Vegas Baby! - DC

Still trying not-so-successfully to catch up on the blog... On memorial day weekend, we went to Vegas. It was nice of my mom to remind me before we went that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” Therefore, that’s the end of the post.

Just kidding.

It’s about a 6 hour to drive from Santa Barbara to Vegas. The drive itself is pretty dull but for us, the first drive through desert was pretty interesting. Seeing the odd tumbleweed rolling around, Joshua trees and signs for Death Valley were pretty cool. At first, we bypassed Vegas to check out the Hoover Dam. Quite the feat of engineering and pretty cool, even for me! It’s obvious that Adam loved it, he’ll stop to take a photo of any interesting bridge, so bring him to the Hoover Dam and well, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. The dam was really cool and there’s a new bridge above the dam too which was pretty impressive. We managed to spend time in three different states that first day, as we started in California, drove through Nevada and popped into Arizona while at the dam.

We went back to Vegas for the evening and wandered around taking in the sights. The extravagance of Las Vegas is pretty numbing. It was somewhat disturbing but also really impressive at the same time.

The next day, we left the city behind again and headed to Red Rock Canyon. There is an 11 mile scenic drive with several stops along the way. It seemed quite unusual to have toll booths to access nature, only in America. We brought plenty of water with us (remember, we’re in the desert), slapped on some sunscreen and headed out. The nature of the rock makes it apparent how it’s quite a destination for rock climbing. We could even see the odd bolt glinting in the sun. After about a couple hours clambering around, we were happy to revisit the air conditioned whip. As we were coming back to the whip, we overheard a few different people reminding their friends/kids/families that the farther they walked towards the rocks, the farther they’d have to walk back to the car… we were only about 50m from the whippark. Yikes.

Back in the city, we dipped in the pool then more mind-numbing Vegas. We did a bit of gambling, Adam has a much better knack with the one-armed bandits than I do. At one point, before going to the bathroom, he gave me 5 bucks and said “don’t lose it all before I get back” haha - I did. With his guidance though, we ended up about 40 bucks up. The next day we headed back to Santa Barbara via some back roads and no name towns.