Route 66

Sunday 15th April 2012

It was actually a bit difficult getting out of bed this morning. The room wasn't very warm and it was too nice and snuggly in bed. However, there was a hot breakfast awaiting us, and the Americans seem to serve hotel breakfast much earlier than I'm used to so we were still up at a reasonable hour.

Theres been a bit of confusion over American food names, and breakfast time was no exception. The waitress asked me how I'd like my egg. Sensing that "soft boiled" or "poached" would probably throw her into a panic, I asked what the egg options were. I think I ended up with something called "easy over medium" which was a fried egg, cooked on both sides with a runny yolk.
The previous night, at the diner, we'd noticed that some of the main meals were served with a "biscuit". E.g. Steak, mash and gravy with a biscuit. When Claire asked the waitress what a biscuit was, she replied "well, it's just a regular biscuit... er, wait, I'll show you one", and returned moments later with what looked like a plain scone. Claire decided to order a meal including a biscuit, and apparently it also tasted very much like a scone too.

We'd been consulting Google maps whilst thinking about getting out of bed, and found out that we'd been rather over optimistic about how much we could do in one day. It turned out that Vegas was a 3.5 hour drive, and that was by the boring direct route on the freeway, and without the big detour to Joshua Tree. So somewhat reluctantly, we decided we'd have to miss Joshua Tree in favour of getting to Vegas before nightfall.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky so we had the roof down all the way. The route was entirely through desert surrounded by bare rock mountains. We went some of the way on the old Route 66.

Since the freeway was built, a lot of Route 66 has disappeared or fallen into disrepair. There were a lot of derelict gas stations and diners along the roadside. A bit sad really, as we could have murdered a milkshake.

We arrived in Vegas at about 4pm. We'd been worried about driving/navigating into the city, but it all went uncharacteristically smoothly and we managed to find a space in the biggest multi storey car park ever under the hotel.
Our room is enormous. It's almost as big as our house, and has its own kitchen, and, at last, a kettle. It also has not one but two giant flat screen TVs. The best part though is the view from the window of The Strip, and all its wonders. Claire spent ages glued to the window when we arrived because there was a big fountain squirting water miles into the sky.

The sunburn/windburn from yesterday has returned with a vengeance. Probably caused by driving in blazing sunshine all day at 80+ mph. And did I mention the roof was down?
Even though we had sunscreen and hats on today, the end result is not pretty.

We've had a look round tonight, and done plenty of people/car/motorbike watching over dinner. Tomorrow we're going to go and look at some more stuff, before seeing the Cirque du Soleil in the evening.

But tomorrow's activities are of no concern to you. There will be no blog tomorrow, because, as the old saying goes, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

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