Friday November 10th 2017

The temperature was up a little bit today to the high 70s and the wind was also stronger. I’m not complaining it was a great day.

View of the Las Vegas RV Resort and the mountains to the northeast.

It wasn’t a very exciting day. For no apparent reason, I got up about an hour early. Rather than starting my day quickly it had just the opposite impact. I sat around watch TV before starting the coffee for breakfast. I’m usually very slow finishing my morning coffee. This morning I spent more time reading the news on the internet than I did drinking coffee. I had very little desire to do anything.

Eventually I went to the laundry to complete yesterday’s failed attempt to wash my clothes. Once again all of the machines were in use, but this time there was no one around to peak my interest in unusual laundry room behavior. Both yesterday and today I’ve tried to do the laundry in the late morning. I probably need to try a later time.

This afternoon I went out with the intent of filling the car’s tank with gas. The station I used last week was now a construction zone. They were digging up the underground tanks. I continued on to a couple of stores with the plan to stop on my way home for gas. Of course I forgot to stop. I’ll have to fill up in the morning on my way to the air show.

Overall this was one of those days that nothing bad happened, but it was far from productive. All I really did was read and watch TV between attempts at being productive.

Thursday November 9th 2017

Today was a little warmer than yesterday. I got up to the mid 70s, but the wind also returned. It was just strong enough that it wasn’t advisable to have the awning out. The wind is forecast to increase while the temperature remains the same for the next couple of days.

More desert flowers thanks to irrigation.

The first half of the day was dedicated to chores around my RV home. I successfully completed most of them but didn’t get the laundry done. When I went to the park laundry this morning two of the eight washers were already in use. A lady that arrived just before me took the other six washers. As I waited to make sure she really was going to use all six machines, I continued to see more unusual behavior in the park laundry. The lady had two buckets of dirty laundry. I don’t think it was enough to fill two washers if you chose to risk one load with cold water. She proceeded to sort her laundry into the six machines. I guess by separating the colors from the whites and using each of the three possible cycles you can make a case for six machines. She had a few almost empty machines that still cost the full fee to run. This is probably the traveling version of what she did for X number of years raising a family in a house that had a washing machine running almost all the time. It doesn’t seem like a good system to me and it certainly doesn’t consider the concept of sharing the laundry room resources. I didn’t wait around for another machine. I’ll try again tomorrow.

This afternoon I went of a scouting mission for Saturday’s outing to the Air Show at Nellis Air Force Base. I wanted to find the best route to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway parking lots. I anticipate heavy traffic Saturday and Sunday mornings. The Airbase and the Motor Speedway are located north of Las Vegas on the east side of Interstate 15. I don’t know if I should go via the highway or by surface streets. The distance is shorter on the surface streets, but there is a traffic light at every intersection. On the other hand it’s a one lane exit ramp from the highway.

Hopefully the media will provide some information about traffic patterns around the air show. At least two of the TV channels have really been talking the show up. The other TV station is talking up the Las Vegas Marathon which is also this weekend. After my scouting mission I have some familiarity with another area of Las Vegas. Maybe it will come in handy on Saturday. With all the traffic it took over two hours to go out twelve miles and come back fifteen the other way.

Wednesday November 8th 2017

This morning I was reflecting on my last visit to this RV resort in April. I had my entire summers travels in front of me with very few well defined plans. About the only thing I knew in April was that I’d be flying out of Salt Lake City at the end of July for a long weekend in North Carolina. Everything else was just an outline of a plan. I wanted to get to Glacier National Park in Northern Montana. At the time I considered everything else part of the journey.

Another picture from yesterday’s wandering in the Wetlands Park.

I had a great summer travel season. I made it to Glacier National Park by the middle of June. That was a lot earlier in the year than I originally thought I’d be there. On the way I stopped at Yellowstone National Park which was barely on my radar of possibilities in April. Most of August and September were spent at the national parks and monuments in Utah. Every place I visited was interesting and well worth the visit, but I could have done much better planning.

The primary lesson I learned was that reservations are necessary and the earlier they are made the better. Early in the year I was experimenting with travel distances and lengths of stay. This made planning ahead difficult. The down side result was that I often had to compromise on location, duration and timing of my visits to popular areas. For instance, I could only get five or six nights at Yellowstone and Glacier and the locations I picked for the Utah National Parks was often more than fifty miles away from the park. Today I started thinking about next summer. I want to avoid some of this years issues. Many places start booking a year or more in advance.

