Years ago a national newspaper trade group that I belonged to held its annual convention in Las Vegas, and I used to enjoy an occasional trip to Sin City. The casino buffets were affordable, and even if you weren’t a gambler, people watching could provide hours of free fun.  But both myself and the city have changed over time, I’m not sure if either one for the better.

We took a ride down the Strip the other night, admiring the bright lights and unique architecture of the casinos, and marveling at the crowds. The folks who design the casinos truly are artists, and on a drive down the Strip you can see everything from castles to pyramids, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and pirate ships.

This is a fantasyland for grownups, and whether you like angels, demons, winged goddesses, Elvis impersonators, drag queens, magicians, country superstars, or anything in between, an hour on  the Strip will provide just what you’re looking for. Yesterday, we drove part of the busy road again, to see it in the daylight, and I was glad Greg White was driving, so that I could eyeball everything around us.

The country may be in a recession, but you wouldn’t know that from Las Vegas! The streets, sidewalks, restaurants, and casinos are all packed solid. The lines in front of popular places like Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville were so long that we didn’t even think of stopping for a Cheeseburger in Paradise. 

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to see a line of people waiting to get into a Las Vegas pawn shop, but the folks waiting to get into this one probably aren’t there to hock their wedding rings for enough gas money to get back home. This isn’t your everyday pawn shop, this is the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, made famous by the History Channel’s reality program Pawn Stars. A couple of weeks ago our friends Stu and Donna McNicol were in Las Vegas and stood in line about ten minutes to get into the shop, where they were lucky enough to meet Rick Harrison, one of the shop’s owners, and Stu even got his picture taken with Rick! We wanted to check the shop out too, but decided to come back mid-week, when hopefully, the line would be shorter. 

Playing tourist can work up an appetite, and Las Vegas has more places to stuff your face than fleas on a hound dog! Every casino has a buffet, but unlike the old days when I came here every year, the $1.49 breakfast buffet and $5.99 dinner buffet are ancient history. These days you can expect to pay a minimum of $15 for a buffet dinner, and over $30 per person at many of them! The Village Seafood Buffet at the Rio Casino is very highly rated, but at $38 a person, we’ll never know.

We did find a good deal at the Boulder Station Casino, a few miles from downtown, and not far from the Thousand Trails campground. After registering for our free players club cards, we paid $15 each, including tax, for an excellent selection that ranged from Chinese food to prime rib, barbecued ribs, and a half dozen other entries, along with plenty of sides and a great dessert bar. Everything was delicious, and we promised ourselves we’d go back again while we’re in town.

With our players club cards, we each also got $3 in free slot machine play, and while Greg and I promptly lost ours and went bust on penny slot machines, Jan ran hers up to about $40 and Miss Terry topped out at $54. But alas, they didn’t pay for those elaborate casinos by giving money away, and by the time the ladies’ streaks had run out, Jan walked away with a penny and Terry cashed out with ten cents! But what the heck, we got a great meal at a good price, and we got to play for an hour or so on the casino’s money. The smart thing is to walk away once you spend their money, and not dip deeply into your own pocketbook to keep playing. But judging by the number of fancy casinos here, I don’t think too many people can resist the urge to tempt Lady Luck just a little bit longer. 

Thought For The Day - Tourists don’t know where they’ve been. Travelers don’t know where they’re going. – Paul Theroux  

Yesterday Terry and I, along with Greg and Jan White, drove about 30 miles down to Boulder City, Nevada to stop at Bee’s Mail Service, which has handled our business mail forwarding ever since we hit the road. A new owner, Jean Wilson, bought the company a while back, and we wanted to stop and introduce ourselves, and put a face with the name. Jean is a very friendly lady with a strong business background, and we look forward to a long working relationship with her.

Boulder City was the base camp for the workers who built Hoover Dam back in the 1930s. At the time, it was the world’s largest concrete structure, and a statue at the dam honors the men who undertook this gargantuan task.

Another major construction project has been going on at the dam for a few years now, construction of a bridge that will bypass the current narrow, winding U.S. Highway 93 that crosses the dam, and is no longer adequate to handle the 14,000 vehicles that travel it daily.

Looking up from the ground, I can already tell you that this is one bridge I won’t be driving over, I don’t care how strong the supporting structure is. I’ll take the longer detour south through Searchlight and Laughlin and then over to Kingman, Arizona.

