We headed for the car and hit the road to Arizona, once we finally were able to escape the parking garage. For some reason, even though I had added self-parking to my room when I added early check-in, the exit kiosk did not like my room key. Thankfully a parking attendant was there to show me where the help button was. That button and I became good friends…
Once we were freed from the Bellagio parking garage, we really did hit the road to Arizona! It was a beautiful 2-ish hour drive to our destination, past desert landscapes, desert mountains, solar panel fields, windmills, some free range cows, and Lake Mead. And when we crossed into Arizona, I was one state closer to my 50 by 50 goal! One more state off the never been there list!
Our destination today was Grand Canyon West. Based on what I’ve seen on TripAdvisor, this seems to be a very divisive place. So…I’m well aware that Grand Canyon West is not the national park. My goal was to see the grand hole in the ground. Years ago (that makes me sound so old, but really…it was 2007), I was on a flight that flew over the Grand Canyon, and I’ve wanted to see it from a lot closer than 36,000 feet ever since. Grand Canyon West is what I consider a reasonable day trip from where we were. The national parks are not. And, geographically, it’s still the Grand Canyon. So here we were.
The experience here was…fine. You park in the middle of nowhere and then have to ride their shuttle buses, which don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason to their timing. The line to get on the initial bus was LONG, but the experience improved from there, especially once we actually got to see the Grand Canyon! Wow! We visited the two different view points and had lunch at the Skyview Restaurant with meal tickets I had pre-purchased when I bought our admission tickets. Our chicken tenders and french fries were surprisingly good, and the view of the Skywalk was cool. We did NOT do the Skywalk. We just enjoyed the views from the rim. And from here the pictures can do the talking. We both were glad we went, even with the obnoxiousness early on with the transportation. We were pretty speechless in response to seeing the Grand Canyon. It was incredible.
We were at the Grand Canyon for a couple of hours. Once we had taken all the pictures we wanted, we got on a bus back to the car and headed back toward Nevada.
Along the way we detoured to the Hoover Dam. Our first stop was another Lake Mead overlook. Wow is that lake low!
Next up was the security checkpoint for the Hoover Dam. We both just wanted to see the dam, rather than do any of the tours, so we stopped at the first point after the security checkpoint, which allows you to walk across the Pat Tillman Bridge, rather than going all the way to the visitor center. We didn’t walk the whole way across the bridge, but we walked far enough to get a decent view of the giant monstrosity, or as my dad calls it, an engineering masterpiece!
Once we caught our breath from climbing all the stairs up to the bridge (yeah, this bodes well for Zion!), we headed into Boulder City, to find the park. Just as Nick was making a comment that there were no bighorn sheep, we saw a whole pack (flock? herd?...I’m clearly not rural NH enough to know what a group of sheep is called) of bighorn sheep in a park…and by park I mean neighborhood park, next to a playground and tennis courts. It was amazing, and we spent a fair amount of time here, watching these really cool creatures.
Once we had had our fill of bighorn sheep, it was time to return to the city. I think it took about 40 minutes to get there, so our timing worked out well. We ditched the daytrip bag in the hotel room, decided where we were eating dinner, and headed back out.
Our dinner destination tonight was at The Paris hotel. Figured while we were in Vegas we should eat at one restaurant of a celebrity chef, and a quick service place was perfect for this evening, so we headed to Bobby’s Burgers…yes…like Bobby Flay. I had the Crunchburger, which was a cheeseburger with potato chips, and Nick had something involving bbq sauce. I also had a strawberry shake. Our burgers were delicious and the shake was awesome too.
After dinner we went back to the hotel to kill time for a bit before we headed to our final destination of the day. The Neon Museum was a relatively short drive (full of lots of swearing, because Las Vegas roads and drivers), once we were freed from the parking garage. This is getting obnoxious. Anyway, we had combo tickets for the Neon Museum to get the guided tour of their “Boneyard” and also to see their new show Brilliant. This started at 7:45.
The Neon Museum was better than I had expected. I don’t have a ton of background knowledge on Vegas, and the tour of the boneyard (of old neon signs from Las Vegas) gave a fair amount of history of the city, while also letting us see the restored (and some not restored) signs from the city. The tour guide was VERY into her gig, and definitely made the tour. Brilliant is a show where they basically project lights onto signs that haven’t been restored yet to make it look like the signs work. That part was fine. The music was better than the light show. But overall, the evening was an enjoyable experience, albeit a long one. There was a half hour break between our tour and our show, and both components were about 45 minutes. So it was a late night! Worth it once though.
Once we were done at the Neon Museum, we headed back to the hotel, where I took a couple pictures of Hell’s Kitchen at night, and then we crashed. It had been a busy and full day, and we had another full day ahead of us tomorrow!
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