Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada

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Today, we loaded about 30 lbs. of Jessica’s grandmother’s china into the already tightly packed backseat, nestled snuggly between our camping stove and our Erma Bombeck books. We’ll see if it survives. We left Los Angeles and headed back east on I-15 through the Mojave Desert, through little towns like Barstow and Baker. Baker is the proud owner of the World’s Largest Thermometer standing at a whopping 134 feet. 134 was chosen to represent the highest temperature ever recorded in North America. Today it only showed a high of 109. Baker is known as the Gateway to Death Valley, but we are continuing east towards Las Vegas!

World's Largest Thermometer
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We crossed the Nevada border and were immediately bombarded with casinos, lights and promises of inexpensive buffets. We bypassed these for now and headed to Sin City.

We arrived about an hour before dark and Ben saw the skyline for the first time. He was impressed and couldn’t wait for night to fall. We stayed at a Super 8 on the outskirts of town and drove to the strip to park at the Stardust for free. With lots to see and very little time to see it all, our first stop was Circus Circus. The second story of the casino held midway games for kids and an hourly acrobatic show. It really had a carnival atmosphere.

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We them walked down the strip seeing all the famous hotels, The Riviera, Caesar’s Palace, Casino Royale, Excalibur, Harrah’s, The Mirage, New York New York, The Venetian, The Bellagio, The Luxor. Each had similar features, yet each had its own personality. It took us about 2 and a half hours to walk the strip only to realize that we had missed the majority of the shows. Ben really wanted to see the Fremont Street Experience, which is a canopy of lights covering a street with casinos on each side. They will display little shows on the canopy like a giant 200-foot long television. However we had missed that also. We went to bed happy to have been here, but a little disappointed with having missed so much. Tomorrow is Area 51.