Desert and Vegas Recap

I know I'm behind on posting, and I said I would catch up, so here goes. We left Modesto on Thursday morning, finally leaving California behind. As we traveled along the landscape changed from a mix of industrial and farmland to all fruit and vegetable farms. We started to notice that we were sharing the road with more and more trucks, transporting fruit, vegetables and cattle. Rick loved this drive...long, straight, flat roads. No more mountains or cliffs! After a while we started to see hills ahead but they were so covered in haze they were just a faint shadow. Eventually we were at an elevation of about 4,000 feet, but considering some of the places we've been that was pretty tame. There were railroad tracks following alongside the highway for quite a ways, with many tunnels through the hills. A long freight train came along and we rode parallel for a bit. It would have been great to see it go through the tunnels but no such luck. We began to see the landscape change as we got further into the desert, and there were Joshua Trees cropping up all over the place. They really are beautiful...so different than anything we've seen before. As we drove along, we could actually begin to see how hot it was outside. You know that hazy, hot & humid look to things when the road up ahead looks liquid and shimmery? It was like that but a thousand times magnified from what we're used to at home, and when we got out of the car the heat just made us feel like we were baking. Dry, but hot, hot, hot!
We stopped in the town of Baron, CA for gas and to look for a place to eat lunch. Driving into town it looked like a ghost town! We passed one after another of closed and dead-looking businesses and homes and wondered if we'd have to pass it by. Eventually we came upon the town "center" which consisted of a couple of cafes, a small strip of stores, a Chamber of Commerce building, and two museums. Very strange...an Aerospace Museum with a fighter plane sitting in front and the Twenty Mule Team Museum. We had to ask where we could get gas, so it was the perfect excuse to stop in! Turns out the town started out as a mining town, home of U.S. Borax and its open pit mine. What a great stop it turned out to be! The museum has a fascinating collection of everything to do with the production of Twenty Mule Team Borax, a product I remember well from my childhood! Apparently there was a strike at the mine years ago, the company installed a lot of automation and many people moved on, which is why the town looks so deserted. Edwards Air Base (no, not the one on the Cape!) is also in the area, which I believe is one of the alternate landing areas for the space shuttle. We learned that the movie Erin Brokovich was filmed partly in Boron. The museum was manned that day by a sweet older gentleman, and we chatted for a while. Imagine our surprise to find out he's lived in Boron for 60 years but was born in Canton, MA! What a small world. We never made it to the Aerospace Museum next door, but our stop in Boron was a rare find.

Eventually, we started to see billboards littering the roadside and knew we were getting closer to Vegas. We arrived just before 5:00, checked into the hotel, got settled and off we went to explore. What a crazy town this is! Each hotel is so different, and there is so much to see. Our hotel, Excalibur, has a castle theme, with a dinner show featuring jousting, New York New York has a roller coaster that winds around the outside of the building, Monte Carlo is beautiful and very Roman, Paris is, well, Paris, and it just goes on and on. We walked around last night just looking at all the lights, people and madness. We both enjoyed New York New York the most. There's a fireboat outside that shoots water every so often and that was great.

We've had a great time in Vegas, and we're glad we experienced it, but in the end we'll be happy to move on. I think, for me anyway, it's too over the top...but we've both decided that it's enough to drive a couple of hours from home and go to Foxwoods or Mohegan.
Tomorrow we head to the Grand Canyon and will stay in Flagstaff, AZ, so we'll be making some more forward progress!