Day 22/23 - Las Vegas to Lancashire

So sad it’s our last day.😢

The flight is about 21:30 so we’ve still got a good day yet. Today we headed off to Hoover Dam. The dam spans the border between Nevada and Arizona. Parking on the Nevada side costs $10 but there is an option to park for free on the Arizona side so you can guess where we parked.

We visited the visitor centre which we thought was poor value at $10 each. Visitors have to have a thorough security check before entering.

There’s a new virtual at the dam which is at a memorial to a dog which ‘owned’ the dam and was killed in a very unfortunate accident. The tale was very sad.

Moving on.  We parked up by the start to the walkway across the massive Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge and Mark walked across it to take some photos, I waited in the car as I was far too hot as I'd had too much sun while looking around the dam.

We then headed back to Las Vegas doing a few Virtuals on the way.

Then it was time to take the hire car back and head to the airport.

The end of a completely awesome trip.  We had had so much fun in the 3 weeks we've been away and have made so many memories, I have to pinch myself to believe we've seen half the things we've seen.  Thank you America, we had a fabulous time xxx

Day 23:  Landed at Heathrow 15:00 and drove back up to Lancashire, arriving home about 20:30 after stopping off briefly on the way.

In total we drove 3700 miles!

Day 21 - Las Vegas

After breakfast, we jumped in the car and set off down to the iconic 'Welcome to Las Vegas' sign a couple of miles down the Strip. The famous landmark is so popular for tourists taking photos there that there is a small car park right next to it specifically for visiting the welcome sign. Today, as on other days over the past week, the visitors were also there to place or view the tributes to the 58 people killed at  the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel. Very moving and poignant visit.

We then made our way back up the Strip to do the Virtuals and see the other surreal sights. Apart from the one small car park I just mentioned, it’s not easy to just park and jump out the car so Mark dropped me off and drove around the block to pick me up again a few minutes later.

After doing this twice it was obvious it was more trouble than it was worth so he took the car back to the hotel and walked down to meet me.

By this time we were ready for a cuppa. We made our way to coffee shop and bought a coffee and muffin each – a bargain at a mere $17! The muffins were about $3.50 each, a bit cheaper than the nearby Starbucks where they were about $4.50 each but somewhat more expensive than the $1.29 we’d paid in Alamo yesterday.

The touristy part of Las Vegas is totally tacky with its replica Eiffel tower, Sphinxes, Venice and what have you but there is something very likeable about it.  It’s as though it knows it’s tacky but doesn’t take itself seriously and The Strip is stunning with its palm trees, rich blue sky and neat road borders. It’s kind of how we were expecting Los Angeles to be, but wasn’t.

Having visited all the Virtuals within walking distance, we took to the car to drive around some of the other Virtuals before ending up at the Stratosphere. The Stratosphere Tower is the tallest free-standing observation tower in the United States, and the second tallest in the Western Hemisphere, surpassed only by the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario. The parking for the tower is at the Stratosphere hotel and to our surprise it was free of charge.

We paid the $20 entry fee each and whizzed up in the lift to the observation decks.

As expected, the view is very impressive.

Day 20 - Rachel, Nevada to Las Vegas!

It’s a relatively short drive to Las Vegas – only a hundred miles or so. Just before setting of I went off to take a few more photos and returned to find Mark talking to a local by what looked like a weather monitoring station. The local man had casually mentioned that the radiation level was high today!  That sort of comment kind of gets your attention! The monitoring station outside the motel had a digital display for levels of gamma radiation and also had equipment to measure wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, air temperature and ground temperature; possibly other stuff as well. The man pointed to a map showing a series of these monitoring stations located in a large circle around Area 51 and Area 54.  Area 54 was a testing location for nuclear bombs in the early days. There was also a printout showing the data collected from each of these stations and this one, being the closest to Area 51/54, consistently recorded the highest levels…. And people choose to live here?!

Time to hit the road again. After stopping at the Sinclair garage for more muffins, we continued towards Las Vegas. We'd planned to visit The Valley of Fire State Park as it sounded suitably enticing.  There was a Virtual there so all the more reason to go.

