbed another one from someone else's site, but this time nobody was home.

M: "Should we take it back for them?"
J: "Nah, she'll probably just grab it again"
M: "Good point."
J: "Well, not much else we can do but take a picture."
M: "Guess so."


One of the street vendors was selling Lucha Libre masks!!! We hadn't bought anything from the street vendors yet, as neither of us are very keen on haggling under the best of circumstances, let alone when we don't really speak the language. Anyways, we did a really half-assed job, and ended up buying a mask like Jack Black wore in Nacho Libre, as well as a little carrying bag Julie liked. We even managed to knock the price down a couple of bucks! Here we are modeling.

Wifi, at last!

Alright, here's a big update for y'all. I've been writing them, but couldn't post them due to the extreme scarcity of wireless internet access on the Baja Peninsula. Here ya go:

MARCH 17:
***
There aren't an abundance of internet connections in Baja California. We've been moving steadily south for three or four days and we are about halfway down the peninsula, in Santa Rosalia, as I write this.


It is the evening of March 17 now, but I won't be able to post this update 'til I find an internet connection somewhere! This is probably about as far south as we will get. There is a ferry from Santa Rosalia to the mainland and we are planning on getting on it the day after tomorrow. If we were to continue further south, our trip would be all driving and no relaxing, and that's not what we signed up for. Also, the truck and trailer have been taking a lot of punishment and we don't want a catastrophic vehicular failure in the middle of the Mexican wilderness. The roads are narrow and unpredictable, and make for slow driving, so we have made the decision to try and relax a little instead of simply taking a survey of the highway system.


A few weeks ago I complained about California drivers. I need to do that again. In Mexico stop signs, red lights, and especially speed limits are taken as nothing more than a suggestion. Mexican drivers even ignore the lanes painted on the road if they think three cars will fit side by side instead of just two! However, they never seem to put other cars at much risk, and they patiently allow other drivers to use the road in the same fashion. California drivers come down here and try to drive like Mexican natives but just end up being rude, aggressive, and dangerous. And they are everywhere!

Okay, SPEED BUMPS (a.k.a. Topes). There is a completely different philosophy, I mean completely, about these things here. As we drive down the highway, we often drive through a village or small town. Mexican authorities believe that this is enough of a reason to add a dozen speed bumps in a row to THE HIGHWAY, followed by one extra large speed bump at the end. I am not exaggerating. Oh, and while driving on the highway, if there's a curve in the road ahead, they'll add about twenty speed bumps. In towns that have more than one paved road they go nuts. We lost the connector to one of our safety chains going over a very pronounced speed bump in Ensenada while trying to find the main road. The thing was almost square!

Another fun activity on the highway is the military "inspection stations", which are numerous. The Mexican military has seen fit to pick random spots on the highway, blockade the road with a 10 foot wall of tires and rocks, and force everyone to drive into the ditch to be inspected. Mark got a little excited during one of our first check-point crossings because he noticed a guy pointing a "very large" machine gun at him. These inspection stations seem to be pretty harmless though. The soldiers are all pleasant and professional, and when we don't understand them the first time (some of them speak fast!) they always politely rephrase their instructions to us until we get it, and some of them even speak English to us. Sometimes we have to give them a tour of the Yukon Ho; sometimes they don't ask a single question. We haven't had a problem with them though, and they do add excitement to the day.


MARCH 18:
***
It's Tuesday March 18th now. We had a breakfast of sweet bread bought at the local bakery this morning in our campground. The shore birds put on a show for us as we drank our coffee on the beach, under our "palapa". Although we are the only guests at our campground, the water abounds with fishermen, and locals keep driving into the campground to see if anyone has landed with a catch. Meanwhile, the pelicans kept skimming the water so closely that we were sure they'd crash, and a bird of prey has been diving spectacularly for fish right in front of us all morning. We'll be going in to town today to buy a ferry ticket for tomorrow's sailing to Guaymas. If all goes well, we will spend tomorrow crossing the Sea of Cortez.



MARCH 19 & 20:
***
More time has passed! It's now Thursday March 20th, and we are in San Carlos, Sonora, on the western coast of mainland Mexico. We went to buy a ticket for the ferry on Tuesday, and it was an exercise in frustration. Clearly posted on the wall and on our information sheet it said that the ferry sailed "Wednesday, 9am", and said we could get tickets the day before a sailing. Fine. With much gesturing and halting language, we managed to communicate to the ticket agent that we wanted to go on the ferry with our truck. He gave us a piece of paper with ticket prices on it, scratched out the "9:00 am" part that was printed on it, and hand-wrote in "8:00 pm". He also indicated that we couldn't buy a ticket now; come back tomorrow. With our feeble grasp of the language we were kind of nervous that we'd misunderstood something and we might miss the ferry, which wouldn't run again for three more days...eek!

