Leaving Las Vegas, Arriving Grand Canyon

And so you ask ‘Just what the heck have you guys been doing?’, and fair enough too as it’s been over 3 weeks since we posted an update, slack huh? Last episode we left you hanging after running down the first half of our Christmas holiday to Nevada. So where did we leave you... oh yeah Christmas Eve in Vegas. Jo and I were still timezone-challenged which had us waking up at 4am every morning (Vegas is 3 hours behind Toronto) and feeling stuffed by 9pm each night. The weather continued to be pretty awesome for this time of year, typically it’s around 12 degrees but we had 18-19 each day and sunny skies. This makes good walking weather so we head off down the strip in the other direction to see the Luxor and Mandalay Bay. At Mandaly Bay we went through the Shark Reef aquarium which was pretty good. Each of us had a handheld digital guide, sort of like a mobile phone. As you visited each tank/exhibit you punched in the matching number and an MP3 would play giving you a run down on the creatures inside. The Piranha’s were cool, I’ve not seen them in the flesh before and hadn’t realised they were so big, about 25cms long. The main shark tank was groovy, resembling a sunken galleon with the holes in the timbers plugged by 2 inch think plexi-glass to keep the beasties (and the wet stuff) separated from the tasty food, us. As if just to prove that we were in Vegas and nothing has to make sense the kids had their photos taken with Santa in a replica sunken galleon surrounded by sharks... see the picture below.

We just didn’t stop walking the whole time we were there, even when we thought that we weren’t going to walk, we did. To get from the MGM Grand to Circus Circus you have to travel a few k’s so I figured that we’d take the monorail which goes from MGM Grand all the way into the older part of Vegas down past the Stratosphere (that CN-style tower you see on CSI). I thought that I had worked out the right station to get off at to minimise our walk but screwed up and we all ended up walking several k’s along the strip to much groaning and ‘are we there yets’ from the kids. The monorail doesn’t really hug the strip so unless you want to go to MGM, Ballys or Harrahs you’ve always got a walk on your hands. Anyway I worked on my upper body by carrying Cam most of the way, passing such legendary casinos as the Stardust and the Sands, and finally we arrived at Circus Circus. Now as you might guess the theme here is ‘big-top’ with a functional high trapeze suspended above the many poker machines and demonstrations of strength,. courage and tight lycra every 30 minutes. The kids enjoyed playing the arcade games, by which I mean carny-style stuff where you get plush-toy prizes for hitting down the 3 pins with a bean bag etc. But the main attraction, and my saving grace for having dragged the family so far on foot, was the AdventureDome which is a fully glass enclosed amusement park complete with a twin-loop, twin-corkscrew rollercoaster called the Canyon Blaster, and other various cool rides.

Jazz didn’t like the look of the Canyon Blaster so she and Jo took a few rides on the Rim Runner, a water splash ride. Abbie on the other hand was just young enough to keenly demand that she join me on the rollercoaster without really knowning what she was in for. Man, it was a cool coaster, scared me silly... poor Ab’s went white as a sheet, I swear she had an out-of-body experience and it took a few minutes after the ride for her to get it back together. She didn’t cry, I think she was too freaked out, and after a minute or two she had forgotten the whole thing and was dragging me to ride with her on the Rim Runner.

Buffets are famous in Vegas and every hotel has an ‘all-you-can-eat’ extravaganza. We only made it to a couple for breakfast sadly but the breakfast at Chin Chin’s in New York, New York was pretty cool with a mixture of standard American fare and Chinese food. Egg Foo Yung and BBQ pork spare-ribs for brekkie anyone? Awesome! The number of tourists we’d seen so far was pretty low, reflecting the fact that this was the off-season. But on Christmas morning as we headed down for breakfast I was really surprised to see that the crowds had maybe tripled in numbers. It’s a real trip to head to breakie at 8:30 Xmas morn and see people drinking double scotch on ice while they hammer some one-armed-bandit. The increase in people made our lives difficult on Xmas Day as we tried to make it up to Treasure Island for the pirate show around 17:30. In the end the crowds were far to big and we risked the kids being crushed so we backed off and saw a brief glimpse of the show from the top deck of a double decker bus as we headed back to the MGM. As if trying to make up for the kids disappointment, as our bus was snarled in traffic passing the Mirage we were treated to another show from the big fake volcano out front. With an early start locked in for our Grand Canyon adventure the next day we slipped the kids into bed and I took in an NFL game on the tube.

