Grand Canyon Family Trip 2016, Part Seven in Travels with ConnieK

I’m finally caught up enough to continue posting! But first, a real life friend of mine has joined the prosebox community so go tell Sherri hello:

I’ve been crazy busy: SEO pages and writing magazine articles for future editions, as well as the on-going quest to lighten my load by downsizing “stuff”. So much is sentimental, so finding the right homes has been a factor, as well.

Continuing the posts on the Grand Canyon trip…
From Utah, we dipped back into Arizona on our way to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Vegas. The place where God set the temperature on ‘hell” and left it there. Las Vegas sits in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, so drifting smoke from the California fires hung like a blanket of smog over the city. It was crowded. It was noisy. It was expensive. We stayed at Bally’s across from the Bellagio and its water fountain display. I loved the Chihuly glass sculpture there!

Our rooms at Bally’s weren’t bad (the a/c was central, so no noisy window unit), but no mini-fridge and no coffee maker. Apparently, most of the hotels in Vegas are like this unless you upgrade. They want you to go through the casino and get your coffee. If you’re lucky, it’ll only cost you $10. And yes, I saw people at the machines early in the morning! Other pics of the Strip:

Oh, the slot machines! How those bells and whistles and blinking lights make you feel like you’re a winner even while you’re losing! You forget the machine took a dollar for you to play because the lights are flashing and you hear the ching, ching ching, as the machine racks up your winnings of twenty-five CENTS. LOL! I’d given each of us $20 out of Nick’s last paycheck to gamble away in his name. Nick was a party boy and longed to be a high roller, so we all knew he would absolutely love that he got a chance to treat his family to a spin in Vegas. None of us won but we all agreed we never had so much fun wasting $20. All told, we all lost, so Vegas got a total of $200-$300 from our family of 5. I didn’t expect to do anything else but lose, so no regrets, but I was VERY glad not to be the lady on the elevator who was on her cell phone, telling her friend she was down $1600 and hadn’t slept in 24 hours!

The lure of the casino:

On Day Six, we slept late, had lunch at Wahlburgers (I wasn’t terribly impressed) and then my husband insisted we take a gondola ride. He likes horse drawn carriages, too. I’m not interested in that sort of thing, but went along with it:

Then we walked through the rest of the Venetian:

After walking through other hotels, we headed to Freemont Street (the original Vegas):

Freemont Street was seedier. One panhandler’s sign said “F You” (only he used the complete word), another’s invited me to suck a certain body part. People were filling their jars with money! Lots of nearly naked people (two girls had a criss cross of duct tape over their nipples and “pants” made of black leather strips…fully exposed bottoms. Why bother?) and in this bizarre mix of neon lights, humanity, and noise, I notice two very different witnesses.

The first is a group with a Bible and loudspeaker, exhorting passers-by to repent with a long, guilt-ridden lecture. Everyone walked by, ignoring them. A short distance away, Rasta Man caught my eye, smiled, and began to play “Amazing Grace” on his steel drums. People began to stop and listen. Two very different witnesses, two very different results. I think Jesus would approve of Rasta Man.

After Freemont Street, we kind of burned out on Vegas. I’m glad we went once, but I doubt I’d ever go back to that DisneyLand for Adults. It was noisy, crowded, and unbelievably hot. It was sad to see humanity sunk low: lurid images, a man asleep at the slot machine and people walking past, another man, passed out cold, his face on the concrete sidewalk.

On the last day of vacation, we visited the Hoover Dam on our way to Flagstaff. We had dinner there at the Galaxy Diner on Rte 66. AWESOME milk shakes!

This is the bridge we took to Flagstaff:

That’s it. Next post will be the long, sad tale of our return flight.