First of all, I went to Circus Circus casino on Saturday. Aside from a casino, there is a giant indoor amusement park. It was crawling with kids and teenie boppers, which was a big change from the rest of Vegas. There is also a three-ring circus in the casino. I guess that's the place to go if you want to take your kids to Vegas. The thing is, who would want to take the kids to Vegas?
Then on Sunday I went to Red Rock Canyon which is a senic canyon about 25 minutes from the Strip.
First to rub it in, I started the day with a late breakfast of tiny tacos . Mmmmmmm tacos carnitas con cilantro y cebollas!
Then I decided that I needed water and sunblock so I stopped at a....
Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market. It's a Wal-Mart that's just a grocery store inside. Never hoid of it before.
I then proceeded to Red Rock Canyon. Unfortunately pictures cannot do justice to the majesty of that place. You enter the valley on a highway, and before you know it, enormous canyon walls surround you and fill your whole field of view. It was breathtaking.
There are many places where you can pull off the highway and follow trails. I pulled off one where there were several other cars (the one with lots of cars must be the good one, right?) and began following a trail. It looked like it was headed towards a crevice in the hills. I heard that there was a senic driving loop further along the road, so I just wanted to get out and walk for a few minutes and go back to the car, but I was quickly intoxicated by the beautiful sunny 70° day and the beckoning hills and kept saying "just a little further and then I'll turn back." The above photo is about an hour's walk from the cliffs as I would soon discover.
I took plenty of pictures of the local flora on the way.
I'm about a half an hour away from the cliffs here.
I eventually made it into the narrow valley between the cliffs. I rested in the shade for a while and enjoyed the quiet. Then headed back to the car. I wished I could have gone further, but since I was going to "turn back after a minute" I didn't bring any water with me, and I was starting to feel like Jeff Jerky.
After I got back to the car, I drove down to the senic driving loop. (similar in concept to the driving loop at Bar Harbor) One of the first stops was the Calico Hills.
It's difficult to get a sence of scale from this photo, but to give you an idea, in the high resolution version of this photo, I counted eleven climbers on the face of this hill.
There's a closeup of a few of them. They're slightly below the exact center of the photo.
There were a number of senic overlooks. It was such a beautiful place. If you ever make it out to Vegas, make sure to check out the Red Rock Canyon.
Today (Monday) I went out with a few of my classmates; Andrew the Russian, and Jude the Malaysian-born Australian.
First, we went to the Las Vegas Atomic Testing Museum. It was all about the history of American nuclear research with an emphasis on the Nevada Proving Grounds (or "Nevada Test Site" as it is sometimes called). There were a lot of cool videos, pictures and artifacts, but unfortunately you weren't allowed to take any pictures. I did get this one outside of the museum-proper in a photo gallery as you walk in.
After the museum, we went to the strip. First we went to Andrew's "lucky slot machine" in the Flamingo Casino where 3 of Andrew's dollars (or technically 79 of Andrew's roubles) will never be heard from again. Then we went to Andrew's favorite store, a gaudy Vegas souvenir shop. It was full of Vegas mugs, Vegas shotglasses, Vegas snowglobes, Vegas this, Vegas that, pithy bumper stickers, gimicky t-shirts etc. For Andrew, this was Vegas Heaven. It was his fourth visit to this shop, and he spent nearly an hour browsing around. It's funny how different people have their own "routine" at Vegas. For example, I like watching the volcano show, but when I mentioned it, the foreigners seemed uninterested and made a beeline for the Vegas bottle openers.
