Stephen Kiel's Blog: Vacation day one - Mission Viejo to las Vegas

We converged at the trunk of the car early Sunday morning and started to cram all of our possessions for the week into the trunk of the car. Initially it didn’t work, and after a few rounds of how bad do we need this we hit a happy equilibrium, got all of the essentials including peanut butter pretzels and a portable espresso maker, slammed the trunk shut, and off we went toward Las Vegas.

We visited for a while and then listened to an audio book for a while, kind of an in flight movie. Today’s selection was an old favorite, “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson. It seemed like a good choice for an opening to a vacation in the outdoors in the national parks. We made it about half way through the book before we got to Vegas. The second half should get us to Zion.

We arrived at the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas and checked in. The rooms are large and a pretty good deal at $69.99 a night. The internet connection costs $12.00 a night, so this isn’t going out until I hit a place where the internet is no extra charge. Maybe I will find that free connection in Zion, or a McDonalds, or a Starbucks along the way.

We walked up and down Fremont Street and toured the area. On the way down through the casino we noticed that our casino ad a water slide that went through a shark tank. This made Kamar’s and my ‘must do list’. We came back from touring put on our suits and did the slide. Kamar went twice, I went for a three times before we decided we needed to shower and get ready to have dinner with cousin Tom.

After Tom arrived we had dinner and then went outside to see the Fremont Street light show, which was pretty spectacular. Tom headed home and Linda and Kamar went back in to the casino, played video poker for about an hour and finished up seventy five cents. We went back out to see a second light show and then started to fade. Tomorrow is another day! Destination Zion.