May 22, 2004 - Las Vegas, NV (where else would Las Vegas be?)

Been here almost 2 weeks, and a week to go.  Upgraded the Thousand Trail membership and now we get 21 days and can go from park to park without any time out of the system.  This is the first time we've ever stayed anyplace for more than two weeks and not been doing some work of some sort.  In retrospect, maybe we should have been sitting for longer periods of time to truly enjoy what each area has to offer.  Oh well, circumstances play a major role too.

AHA!  First off, my last shot at Lake Minden, near Sacramento.  Barb and I like to take morning walks as often as we can, weather and other conditions notwithstanding.  The lake is about a mile around, and each day we weren't off and running for one reason or another, we'd spot this beautiful Great Blue Heron (a GBH) standing on some concrete near the road at the edge of the lake, looking for his breakfast.  He'd keep an eye on us, but wouldn't fly away, and we'd be within a dozen feet of him.  So, the next day I'd carry my camera and he'd be nowhere to be found.  So, the next time I'd leave the camera home and there he'd be.  And it went on like that for the whole time we were there.  The last day, I took the camera again, determined to shoot that guy.  And there he was out in the middle of the lake on the swimming platform.  I zoomed in on him just so I could shoot him, but other than the story it's really not much of a shot.

The day after we got to Las Vegas we had some very special visitors.  That's Ana next to Barb, and her daughter Miriam.  Greg (lower photo, tall one) found our website when he was doing a search for laser cutting inside of crystal.  Since I had some shots of friends Jim and Jackie with their business, Crystalux, he found us.  And in reading some of the site, he noticed the missing pictures from the fall/winter of 2002 where I'd had a computer crash and blown a bunch of the pictures away.  Well, turns out Greg had been in the internet business, and knew of a site that was going to try to archive the web.  That's right, they were planning on providing a total archive of the entire world wide web (www).  As you can guess, it was a project that got out of hand quickly because of exceptionally rapid growth.  But in the process, they'd archived some of our site, and there were some of the missing pictures!  So he wrote me and told me where to find them.  I immediately wrote back, thanking him and asking who he was, where he was, and all those other personal questions.  I got no response for several months, and then out of the blue got a message from him where he told me he was Swiss, was touring the US with Miriam and her parents.  I asked where he was, and he said they were in Vegas and going to be there for a few days before moving on.  So happened we were just pulling into Vegas.  How's that for timing, eh?  Because of Greg, I was able to replace all the pictures on about 6 or 7 pages that had been lost.  THANK YOU GREG!!!

On the left is Antonio with Greg, and then Greg and Miriam.  Antonio and Ana are Spanish, and there was lots of interpreting going on during our conversations.  Antonio and Ana are multi-lingual, as you can imagine.  5 languages for Antonio and almost as many for Ana.  The "kids" spoke flawless English along with Spanish, Swiss-German, and French.  Antonio works for a major food broker, Greg works for a company that makes charts for the airlines.  Amazing talents between the four of them.

This visit was special for so many reasons.  First off, it was one of our first contacts with some non-RV'ing people through the website, and then to have them be Europeans was even more fun.  Greg had even brought us some wonderful Swiss chocolate, how's that for gracious.  We really enjoyed them, and would have liked to have spent more time with them.  They were off to celebrate Ana's 50th birthday!, and the next day were driving to Arizona.  They've visited the US several other times and seen RV's, but had never been in one before, so we got to play show and tell.  How special.

Now, Frank & Susie were also at the TTN park in Las Vegas, and we did some serious running around with them.  They know the area like the back of their hands, and Frank's sons live there.  The older son Tommy is the lead guitarist  in the "Purple Reign" band on the strip.  That's him in the black on the left.  Notice the times the band plays?  Well, it was our second night in Vegas, and off we went (after a very short nap) to hear him and the band.  It was great fun, despite the smell of the cigarettes (nothing worse than an ex-smoker when it comes to not liking the smell of smoke) and the rather small lounge they played in.  We got to meet several of the band members as well as Tommy, of course.  The band has been in that lounge for over 3 years now, and it was easy to see why.  The crowd loved them, and they really did quite well.  The Prince impersonator was excellent, had the hand movements and playing style down cold, and Tommy is a great guitarist.  We have no trouble suggesting you go see them if you're ever in Vegas looking for some quality free entertainment, though late at night.