The project’s website says that the bridge will be finished by September of this year, and the bypass will be carrying traffic by November. I don’t know, it looks like there is still a lot of work to be done before that happens.

We wanted to see the progress on the bridge, so Greg drove us down to the dam, inching along in a long line of traffic moving at a snail’s pace. That was okay with us, we all four get along well, and we enjoyed the views of Lake Mead as we drove into the canyon.

I said that this area has a lot of bighorn sheep, and no sooner had I spoken than eagle-eyed Miss Terry spotted several of the animals lounging on a ridgeline a couple of hundred yards from the highway. We all scrambled for our cameras, but about then the traffic started moving and a horn honking behind us made us miss the shot.

Greg made a U-turn at the dam and we drove back up to the Lake Mead Visitor Center for a potty stop, and to take some photos of the lake’s deep blue water. Then we drove down to the shore, where we saw this sailboat heeled over to the side, barely moving, with little breeze to fill its sails.

Our next stop was the Camping World in Henderson, where we didn’t find anything that we couldn’t live without. By then it was late afternoon and we were all getting hungry. Jan was in the mood for Mexican food, so we stopped for an early dinner at Lindo Michoacan in Henderson, which was named Best Mexican Restaurant in a Las Vegas newspaper survey.

As I’ve said before, Miss Terry loves Mexican food, but after living in Arizona for years, she is a bit of a snob about it, and it takes a lot to impress her. I asked her how Lindo Michoacan rated on a scale of 1 to 10, and she gave it a 25! Our waiter was very attentive, the portions were huge, and the view of Las Vegas from the windows that make up one wall were magnificent.

As you can see in this photo taken with my Blackberry, Jan, Terry, and Greg look well fed. Even after eating as much as we all could, there was still enough left over to take home for lunch today. Jan and Terry assured Greg and I that this was a place we’d be going back to before we left the area!

Thought For The Day -You may have a screw loose, but that’s okay, you still have that screw, you haven’t lost it .

When I called 3Ts RV Service in Lake Havasu City, Arizona late Wednesday afternoon, a nice lady named Tina in their office had promised to have a replacement motor for our jacks and slide rooms to us here in Las Vegas yesterday, and sure enough, it was here by 11:30 a.m. Now, that’s great service!

I had heard good things about 3Ts before, and the RV Service Reviews website has some good customer reviews on their service. I wish that a lot of other RV shops and dealers were as honest and efficient, but it has been our experience that 3Ts is more the exception than the rule. That’s why we developed our RV Good Guys guide to reliable service and repairs on the road. When you’re broken down in a strange town, it’s nice to have somebody you can rely on.

The original electric motor had a label on it that said Made in Slovenia. When I opened the box with the replacement motor, I noticed that the new one has a label that says Made in China. Will outsourcing never stop?

I called Greg White to tell him that the motor had arrived, and a short time later he arrived and spent the next three hours under our motorhome getting the new motor installed, and checking to be sure that the rest of the wiring was in good shape. When Greg finally crawled out from under our coach, we went inside, fired up the engine, and our jacks and slides worked perfectly again! What would I do without my many friends who are always there for me? Well, I’d spend a lot of money, to be honest. Thanks for all of your help, Greg. I owe you (again).

Our Thousand Trails membership gives us 50 nights of camping a year in standard campsites at no charge, and any nights over 50 cost $5 a night. Most of the RV sites here at the Las Vegas Thousand Trails are pretty tight and don’t leave much room for parking cars or doing much outside. Our extended length van made things even tighter.

Having a neighbor sitting outside smoking, with the cigarette smoke coming in our open windows, wasn’t our idea of fun. We’ve had this happen several times before, and the offenders always say they smoke outside so that their RVs do not smell like cigarettes. No, instead, ours does! I used to enjoy an occasional cigar or pipe myself in the past, and I have nothing against smokers, as long as their habit doesn’t impact my life. When it does, that’s a different story.

Right across from our cramped RV site was a large corner site sitting empty, so I went up to the guard shack and asked about it. The ranger on duty said that it was a 50 amp electric site instead of the standard 30 amp sites, and there was an up-charge of $3 a day for it. The site is easily half again as large as the standard 30 amp site we were in, and I jumped on it. Here is a picture of our first site, now occupied by the Medallion fifth wheel in the center.

And here is our new site, which is much larger. We have more power, more space, more privacy, and all for $3 a day! It’s probably the best deal in Las Vegas!

