Viva Las Vegas!

Craig:

So spending copious amounts of time in a car is boring. It gets old very quickly. I know that it is our own fault for undertaking such a long trip but whatever. One of the ways to not make it seem as though you are in the car all the time is to drive in short spurts and split long drives into two shorter drives. We did not want to drive from Arches NP in Utah all the way to Yosemite NP in one day so we decided to break the drive up into two. Now if you are familiar with U.S. geography you might know that there is one particular city that happens to lie very close to half way in between these two national parks. There were many other campsite options but Las Vegas just made sense. It was directly on the route we wanted to take.

So how bad can a camping trip in Vegas be you might ask? Well, ours turned out to be fairly miserable. The campsite advertised that they were close to "the strip." "Close," we found out was a block away. When we had to drive on Las Vegas Boulevard to get to the campground we knew we were in for a treat. Our tent site consisted of a patch of green grass that served as a median in a parking lot full of RVs. We set up the tent while listening to screams coming from the top of the Stratosphere and squinting our eyes from the bright lights of Circus Circus. Put all of the sounds and lights together with a 10:00 pm temperature of 99 degrees and you have a excellent night of sleeping in a tent ahead of you.

We managed to get a little bit of sleep and woke in the morning to the same 99 degree temperature and the blaring morning sun. We packed up the camp very quickly and were on our way out of Vegas in a very timely manner. We checked out of the campground with the reputation that we were "oh... the tenters."

Las Vegas was an interesting experience and you might say that we learned our lesson about route planning but we didn't. The route next included driving across Death Valley. I was thinking...how bad can a place named Death Valley really be? Silly me.

Next stop: Yosemite NP via Death Valley NP.