After a great month in California, we turned our attentions toward Texas. However, since it would involve a journey of almost 1,200 miles, we built in some stops along the way.
First up: Las Vegas - which we'd last visited, for a few days, in 2019 near the beginning of our RV travels. Then, we'd only been able to get accommodations in a somewhat seamy RV park. This time, we decided to stay in a campground right on the Las Vegas Strip operated by the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino.
The RV park was only about 20 percent occupied this time of year. While it was convenient to the Strip, it still took us 15 - 20 minutes walking through the convoluted layout of the casino complex until we actually reached the Strip.
Circus Circus is located at the north end of the Strip. Like Circus Circus, most of the casino complexes are huge. One night we decided to walk down to the Bellagio to see their fountains playing to music. Only six casinos south from ours, it still took us an hour and twenty minutes to walk there, and that was without wasting any time withthe many sights, sounds and smells assaulting our senses.
On the walk back, we crossed Las Vegas Boulevard to the other side so we could see Vegas' newest attraction, the Sphere.
What is it you ask? Well, we can't tell you since the ticket prices start at $120 per person and the reviews on their web page provided lot of superlative adjectives and little info. The exterior of the sphere was an ever-changing jumbotron light show playing 24/7.
We did take in one show while in town: the card magician Shin Lim, who won America's Got Talent twice, playing at the Mandalay Bay. Just for grins, we also drove to a restaurant at the other end of the Strip. That distance of 4.7 miles took us 45 minutes to complete. It was a traffic jam like no other - complete with long red lights, many cars, and lots of eye candy.
We also took the opportunity to get out of town. We first traveled about 30 minutes west of Las Vegas to visit Red Rock Canyon Scenic Area, which is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The highlight is a 13-mile-long semi-circular drive along the mountains that surround the valley on three sides. The rocks on one side are beautiful limestone of different colors formed when the area was underwater.
Mountains of sedimentary rock line the other side of the valley.
We stopped about halfway along the scenic drive for a short hike to an area with petroglyphs. One ancient artist had obviously seen a old time sailing vessel and thought enough of it to spend hours recording it. We wondered if the chipped out areas represented the earliest known example of censorship in the New World. Near the petroglyphs, dripping water had stained the side of the rocks a deep blue.
Another day we traveled about an hour northwest to visit Valley of Fire State Park, another area of beautiful, multicolored rock layers. One area was called The Beehives because of the shape and marking of the rocks.
There's also a scenic drive that winds through this park. We stopped along the way to hike the Mouses Tank Trail, where many of the rocks had a similar beehive appearance and some also resembling swiss cheese. The trail which leads past petroglyphs to a rock opening filled with water (the Tank).
An overlook farther along the road shows the line separating the red and yellow limestone layers.
At a crest in the road, we come upon a herd of bighorn sheep, including a ewe and some lambs. One ewe stopped in the middle of the road to nurse its baby.
At the end of the scenic road is an area called the White Domes...
...and you pass a small but beautiful arch as you exit the park.
One Vegas evening we decided to visit the Neon Museum, resting place for signs from Vegas' past.
At the museum, we learned that the iconic "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign was designed by a woman. Of course, we had to drive to the southern end of the Strip to see the real thing!
Moving on from Las Vegas, we crossed into Arizona for a three-day stay in Phoenix. There we had a lovely dinner with friends Ania Kubicki and Wayne Lorgas.
We'd visited Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin home and architecture school in Wisconsin during our circuit of the Great Lakes in 2023. Wright had a second location, Taliesin West near Scottsdale, that the school used during the cold Wisconsin winter months. We took a self-guided audio tour of the Taliesin West property.
We also visited Phoenix's fabulous Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) which showcases instruments and music from every corner of the world. You wear headsets, and when you stand in front of the display for a particular country you see and hear video clips of some of the display instruments being played.
We moved on again, this time to Las Cruces, New Mexico, just north of El Paso and the Texas border. It would serve as our jumping off point for visiting White Sands National Park, which we'd seen in fall of 2020 after it and other national parks had re-opened following the first hard months of COVID shutdowns.
The white sands are actually gypsum (the same substance used in drywall and plaster). Everything is super bright - even the roads - so sunglasses are a must. Snowcapped peaks were visible in the distance.
Since we last visited White Sands, park archeologists have discovered human footprints that are more than 23,000 years old. This means that people migrated from Asia to the Americas much earlier than previously thought. way before there was a "land bridge" from Asia to North America.
We did a little hiking in the backcountry, although the bright sunshine made it fairly taxing.
Before leaving the park, we hiked on the Dunes Nature Trail.
There were interpretive signs along the nature trail. Unfortunately, the sun had bleached them to illegibility.
The next morning, we pulled up stakes at the campground and headed into Texas for two weeks. More about that visit in our next blog post!