US Day 11: Las Vegas

Las Vegas

Woke up this morning, went and found some food for breakfast (Starbucks *sigh*), packed up our gear, checked out of the hotel, loaded the car, and then headed out to find a laundromat so we could do some washing. Spent the rest of the morning sitting around waiting for the washing / drying to finish – although I did sneak across the road to a hi-fi store to admire the large screen TVs they have over here.

After the washing was finished, we found somewhere to have lunch, and then decided to go for a drive out to Red Rock Canyon, just on the outskirts of Las Vegas. It had been raining all day, but the forecast was for clearing showers, so we figured at best we would go for a bit of a wander, and at worst we would just enjoy the drive.

When we got there, we found the gates locked, and quite a bit of water lying around. We figured there must have been some localised flooding with all the rain they’d had in the region. We stopped at one of the overlooks nearby, but couldn’t see much due to low cloud. So we decided to head back in to town, taking an alternative route to see some other sites. We only got about a mile down the road when we discovered a road block set up to prevent people trying to cross a very fast moving, and very wide flood of water streaming across the road. It would have been more than 50 yards wide, and had washed parts of the road away. We had to turn around and head back the way we had come in. It was only then that we noticed just how much water was running in the creeks along side the road, and we noticed some of the other side roads had been cut as well by the flood waters.

When we got back in to Las Vegas, it was time for us to check in to our next hotel, the NYNY – which we did, got to our room, and settled in.

We went out and got some dinner, before heading across the road to the MGM Grand where Cirque Du Soleil have a new show on, called Ka. We had booked tickets over the internet several weeks ago, and had been looking forward to seeing it. We got really good seats and thoroughly enjoyed the show, it has a much more defined story line than most of their other shows (there are four semi-permanent Circque Du Soleil shows playing in Las Vegas now !!). It was a 10:30pm session, so it ended up being a rather late night, but it was worth it.