As we were instructed, we showed up the next day at noon and the good news was, the ferry was still supposed to run at 8pm that night, and we could buy a ticket, but the bad news was: their credit card machine was broken. We would have to find a bank machine and pay the huge ferry fee in cash. In to town we went, got the money, went back to the ferry terminal, and a different person, who also didn't speak any English, was now manning the ticket booth. How to tell her we had already had our tickets printed, and the man had hidden them somewhere awaiting our money? Argh...it eventually got sorted out and we got tickets, with clear instructions to be in the parking lot at seven pm.

Fast forward: it's 7pm; like good little Canadians we are in our truck, in the parking lot. There is a rowdy but jovial gang of young-ish Mexican men hanging around, as well as a pair of Americans we had met the previous day. They are also going on the ferry. We chit-chatted with them while watching the young Mexicans swill beer and wrestle each other. No ferry in sight.

7:30. No ferry.

8pm. No ferry.

8:30, the ferry pulls up! It's tiny! At the same time, a truck full of armed soldiers pulls into the parking lot. They are there to inspect every vehicle leaving the ferry, and it's a slow process! We have our tourist cards, passports, and customs questionnaires at the ready, but the army men leave as soon as the last vehicle is off the ferry.

8:45pm. Some officials come out of the ferry building and inspect one of the trucks that the young Mexicans are driving. They don't look our way. The truck, thus inspected, starts driving around the parking lot. Are we supposed to get into some sort of line? Everything is unclear.

8:55pm. A vehicle drives onto the ferry! Mark eyes are a bit wider than usual, because it has come to light that we must drive about 150 feet down a sloping ramp into the belly of the ferry, in the dark, BACKWARDS. He glances frequently at the travel trailer in the rear-view mirror as we wait.

9:05pm. The ferry employees start directing us, backwards, towards the ramp. We are the last vehicle to be loaded. Suddenly, the official-looking agents that had inspected the other truck earlier come out of the building and halt our progress. They look over all our paperwork carefully, even comparing our truck's serial number with that of our Mexican vehicle permit. GET ON WITH IT, PEOPLE.

Finally, we inch down the ramp backwards, Mark valiantly correcting for the trailer's willy-nilly movements so that we don't fall off the side of the ramp into the Sea of Cortez. The ferry crew is good at directing him and we get on board FINALLY. The truck gets winched to the floor of the ferry, and we are sent into the lounge, prohibited from sleeping the night away in our comfy Yukon Ho.

It's now about 10pm and in the lounge a spanish-dubbed version of the movie "Major Payne" is playing.

Fluorescent lights make us all look slightly grey, and the rocking of the tiny ferry doesn't help, either. We sit like zombies until the movie is over, and then most of the lights are turned out and all dozen of the ferry's passengers stretch out in a lounge built for maybe 150. Mark and I stretch across four seats each, with the metal frames of the seats digging into our bodies where the cushions end. It was a LOOOONG night. At about 6am, everyone but us seems to decide that it's time to buy coffee and Mr. Noodle cups from the cantina. An hour after that and it was land ho and thank goodness our ferry ride was over.


MARCH 20:
***
As I mentioned, we are now in San Carlos, which seems to be a somewhat touristy little town. We have lucked into a cheap but nice RV park that has real hot-water showers (haven't seen one of those in a while), a pool, INTERNET ACCESS, and is right across the road from a pretty beach. We will hunker down here until the end of the weekend and wait out the chaos that is Mexican Easter, or the end of "holy week" as they call it.

If you're still reading, thanks for hanging in there for this super-long post! If you're NOT still reading, well fine, I never told you but I don't like you that much anyway. (That's a joke mom. And you're still reading anyway, so you don't count.)

I'll post another update soon. Hope you all are doing well!

Santa Rosalia

Super quick update for you all. We are in Santa Rosalia, about halfway down the Baja peninsula. We´ll hopefully be taking a ferry to the mainland tomorrow.

Our travels have been good, but slow. The roads here are not built for speed. We won´t be going much further south in Mexico for those reasons. (Don´t want to spend the entire trip driving at a frenetic pace! Must relax!)

Anyway my internet time is running short. Just wanted you all to know we are still alive, haven´t adopted a Mexican street mutt yet, but we made friends with a few. Wish us luck on our ferry trip and I will hopefully find wifi somewhat more often on the mainland. Camping on the beach these days. Pelicans and palm trees abound.

K, gotta run!

