June 20th, Flagstaff to Vegas.

June 20th, Flagstaff to Vegas.

Now that the flat move is over (more on that some other time) its time to resume the blog! I will however be more than a little hampered by the apparant sacrifice of my little travel notebook during the move :(

Well the 21st seen us back on the road and off to Vegas. The drive was through some pretty-darn-similar-looking-to-yesterday desert. By now Ive given up on seeing desert thats has bugger all in it - the deserts here are far too lush for my liking with lots and lots of small shrubbery, hurrumph.

On route we stopped at the impressively scaled Hoover Dam. The dam is not, as I assumed, named after J Edger Hoover but is named after the Herbert Hoover the 31st president of the United States. I wont rattle on about it too much other than to say it interesting in an engineery sort of way with some nice 30's style flourishes in the architecture. Its Also the single hottest place Ive ever been. The wind appears to come in straight of miles and miles of desert and get funneled into a single people cooking gust, yuck.



Arriving in Vegas we found our Hotel the 'Lady Luck'. Wandering in it appeared we had, in the words of the dead knight dude from Indiana Jones, "Choosen poorly". Not only was it a pretty decent distance from the fun parts of Vegas it was also populated with 'huver-around' clad oldies bumming away dime after dime in the slot machine filled ground floor. However, no mere collection of soon-to-be-poor oldies could dampen the mood! This was Vegas! And with our minds buzzing from flashbacks to 'Swingers' we stepped out to sieze our first night in Vegas.

About 40 minutes of walking in 40C heat saw the mood well and truly sweated out of our rapidly dehydrating bodies. Walking in Vegas was a bad idea. In dire need of a beer we fell into the next casino and grabbed some seats in the bar at the back.

The bar had some 'entertainment' in the form of three dubiously dressed filipino singers and their associated band. It was weird, really weird, and the 60 year old lithe filipino audience who were salsa-ing with frightening proficiency didn't help. At this point I considered I had somehow and without remembering dropped some acid. Was I experiencing a 'fear and loathing in vegas' style trip? Looking around I decided this probably wasn't the case - my imagination wasn't *this* warped. A couple of beers later we dragged our still heat exhausted and confused hides back into the night and off to our Hotel, resolving never to walk again and to do Vegas properly tomorrow night!