Day 20: Williams AZ to Las Vegas NV

Friday July 1

We travel from Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada.  We sleep in a little bit (knowing it is only about a 4 hour ride) and leave Williams around 10:30 am.  It was so nice to have a home for 5 straight nights but we want to see some more sights.  We head through California and the Sonoran Desert which added about an hour of driving time but let us claim we visited the state.  Once we hit the California border, we are met by a vehicle inspection area- the first and only of our travels.  It was a mandatory stop where the security woman asked us a bunch of questions- where we were from, how long we'd been on the road, how old the camper was, etc.  Our best guess was they were looking for immigrants but we're not positive of that.  We stopped at the Desert Information Center around 3pm and the temperature climbed to 115.  Unfortunately they had closed early on this Friday before the 4^th of July weekend.  We drove into the Vegas campground around 5:15 and it is 104 degrees out.  The campground is a paved parking lot but you can probably see 6-8 hotel/casinos from the camper.  It is so hot we decide to cook outdoors and Scott cooks taco meat on the grill burner while I prepare veggies inside.  We don’t even heat the shells so that we don’t pour anymore unwanted hot air into the camper.  The AC is working hard but just can’t keep it cool enough for us.  We decide to have an early bedtime and head to Hoover Dam early in the morning (before the heat really comes) and then tour the city by bus tomorrow evening.  Lexi makes a list of the hotels she wants to visit and free shows that sound interesting.

Our view from the camper- Vegas!

It was amazing to drive into Vegas at rush hour traffic on a Friday before a holiday weekend and not get lost or caught up in traffic.  I had called the campground and they gave me the back way into the campground (to avoid Las Vegas Boulevard) and the GPS finally recognized we wanted to come this way.  I was busy trying to look around at the famous sites while navigating Scott through the traffic and construction.  I did get to see some of the famous sites:  Trump, Mirage, MGM, Mandalay Bay, etc.  I am excited to go look around tomorrow and it is hard to sit here tonight amid the lights and not be out exploring. 

On the way into the city, Scott kept thinking he saw smoke in the distance and even thought he smelled it.  I thought it was just haze.  We both believe it was the smog coming into the city.  I have never seen smog before but believe that is what we saw.  I can believe it would be smoggy too based on the traffic in the city.  The city highways were very easy to use and not nearly congested as I thought they would be.  But as Scott pointed out, they had time to plan out the city here, whereas in Boston, the city was built up first and then had to add transportation afterwards.  Scott also thinks Vegas drivers are even worse than Mass drivers (hard to believe).