My area of travel for next summer is primarily east of the Mississippi. I have reservations booked from late February through the first week of April in Florida. I also have the Memorial Day holiday booked at the fair grounds in the middle of Missouri for the Escapees RV Club Escapade. My route of travel during the month and a half from the middle of April to the end of May is the first open question. My travels from there are wide open. The only other constraint is my desire to be back in New England for the fall season.

Today I’ve been researching what I’d like to see and the routes I might follow. One goal is to identify where I’ll be for the Fourth of July and Labor Day. Making reservations for those holidays was a big problem this summer. I ended up in the middle of the Nevada desert for the Fourth and an expensive gravel patch on a hill for Labor Day. The thing I need to keep in mind is that there are more and more people competing for the sites out there and a 35 foot class A motorhome can’t fit in every available site. I’ve already struck out attempting to get a two week stay in New England next October. Shorter stays and other places are available, but it goes to show I’m not looking to soon.

Tuesday November 7th 2017

The nice fall weather with highs around seventy continues. Today I found a nice county park not to far away from the RV park. It’s called Wetlands Park and is along part of the Las Vegas Wash. It actually has the babbling sound of running water at one of the drier times of the year in the dessert.

Green areas of the Wetlands Park with the mountains across the valley to the southwest.

Early this afternoon I drove over to the Wetlands Park to check it out. There are lots of trails for walking and bicycle riding. Today I walked a couple of the trails, but may ride my bicycle here another time. Some of the trails are wide concrete paths and others are gravel. Signage isn’t the best and the bushes along the trails are high so it would be easy to get lost. Most likely I’d just come out a long way from my parking spot if I made a wrong turn. I’ll print out a map before I return.

Duck swimming in the pond in the reflection of the sun.

It was nice to see all the wild life in the park. There were many birds in the trees and on the ground. I focused my attention to the ducks in one of the ponds. They seemed to be on a speed patrol of the little pond as they moved rapidly across and around the pond. Maybe they were trying to stay away from the impressively large turtles that were also residents of the pond. One turtle was so big it barely fit on the rock it was using to catch the sun.

Large turtle sunning on a rock in the middle of the pond.

Gigantic turtle on an even bigger rock in the pond.

The only mammal I saw as a rabbit, but I saw evidence of larger animals. At several places along the trail I saw scat that probably came from coyotes. Dogs are prohibited from the trails. One of the listed reasons was the presence of coyotes.

Overall I walked and wandered over a mile during about two hours. The area is very big. I saw very few people on the trails and I only wandered through a small part of the park. I plan to go back and “get lost” in more of the park and I’m going to look for other area parks. This is an area that tourists to Las Vegas don’t visit. It’s only by looking beyond the attractions that I found the park.

Monday November 6th 2017

It was a beautiful fall day. The high temperature just broke seventy degrees. The major event for the day was food shopping. The refrigerator was getting a little empty. I was out of OJ and the milk, eggs and butter substitute were getting close to the end. Outside the refrigerator, I was out of bread and cookies. I still had can goods, potatoes, onions and frozen dinners so I wouldn’t starve but clearly a grocery run was in order.

More color in the desert thanks to irrigation.,

One of the advantages to being in the urban area of Las Vegas is the shopping options. For groceries, I have options about a mile away in each of three directions. There is an Albertsons to the north, a Smiths to the west and a Super Walmart to the south. The east has nothing but residences and then mountains. Walmart is my usual choice. It has most of what I need and doesn’t require a discount card to get the best prices. Smiths will use a “store” card if you ask but that’s one more thing to remember. I suppose I could get a card but that also seems like a painful process. I’m not sure what the sale item process is at the Albertsons market.

The grocery run was my only event of the day. I am clearly in RV living mode. I’ve been here in Las Vegas for more than 2 weeks and have done very few tourist things. I’ve visited the strip and downtown to see what’s changed and I’ve been out to Lake Mead. I haven’t been to any shows yet and I’m only going to casinos when I have another reason than gambling for the visit. There are lots of tourist things that I may do while I’m here, but I’m not in a rush to see them. If I don’t get to see them while I’m here then they’ll be all the more interesting on a future visit to the area.