Border, border, border

Well, we made it to Mexico. Twice.

We woke up in Yuma this morning with lots of errands to run. One of those errands was to get maps of Mexico because we are unable to get Mexico information into Karen the GPS unit at this time. (Long story. I'm not getting into it.) We were browsing the book store in Yuma and got into a conversation with some snowbirds that had just been to Mexico for a few months. We were a bit disappointed because the bookstore (Barnes and Noble; a big one) didn't have any maps of Mexico in it, even though it was less than 25 miles from the Mexican border. Strange.

The snowbirds assured us we could get maps easily in Pemex, which is the gas station in Mexico (government run, and they're all the same). They also said we could park overnight at this wonderful place called Pemex, because it was just like a truck-stop. Fine and good. We left the bookstore with a few reference books on camping and whatnot and headed for the border! Yay!

Then we got to the border, a green light blinked, we looked around in vain to see where we were supposed to get our tourist cards and vehicle permits from, someone behind us honked, and we were on our way in Mexico. Dang.

We found ourselves in San Luis, a noisy little pot hole-filled border town, without a map, or any local currency, or proper travel documentation. Aaahh! Oh, and we don't really speak the language all that well.

So we drove frantically around and found the famous Pemex gas station. I did manage to get some pesos right off the bat, but when I asked for "un mapa" the cashier shook her head. "No mapas today", she told me. Hmm. We did some more frantic driving, trying to get back to the border, drove down a one-way road (but guess which way we drove it!) had two false leads and finally got into a line to cross the border INTO the States again.

The line was long but the guards were friendly, and we turned around, parked in an improvised parking spot on the advice of the Mexican border guards, and took a very, very long time getting our documentation. They actually popped into the building halfway through, asking us to move our truck. Mark, Mexico fashion, told them "un momentito" (just a minute) and then took about another half hour getting everything else signed, stamped, and processed. Oh well; they didn't tow us, and our border guards showed off my tattoos to the other guards.

So...paperwork was done. We had no idea where we were going, but it had to be somewhere, so we drove. BOTH of my road atlases only have a two-page spread for the entire country of Mexico, so there wasn't exactly a lot of detail. We stopped at two more Pemexes on the road, and neither had maps OR any area where there was room to pull over for a bit. Those stupid snowbirds. If I see them again I'll strangle them.

ANYWAY. We got as far as Mexicali, where I am typing this, and we found a boring old Walmart, pulled over, and bought a map. We're a bit nervous about spending the night as there are about a half a dozen men with whistles hanging around the parking lot, helping people back out of their parking spaces. Is it also their job to kick out boondockers? Do they care? We will find out...I'm hoping we can stay. One of the only rules we really know so far about Mexico is not to drive at night, and, well, border fiascos took so long that it's night now.

Wish us luck!!

Leaving Las Vegas

Yuma smells like flowers. We've been all over this town today and everywhere, it smells like flowers, but looks like a desert. I don't get it.

I digress.

Last week we drove through the Mojave Desert...


...to Las Vegas!

We stayed at Circus Circus and it was huge. We had to walk through two casinos and a shopping mall to get to our room. Everywhere there were SPARKLY LIGHTS and LOUD NOISES and people accosting us, trying to give us "free" whatevers.

We did go to one of those time-share scams and it wasn't too bad. It took up a morning but we got free breakfast while we were there, $50 to spend at any of our hotel's restaurants, and five free tickets to the Comedy Club at the Riviera Hotel across the road from our hotel. Our friend Kristie, who was staying at the same hotel as us, kept trying to get the time share people to offer her stuff, but they didn't want her because she was single. Weird, huh? Mark tried to go with her but they check IDs for proof that you live together. Oh well. At least some guy tried to pick her up on Fremont street the day before she left. ;)


I could list all the stuff we did, but all I really need to tell you is that we were busy busy busy the entire time - we saw the sights, gambled, saw a bunch of great shows, won a bunch of stuffed animals in the midway in Circus Circus, and didn't even have the time to get enough sleep while we were there.

Las Vegas is surreal and mind-boggling. One interesting thing I noted was that, although you can buy incredibly cheap alcohol (margaritas for $1, for example) at any time, day or night, and walk around in the streets drinking it, we didn't see any rowdy drunken behaviour at all. Interesting.

Here is the pictures portion of this entry:

Like I said, we saw some shows.



We went to Quark's Bar, and the Enterprise was in orbit there.


At the bar, the boys drank a Borg Sphere.


General Las Vegas stuff.






We're out of Las Vegas now and in Yuma, Arizona, which is a border town. We're catching up on errands before we head to Mexico tomorrow. It should be fun!