I can’t say that NFL is as good as AFL, frankly it’s a bit slow and the moments of true excitement few and far between, but I will admit that I’m getting into it and watch most games every week. It’s likely that I’ll try to follow it when we get back to Melbourne... maybe I’ll finally have to get Foxtel. I haven’t settled on a team, but I like the Pittsburgh Stealers whenever I see em. One gridiron highlight wasn’t the NFL but rather the college league Rose Bowl where the Texus State quarterback, a serious super hero called Vince Young, basically won the game on his own in the dying seconds to steal the result from Uni of Sth California 41-38, very exciting game. Young had 200+ yards passing, 200+ yards rushing and 3 personal touchdowns, it’s the stuff of legend. Most quarterbacks shy away from running and getting hit, but not Young, he gives out as much punishment as he gets, aussie rules fans would like him.Boxing Day morning we grabbed some Macca’s for breakfast and walked down to the west tour lobby of the hotel to await our guide to the Grand Canyon. He arrived on time and turned out to be a nice bloke called Jason who was, what else, a hopeful Hollywood screen writer. Vegas is a good place to work if you’re trying to make it in Hollywood apparently, the range of jobs is much greater than in LA and of course you’re only 4 hours drive away. Jason guides people 4-5 days a week and writes the rest of the time, maybe we’ll see one of his works on the screen in the coming years. He and I had some fun discussing favourite movies, plot flaws and bad acting performances as he took us on the 3 hour drive out to the West Rim of the Grand Canyon. Of course also on the way we were educated on the native flora and fauna of the region and made a brief stop at the Hoover Dam. Sadly we couldn’t stay long and from our vantage point we really couldn’t appreciate the dam or see it’s massive wall. We crossed over the dam, left Nevada and entered Arizona - The Grand Canyon State. The drive through the Joshua Tree Forest was pretty cool. These unusual trees only exist in this one part of the world and take their name from Mormons who travelled through there over 100 years ago and apparently envisioned that they looked like Joshua from the bible with his arms outstretched. Jo and I of course assumed that they’d been named by Bono and The Edge, so it was nice to get the real history :-).

Once at the Canyon rim we entered a small airport where a number of small-to-medium prop planes and choppers operated out of. It was a windy day and they mob we were booked to fly with had one chopper down so we had a long wait of 90 minutes before we could get off the ground. We decided to take our lunch a few klics away and eat at a lookout. The view was simply amazing, I’m sure as you’d expect photos simply don’t do it any justice, and it goes for 270+ miles, you have no chance of seeing it all unless you have a month to spare. On seeing the Canyon I wished that we hadn’t gone to Vegas and instead had booked a rafting trip down the Colorado, maybe next time. The chopper as finally ready for us and as we sped off over the rim of the Canyon the ground dropped away 3000 feet in a split second. The buffeting wind meant that Abbie, Canyon Blaster roller-coaster still fresh in her mind, clung to me for dear life. When the wind knocked the bottom out of the helicopter it felt like we just dropped 5 stories in a runaway lift. Safe to say that the views were awesome! Cam couldn’t stop grinning, he loves his choppers in Battlefield 2 (a ar game I play on my PC) so the chance to ride in one had him beaming. We landed on a partially leveled piece of stone about 50m from the river and leaving the chopper to another set of returning tourists we made our way down to the water where a pontoon boat awaited us. With a friendly welcome from our captain, if a 20 foot boat can be said to have a captain, we sped off upstream and back into some sun shine admiring the amazing cliffs, bluffs and stone pillars all around us. The trip didn’t last very long and soon we were back at the jetty and waiting for our chopper ride back to the top. In all the experience was good but left me feeling that we’d cheated ourselves by thinking that we could enjoy the Canyon in a day. In truth the car ride took up about 9-10 hours and we really only got to see the Canyon for about 90 minutes. On the way home Jason got word over his radio that there was a traffic jam at the Hoover Dam, something that happens a lot as it’s the only road across the Colorado for 50 miles in either direction and the main route from Arizona to Nevada. So we took the long way back to Vegas which meant an additional hour and a half added to our drive. The kids dozed with an interruption for Macca’s (2nd time that day... whatever) and we all arrived back at the hotel completely shagged out.

The next morning we were ready to leave, 5 nights in Vegas with 3 kids is hard work, and we were rapt to find that all our flights were once again on time if not a little early. Back in Buffalo the snow had melted meaning that we hadn’t missed a white christmas after all and that I didn’t have to dig out the car before the 90 minute trip back to Oakville. Vegas was great, but the look on the kids faces topped it when we arrived home just after 9pm on the 27th to find that Santa had made his delivery while we were gone. That Santa guy sure is clever.