A New State

May 29, 2013

Up and at ‘em this morning, working on our blog and me on the book I’m editing. My deadline is approaching in a few days so I’m trying to make some serious progress on it. Motel 6 doesn’t offer a free breakfast, so we get our juice and cereal from the van (and the 99 cent store bananas) and make our own in the room.

We don’t get on the road until about 11 am (the motel cleaning staff are practically shooing us out the door as Jack tries to insert one more photo in the blog). The dust storm is still going on, with a very light brown haze obscuring the horizon. As we drive east, the landscape looks more and more moonlike. With the exception of a few low scrubby bushes, you could think you WERE on the moon!

Driving on the moon?

As we approach the state of Nevada, the dust has dissipated. We suddenly see a bunch of billboards and buildings, all just over the state line—it’s casinos, hotels, and billboards advertising casinos. It goes from a deserted moonscape to Las Vegas in one fell swoop as we drive across the line into Nevada. Actually we still drive through some stretches of moonscape before we get to Las Vegas proper, but the drive into the city is punctuated by various little towns who are trying to do their own Las Vegas thing, just on a smaller scale.

 

Tinsel Town, here we come.

 

 

Good thing Carol is driving and not Jack.

 

Las Vegas outdoing Rome.

 

Vegas has something for everyone. Now available on facebook.

We don’t see a way around Las Vegas; I don’t think they want anyone to drive nearby without seeing and being tempted by the casinos, so we take photos of the skyline and various casino buildings, which are always changing. There’s a crash on the interstate, so we sit in stop and go 10-lane traffic for a while. One of the curses of cities…

 

Stop and go traffic. Could be Los Angeles, Branson, or Las Vegas. Nice places to spend a holiday.

Heading out of Vegas, the scenery begins to change—it becomes much more scenic, with more subtle pastel colors and more dramatic mountains, and more plant life. This looks like the American West of our movies and TV westerns. Wide open spaces and dramatic, faraway views. About 5 pm, Jack and I look at our options for camping and spot a fairly sizable town about 45 miles away that has a couple of RV campgrounds, Mesquite, NV. It’s right on the border of Arizona. (We will revisit Arizona briefly, as we drive through a tiny corner of it and then into Utah.) When we arrive, it’s obviously a casino-based town, but much more manageable than Vegas. We have a tasty supper at Peggy Sue’s Diner (Jack finally gets his hot turkey sandwich and mashed potatoes that he’s been looking for). 

 

Mashed potatoes, turkey, and gravy, here I come.

We drive around town a little and finally settle on a fairly empty RV campground, right by a casino of course. In fact, I have to go into the casino to register for the campground.

(I can’t resist spending a few minutes in the casino and end up winning $3.30 for my $1.00 investment into one of the video gambling machines. I like to quit while I’m ahead. Jack is not tempted.)

I stay up working on my book editing and then we both go to bed. Nice and quiet here, surprisingly. I guess everyone is in the casinos…

Where we are:

Bird species count: Vermilion flycatcher, turkey vulture, Bell’s vireo, *golden-fronted woodpecker, Say’s phoebe, northern cardinal, greater roadrunner, house finch, common raven, *northern rough-winged swallow, *summer tanager, *prothonotary warbler, *yellow-breasted chat, *yellow-rumped warbler, northern mockingbird, mourning dove, cliff swallow, Mexican jay, black-headed grosbeak, black-chinned  hummingbird, Wilson’s warbler, *Scott’s oriole, chipping sparrow, house sparrow, lesser goldfinch, black-crested titmouse, acorn woodpecker, scrub jay, *western kingbird, white-winged dove, *canyon towhee, *Grace’s warbler, *zone-tailed hawk, *curve-billed thrasher, Bullock’s oriole, Gambel’s quail, great horned owl, black-throated sparrow, *cactus wren, ladder-backed woodpecker, white-crowned sparrow, brownheaded cowbird, Brewer’s blackbird, *pyrrhuloxia, hooded oriole, verdin, crow, Anna’s hummingbird, dark-eyed junco, white-throated swift, Steller’s jay, mallard, common egret, brown pelican, western bluebird, loggerhead shrike

State count: 12 [Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada]

       

Odometer count:

Surber, VA: 107,435

Mesquite, NV: 113,235

Accommodations avg cost: 53 nts, avg $11.33/night

(Our average nightly cost is now so low because of our wonderful friends putting us up for so long in San Diego! I’m not counting the accommodations cost of Jack’s and my “vacations from our vacation” since they were handled separately and each of us still mooched off of friends while the other was off vacationing.)