The entrance/payment booth (there’s a $10 per car entry fee), was down a well-surfaced road about ten miles from the public road. Once through the entrance, we drove to the signposted named rock formations in order.

After doing all the Earthcaches we decide it was time to head into Las Vegas.
This was about another thirty or forty miles down the I15 highway and despite very heavy traffic, we were soon turning onto The Strip and into our hotel carpark.

We’d booked into the Best Western on The Strip primarily as it appeared to offer the best value for a Strip location.  It had its own free multi story carpark at the rear which was surprising sparsely occupied.

Our hotel in the middle

To get to the check-in desk, we had to walk though the casino. The smoking laws in The States vary from state to state but are roughly the same as we are used to in the UK.  However, although smoking is not allowed in most enclosed public places (and indeed many open-air public places) it is allowed in casinos! This came as a bit of a surprise to us and traipsing through a smoky casino in order to check-in was not the best first impression of the place.

Anyway, our room on the third floor (they call it fourth floor) was pleasant enough although the window overlooked a yard where staff took their smoking breaks but luckily we weren't planning on being in the room too long. There was also an ice making in the corridor just a few metres from our door. Although we were pleased to see it was working, we were not so pleased to be able to hear people using it throughout the night.  Amazed how many people needed ice at 3am.

Having checked in, we went to make a start exploring the area first heading to the totally surreal Venetian Hotel Grand Canal Shoppes. This complex is a sort of condensed copy of Venice complete with bridges, towers, canals and gondolas all under a perfect blue sky with fluffy white clouds. You can even have gondola rides! Gondola rides around a shopping centre!!!

Apart from petrol, most things seem to be expensive in the US. However, clothing seemed to be reasonably priced and I was keen to buy some new Skechers as my best ones were now looking a bit worse for wear having worn them for tramping about in the desert. Incredibly they worked out about 30% cheaper than in the UK! Super!

Yay new shoes!

Day 19 - ET Highway

Sinclair Garage

The plan today was to find some of the ET Highway mega trail caches.  There are cachers who have done 24 hour midnight to midnight marathons finding several hundred caches in one day. For that sort of caching it would be essential to carry extra cans of petrol. We were not planning such a marathon exercise and although we pondered over buying a spare fuel can at the garage, it would have been something else we would have to leave behind so we decided to just  head back to the Sinclair garage and top up with petrol again. This might sound neurotic but the jeep had a stupidly small petrol tank and when we reached the garage had actually driven about eighty miles since filling up the evening before. We also bought some bread and muffins etc to keep us going through the day.

Our leisurely start meant that by the time we were ready to start the power trail, the Alien Research Center was open for a visit! Not quite as alarming as it sounds, it’s actually a wacky museum/gift shop for all things Area 51 and UFO related.

Finally we made a start with the caches….
Coming to the ET Highway was Mark’s idea so it only seemed fair that he should do all the work.  I did the driving while he jumped out to find the caches. 😀 Doing the driving is not necessarily the easy option. It is pretty boring driving 0.1 of a mile and stopping again being sure to pull right off the road to avoid any traffic. The ET Highway is far from busy but the vehicles really do storm along here, and being wiped out by a 60 ton truck driving at 70 mph is not something we’d planned for. There’s no phone signal here and it’s fair to say that any sort of traffic accident probably wouldn’t end well…

Another oddity about these caches is the way cachers are allowed to shuffle the caches along. Normally, when you go to find a cache, you open it there and then, sign the log and replace as found. With these caches, you are allowed/encouraged to pick up the first cache and replace it with your own container with a new log. You then sign the log of the container you picked up while making your way to the next cache and swap containers again.

Some teams even have a third person in the car doing the log signing to speed things up even more. This is widely know as the ‘three cache monty‘ method.

After 10 miles/100 caches we decided to take a break and drive down to the Area 51 back gates.

Area 51 back gate

Area 51 is a top secret airbase where conspiracy theorists believe the US government keep alien space ships etc. Whether or not that is true, who knows, but the place is remote from an already remote location. The back gate is reached down an incredibly dusty nine-mile long track and when you get there there’s not much to see apart from security cameras, confrontational signs … and a sinister looking pickup truck parked on an overlooking high point.