RV living mode means I may stay home all day or a I may go out at a moments notice on a whim. It also means that the content of this blog may be a little dull or different. I intend to keep writing a daily blog entry to keep up the habit and as a quasi social outlet. It serves as a substitute for morning coffee conversation with my imaginary friends. Another advantage of writing the daily blog is having to think about what I’m going to write about may keep me more active. If I don’t know what I’m going to write about by mid afternoon then I need to get out and find something interesting to do. It won’t always work, but at least it will get me out of my RV home.

Sunday November 5th 2017

It was another windy day with a high temperature around seventy. The return to standard time overnight left me a little disoriented all day. I think I’m just aware enough of the suns position that I know the clock is different than yesterday. When you throw in the ten o’clock starting time for football games I’ve watched at 1PM on the east coast for years, I am really confused. It got so bad that I had my main meal of the day cooked and ready to eat by a little after noon. For a normal Sunday I’d probably eat around two or three.

I had the football games on TV all day and even watched a series of downs now and then. Mostly I was doing other things. Around five I’d had enough and went to Sam’s Town casino resort to watch the fountain show. I wanted to see if anything had changed. They shut it down for maintenance shortly after I saw it in April. I think the animated animals are in better shape than they were in the Spring. The bear and wolf don’t seem to be as shaggy. I took a few pictures that capture the magnitude and color of the show. Next time I’m going to try to capture some video. It will probably be the Christmas show the next time I see it.

Fountains spray water high up toward the atrium roof.

Mountain lion above the rock water falls.

Bald Eagle watching over the area.

Lasers show the way.

Images projected on the rock wall by lasers.

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Wolf high above watches over the park.

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Saturday November 4th 2017

Wind influenced everything today. There were strong winds all day. Everybody in the RV Park has there awnings in and outside furniture secured. Some folks seem to have gone into hibernation mode. They have moved inside there RVs and don’t seem to come out for anything. It takes more than a little wind to keep me from walking around the park a time or two even when I’m in stay at home mode.

South end of he strip across the valley from the Green Valley Ranch Resort and Casino.

The wind is not real bad in this urban area. The worst of it stays above the surrounding buildings. Out in open areas with nothing to divert the flow, the same level of wind has more impact. If I didn’t already know this little fact I was reminded when I went shopping today. Keeping the car going in a straight line on the freeway took constant attention.

My shopping destination was Fry’s Electronics. It is located by the airport on the Las Vegas Strip. Fry’s is a west coast based electronics store that has a little bit of everything. If you super sized Radio Shack and put it inside a Best Buy, you would start to approach what this store is like. It is fun to just wander through the store and see for sale some of things I’ve only read about.

I was looking for solutions to get my DirecTV working on my living room TV. The current HDMI to Cat5e switches in my RV broke this summer after a particularly bouncy trip. I documented my diagnoses of the problem in Tracing Wires on A Rainy Day. Just replacing the existing failed equipment with the same thing would seem to be asking for a repeat failure, so I’m checking out other possibilities. I didn’t find anything specific to solve the problem, but got a couple of ideas to follow up on.

On the way home I stopped at Green Valley Ranch Resort and Casino. Yesterday’s eight cent profit and another nineteen dollars and ninety two cents went to the entertainment gods. The slot machines gave me more than an hour of play, but took my money in the end.

Friday November 3rd 2017

The wind is up and the temperature is down here in Las Vegas. It is still comfortable, but fall is finally here. Most of the day it was in the sixties. It got into the low seventies toward the end of the day.

It was house cleaning time this morning. I still haven’t found a mop that suites my needs. I want one that might do multiple tasks like be able to be used for washing the outsides of the windows too. Without a mop I was down on my hands and knees with a bucket and a big sponge. The floor really needed a good cleaning. About half the floor area is tile and the other area is carpet that I can vacume. I’m not sure how good my built in vacuum is. Even after vacuuming the four throw rugs they still gave off a lot of dust when I shook them outside in the wind.

More products of irrigation in the desert.

Later this afternoon I went out to get a few groceries and stop at one of the casinos for some slot machine time. Boulder Station was my casino of choice today. I had a positive outcome from about an hour and a half of play. My profit was a grand total of eight cents.

I was back at home before dark. It occurs to me that I haven’t really been out after dark much since this spring. When you are in the middle of nowhere and it gets dark after 9 or 10 there isn’t much reason to be. That will all change this weekend with the return to standard time. I’m already having a hard time with the darkness before six. Before five is going to be even harder. I’ve been taking my last walk of the day around the park between five and six. The park is well lite, but I’ll probably move my walk earlier to get it finished before dark.