My friend Judy Bayless, who presented two excellent seminars on genealogy at our Yuma rally, contacted me to tell me that Rootstelevision.com was one of the resources she planned to discuss in the seminar. But just days before the rally, she learned that the website was shutting down, so she removed it from the seminar.

Apparently the genealogy community raised such a hue and cry that the website is going to remain open, with commercial advertising now, to make it financially viable.  Judy said that Megan Smolenyak, who runs the site, is the author of the companion book to the Friday night NBC series, Who Do You Think You Are?  Roots Television is a free site with a ton of good genealogy material, including more than 700 videos of lectures, discussions, interviews, etc. I just checked it out and was very impressed! Give it a look, you may learn something about your own family tree!

Bad Nick stays as far away from manual labor as possible, so while Greg was working on the motorhome, he was busy writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled And You Wonder Why We Have Problems? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day - You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything. Especially all at once.

We were up way too early again yesterday morning, a habit that I am going to start working very hard to break. But we had reservations at the Thousand Trails in Las Vegas, and the person I spoke to on the telephone there advised us to try to arrive mid to late morning for the best selection of RV sites, because the campground is pretty full.

We pulled out of the hilltop RV dry camping area provided by the River Palms Casino in Laughlin at 8:30 a.m. and began the seventeen mile long uphill climb from the Colorado River to U.S. Highway 95.

I was curious to see what our Winnebago would do on a hill like that from a standing start,  so I just left it in high (sixth) gear and let the Allison automatic transmission do its thing, instead of manually downshifting. We averaged between 38 and 40 miles per hour on the steepest sections of the road. I can live with that.

Greg and Jan White followed along behind us in their 1999 American Eagle motorhome, and since their coach has the same Spartan chassis and 350 horsepower Cummins diesel engine that ours does, and we both run with the Silverleaf VMSpc engine monitoring system on, I was on the radio comparing notes with Greg. On the steepest inclines, the computer showed I was getting about 2.7 miles per gallon, while Greg reported back that his was showing about 3.5. Once we got onto U.S. 95, we had a long, gradual climb toward Searchlight. On that, I was averaging about 6.7  miles per gallon,and Greg reported just over 7.  Since our odometer just turned over 40,000 miles, and Greg’s rig has about 91,000 miles on it, I don’t know if his is more broken in or what. Of course, the  3/4 ton Ford extended length cargo van we tow probably weighs a little more than Greg’s Dodge Dakota pickup, so that may be a factor too.

We arrived in Las Vegas about 10:30, and Greg and Jan dropped off to stay at another nearby RV park. Our GPS steered us wrong, telling me to take Exit 70, instead of 69, where Greg got off. This resulted in us coming back toward the Thousand Trails from the wrong direction on busy, divided Boulder Highway. But I got lucky and managed to make a U-turn at a traffic light with no problems, and got back to the campground.

About 1/4 mile or so from our destination, our PressurePro tire monitor suddenly started beeping, telling us that we were down to only six pounds of pressure in the left rear tire of our van, and then the display dropped to zero. I thought that we must have had a blowout, but once I could stop and check the tire, it was fine, and my tire gauge said it was right where it should be. I have no idea what set it off and gave us the wrong reading, but I seem to recall that Mike McFall from PressurePro once told me that they will sometimes pick up stray radio signals and send a false report, so I assume that’s what happened.

The sites here at the Thousand Trails are pretty tight, but we got our 40 foot motorhome backed in, and confirmed that our HWH leveling jacks and slide-out rooms still would not work. I called my friend Phil Botnick, one of the best RV techs around, and even though I am known for my lack of mechanical skills, he patiently talked me through troubleshooting the system.  Phil’s diagnosis, based upon his experience with the coach last week in Yuma, and what I was telling him as I tried the things he suggested, was that the motor was shot. He suggested that I call HWH in Moscow, Iowa and get their input.

Phone calls to both the Winnebago factory and HWH confirmed what we already suspected. One motor runs both the jacks and slide-outs, and it was kaput. The nice lady at HWH gave me the part number for the motor, and suggested a couple of local shops to call. I did, and nobody in Las Vegas had the motor in stock. I was going to order it directly from HWH, when I remembered that our friend Mike Loscher had suggested 3Ts RV Service in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. They have worked on Mike’s jacks, and he was very pleased with them. Shoot, we were just in Lake Havasu City on Tuesday!