Now, see?  We didn't spend all our time down on The Strip at all.  Just lots of it.  Those little fuzzy headed chicks in the nest (see them?) were in the Cactus Garden behind/around the chocolate factory, and we just had to tour it.  Talk about quality free things to do, Frank and Susie have it down to a science!  Visitors to the Ethel M Chocolate Factory are usually treated to two free samples; I guess because there was no one there but us, we all got four samples--yummmm! The garden was full of seed pods of all kinds, and for some reason I thought it was worth taking pictures of them.

Gee, a picture of a flower.  Barb must be with us.  Dang near stepped on this mourning dove, it blended in so well.  They were all over the place, and maybe the parents of the chicks we'd seen earlier.  We never could catch any adults near the nest so it's just speculation on our part.

Guess what--Purple Pancake Cactus and a Palo Verde tree give some color to an otherwise rather monochrome setting.

Seed pods, remember?  Some tiny little fuzzy ones, and some that look well protected.

A local resident that kept my attention for quite a while.  That black thing back by its rear foot is a bug.  The lizard would grab it, shake its head and send it flying, then run over and grab it again and repeat the process.  The bug must have tasted terrible or it was biting back or something.  Never did get the whole story.  And another seed pod.

Frank took a liking to our camera, and Barb was telling (showing?) him how to use the zoom when he snapped the shot.  And a dwarf Joshua Tree.  We'd been through the Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern CA with Frank and Susie (remember the squirting mustard trick--that's where it happened), but we'd never seen any dwarf trees there; of course, I don't think they were labeled either.

The King Ferdinand Agave made us think of Barb's dad.  He wasn't a king (well, maybe in Barb's eyes), but he was a Ferdinand.  There were these nice benches all through the garden, and we'd never seen so many barrel cactus in one place before.

We were goofing off taking each other's pictures on this bench, and then an Asian family came up that didn't speak much English, and I told them Frank was famous and asked if they wanted his autograph (just joking).  The father then motioned for him to sit on the bench, but Frank wasn't about to be made famous that quickly, and declined.  Using hand signals, we got the family to sit on the bench and we took their picture for them with their camera, and then again using mostly the waving of arms and pointing, Frank agreed to be famous for a moment with the girls.  Lots of fun, this lifestyle.  Always something exciting and fun happening.

Hey, looky, another pretty flower in the desert.  And then the reason it's called a Screwbean Mesquite--gotta look closely, but the seed pod looks like a big wood screw.

HA!  And you thought I was kidding about the name.  Barb spotted another local all stretched out like it was taking a nap, but before I could get there with the camera, it had gone back to foraging.  Several of these little cottontails were in the garden hiding from foxes, coyotes, hawks, dogs, large cats, and automobiles.

Just before I took this picture, Frank stopped me and suggested I come over to where he was and get it backlit.  I'm sure glad he did, because this is good.  And more seed pods.

The dove must have been Authorized Personnel.  Finding color is always fun in settings like this.

Well, what can I say.  I took a fancy to the seed pods in this garden.  That's Susie's hand giving me a hand with that shot.

Bet you can't guess what Barb is looking at there, can you.  That Saguaro has to be over 100 years old.  They don't begin to grow arms until they're about 70 years old, and this one had another arm in the back that we can't see from this angle, and who knows how much taller it was than its skeleton indicates when it was alive.  We saw a skeleton similar to this for sale in a art gallery in Sedona that had been treated or varnished for something like $15,000!  As we recall, it's illegal to harvest Saguaros, either dead or alive.

Beauty among the thorns.........and NO, I most definitely did not pull his tail off!  But something sure did.  Didn't seem to slow him down any at all.