O..K… lets just turn around and head back.

The owner at the A’Le’Inn had mentioned the night before that a couple of UFO enthusiasts were planning to get married at the Area 51 back gate at the weekend!

Back on the highway we decided it was time for a cuppa and a ‘comfort break’ so we headed back to our accommodation for a breather. Suitably refreshed, we continued with the series but resumed at number 300 as it seemed a good place to re-start. We then carried on until 431 after which there is a large gap in the series due to bends in the road. It was getting dark by then so we decided that was enough. Although we didn’t find the fabled thousand in a day, we can at least say we’ve done part of the legendary ET Highway series and we also set a new personal most-in-a-day.

Riley

Day 18 - Zion National Park to Rachel, Nevada

The plan was to do Angels Landing this morning and then continue on to Nevada to the ET Highway.  Once again, this would involve quite a long drive so we planned to make as early a start as possible.  Also to avoid crowds on Angels Landing.   Angels Landing is one of the world's most renowned hikes and we'd been looking forward to it ever since we'd started planning our trip.

Checking out

Woke up with the 05:00 alarm, showered, had breakfast and set off hoping to get to the Zion Canyon visitor centre parking in time for the first shuttle bus at 07:00.  We arrived just after 07:00 got out the car into a gale force wind. OK, perhaps gale-force is a bit of an exaggeration but it was VERY windy. This is somewhat different to what we had been advised the day before when a ranger at the visitor centre had said that it should be calm now for a couple of days.

Within thirty seconds or so, we had decided that doing Angels Landing in this wind would be foolhardy to say the least. Yes, we could have waited around for a few hours to see if the wind dropped but that would have put our other plans out of kilter so we decided that we would continue on towards Nevada at a more leisurely pace picking out a few caches on the way.... yet another reason to come back to this area.

I’d noticed a ghost town called Grafton on a travel blog so we headed there passing over an old iron bridge on the way. It turns out that the Rockville's Historic Bridge was the main route to Zion Canyon before the road tunnels were build in the 1930s.

The cemetery at Grafton has a curious collection of graves. It looks like the locals had a pretty tough time in early 1866 with a large number of deaths in a short space of time. The causes ranged from diphtheria, scarlet fever and ‘unknown’ to an accident on a swing and being killed by Indians! The good ol’ days eh?

There are two or three restored original buildings in Grafton and interestingly the hamlet had been used as a film set in a 1940s film but the film makers had built a temporary saloon bar near the school house as well. There was no sign of this saloon though.

Continuing on our way, we did a selection of virtual caches. One was at a Mormon temple in a city called St George’s – the most intriguing part of this was seeing the groundsman spraying the grass green with some hideously toxic smelling dye!

A couple of Virtuals were relating to a canal in Hurricane. The Hurricane canal was a 7.5 mile irrigation built in between 1891 and 1904. This diverted water from the Virgin river to enable people to settle at Hurricane. The canal is no longer used and pretty overgrown in places but information boards along the route give snippets of information about it.

We were planning to stop at The Little A’Le’Inn motel at Rachel in Nevada. This is about thirty miles along the brilliantly named Extraterrestrial Highway. The ET Highway is a single carriageway road with a 70 mph speed limit and no petrol stations for 150 miles so we decided to fill up at Alamo ten miles or so before we reached it.

The Sinclair garage at Alamo is a surreal jack of all trades garage. Apart from what you’d normally expect at a filling station it also had a grocery shop and hot food counter selling all sorts of amazingly good smelling food. They also stocked fuel cans.... A lot of fuel cans. 😀

We filled up with petrol and continued on to Rachel.

Alien Research Centre

The Little A'Le'Inn motel is a mecca for UFO enthusiasts. The entire place is alien themed and after dumping our stuff in the static caravan we’d booked we headed to the bar for a bite to eat and drink. Apart from UFO nerds, the inn has, in more recent years, become legendary for Geocachers enticed by the colossal ET Highway series of caches. A small area of wall in the bar has an array of geocoins to admire and discover and there is even an actual geocache in the bar. Nice and easy to find that one!