I called and they had two of the motors in stock, so I gave the lady there my credit card number, and she promised to have one to me by UPS today. I hope so, because with both slides in, it is pretty cramped living in our motorhome. And because we can’t use our jacks either, we’re sitting at an angle that makes life interesting at times.        

Thought For The Day - Don’t dream your life, live your dream.

Yesterday morning we left the Yuma County Fairgrounds, our home for the last several weeks, and drove 85 miles north on U.S. Highway 95 to Quartzsite, with Greg and Jan White following us in their American Eagle. They had never been to this part of Arizona, so I played tour guide on the handheld radio, pointing out the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, Yuma Proving Grounds, and Castle Dome as we motored north.

In Quartzsite we left the main highway long enough to make a half loop around town to give them a feel for the place, though there were only a handful of RVs scattered about here and there, as opposed to the thousands that cover the desert in January and February.

From Quartzsite, we continued north on State Route 95 through Parker, then along the Colorado River through what is known as the Parker Strip, a land of dramatic mountains, cool water, and scenic beauty. I always love this drive, it’s a good two lane road, with plenty of pullouts if you need them. However, unlike past trips in our old MCI bus conversion, we didn’t need them. The Cummins diesel engine powered us right up the hills without blinking an eye!

Arriving  in Lake Havasu City, we parked both rigs at the Elks lodge, and I went inside to obtain permission to leave them there for a couple of hours, while Greg unhooked his Dodge pickup. Seeing the London Bridge was on Jan’s bucket list, so we drove across it, and then back again, then we parked and got out to see the historic bridge and checked out the shops in the small English themed village in the bridge’s shadow.

It must be Spring Break, because later on Greg told me that there were some pretty young ladies in skimpy bikinis and other revealing clothing. I didn’t notice them at all, because I was busy taking pictures of Miss Terry, and I only have eyes for her.

We grabbed a quick snack at Dairy Queen, then got back on the road and drove another 23 miles north, to hook up with Interstate 40. We took the interstate a few miles west to Exit 1, then got onto a narrow two lane road that had more nasty twists and turns than a politician’s biography. I’m sure Greg and Jan, following along faithfully behind, wondered just what kind of an adventure this crazy man was taking them on, and Miss terry uttered a reservation or two herself. But, eventually the road smoothed out, we rejoined State Route 95 through the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, and came in to Bullhead City, where we crossed the Colorado River into Laughlin, Nevada.

Harrah’s Casino in Laughlin has an RV parking area where you can dry camp for $5/night, or $25/week, but every other casino seemed to have signs advertising free dry camping, so what’s up with that? We saw lots of RVs dry camping in designated parking lots at casinos all through town.

We stopped for the night at the River Palms Casino, which has a free dry camping area high on a hill, with great views of the casino lights below. Security told us we could get a free permit to stay up to 14 days. Then we would need to renew the permit, but we could do so for as long as we wanted to.   

We registered, parked our motorhomes, then headed back to the casino for dinner. If you join their free Players Club, you get a free T-shirt, and on Monday and Tuesday nights, two prime rib buffets were $9.95 with the Players Club card.

The line to register for the Players Club was long, and the line for the buffet was even longer. I must have been tired and cranky. Or else the bunch of French Canadians in line in front of us just ticked me off when they let some of their friends cut in ahead of us. People in line started to grumble, and Bad Nick emerged and told them that was bulls&%# and to go to the back of the line. Two did, but one lady stood firmly and said “These are my friends!” I told her that Greg was my friend, but if he tried that crap, I’d throw him out of line too!

One of the guys in their group turned around and told me in very good English it was okay, she was with him. I assured him that it wasn’t okay, and that the next time I came to his country, I’d be sure to be a rude jerk too, He gave me that smirk some folk use when they think they are being funny,  and played the old “I don’t understand English” thing with me. I told him that I knew that he understood me very well, and that he understood exactly what I thought of him and his crowd. I’m sure I embarrassed Miss Terry, Greg, and Jan, but once in a while somebody has to stand up on their hind legs and tell the jerks of the world where to get off. Besides the only place more dangerous to be than between a mama bear and her cubs is between a fat man and his food!

Today we plan to leave early and continue on to Las Vegas. Our leveling jacks are acting up again, and would not work when we arrived in Laughlin. Hopefully we can get that issue resolved in Las Vegas, and then just play tourist and relax for a while. 

Thought For The Day - Only dead fish go with the current.