Thursday November 2nd 2017

I didn’t do much today other than hang out around the RV. For some reason I thought it was Friday most of the day. Not that the day of the week has much bearing on my activities, but knowing what day it is seems to be a necessary part of enlightenment.

It has cooled off to seasonal norms here in Las Vegas. The high temperature was in the low to mid 70s today. Toward the end of the day the wind picked up and cooled things down some more. The next few days are not going to be any warmer. By the start of next week we may get a little rain with high temperatures in the sixties. I’m really looking forward to fall temperatures.

I really enjoy the roses in bloom in the desert here at the RV park. It is amazing what a little irrigation will do.

As I sit here in front of the computer attempting to write this blog entry I can’t remember anything significant that I did today. I kept busy all day with small tasks, reading and occasionally paying attention to the television. The day went by quickly so it wasn’t a wasted day. I guess the best way to describe it would be as a normal living day in my RV home.

With nothing better to write about I’ll take this opportunity to congratulate the Huston Astros on winning the world series. I really liked most of the parts of the games I saw. The number of pitching changes contributed to my not watching any game all the way through. I tend to change channels when pitching changes happen. Listening to the announcers quote obscure stats about pitching match ups is a good reason to change channels. The Dodgers seemed to change pictures every time a batter got a hit, while the Astros seemed to be afraid to make a pitching change until they were burnt. I’ll remember this World Series as one of pitching changes and home runs.

Wednesday November 1st 2017

After two days of fighting the Las Vegas traffic I decided to leave most of the driving to someone else today. I caught the 11:40 shuttle from Sam’s Town Casino to the strip. Checking out the changes on the south end of the strip was today’s objective.

The 11:40 shuttle dropped me off at Harrahs around noon. I had either three hours or 7 hours before the return shuttle. My plan was to catch the 3:05 return shuttle. I learned that the inconvenient shuttle times are a very new thing. The company that was running the shuttle service for the casino suspended operations at the end of September. The casino now has a single bus instead of two. It makes a run to the strip and back to Sam’s Town then makes a run downtown and back.

Lady Liberty in front of the New York New York hotel and casino.

My tour of the south strip was mostly a lot of walking. I walked south on the east side of the strip to Planet Hollywood then crossed the street to the Cosmopolitan, the Crystals Mall, and Aria Casino. Not much seemed to have changed at any of those places. The big changes are taking place at the Monte Carlo Casino. There are construction walls up all the way from the entrance next to the Aria, through the casino and out to the strip. MGM is in the process of updating and rebranding the hotel casino as the Park MGM.

I stopped for lunch in New York New York at the Fulton Fish Market. I had fish and chips that were a couple of dollars cheaper than the fish and chips I had last week at Gordon Ramsey’s Fish & Chips in the Linq Promenade. I have to say today’s fish and chips weren’t as good.

Lion in front of MGM Grand hotel and casino.

The pedestrian bridge across Tropicana Avenue from New York New York to Excalibur is closed for construction so I crossed the strip to the MGM Grand then across Tropicana to the Tropicana Casino. There was nothing exciting to report at either of these casinos. After crossing back across the strip, I caught the tram from in front of the Excalibur down to the Mandala Bay Hotel and Casino.

The tram passed by the site of the tragic Las Vegas shooting a month ago. The organizers of the event were allowed to start clearing the site out and taking down the structures today. Over the last month law enforcement has been collecting evidence. Then the lawyers and their support crews representing the victims had a court ordered period of time to search for evidence to support their lawsuits. They aren’t looking for evidence related to the shooting, but rather evidence that the organizers and support groups didn’t do enough to prevent the incident or support the victims once the incident started. Something about that reminds me of vultures around a body.

When I reached Mandalay Bay I had less than an hour to get back to Harrahs for my return shuttle. I walked quickly back through Luxor and Excalibur. They seemed to be pretty much the same as they were in the spring. I skipped my plan stop for dessert at the Dairy Queen in Excalibur and continued to make my way back up the strip. I made it back to the shuttle stop with five minutes to spare.

I really didn’t have enough time to enjoy the south strip areas. I never gave the machines any love which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. More significantly I didn’t pause long enough to really see the sights or people watch. Observing the characters that visit this city is always fun. The shuttle with its current schedule isn’t really a good option. I think it’s back to driving for me.