The Road from SMOFCon, Day 3: Grants NM to Las Vegas NV

It's taken me all day to find the time to process the photos from yesterday's drive, which was Grants to Las Vegas. Google Maps says this should be 500 miles. I'm going to have to go back and check the odometer reading, because the figures in our travel log do not make any sense to me. I think we must have written down a wrong number somewhere.

( New Mexico Mining Museum )

We only got to spend about 90 minutes at the Mining Museum, which wasn't enough; I would have preferred at least another hour in order to read more of the displays, but we had to get moving. We made a point of telling the Chamber of Commerce people there that we specifically rearranged our plans to spend the night in Grants because we wanted to visit this museum. This is the sort of thing they should know whenever anyone questions funding these things.

( Interstate 40: Mesas and Mountains )

( Trains and Planes )

As we passed Gallup, we were back on our original itinerary, but only a bit over an hour behind schedule, as we started out early from the hotel this morning. We tried to minimize our stops, and we steadily made up more time, but by the time we got to Flagstaff, we really needed a break from driving.

( Train Break in Flagstaff )

Passing Williams, we realized that we should have stopped for fuel at the Pilot at MP 185, and that we probably didn't have enough to make it to Kingman, based on our fuel consumption on the previous two tanks of gas. We therefore stopped at Seligman, which is not the best place, price-wise, and bought five gallons to get us to Kingman. There we refueled and, if the numbers are to be believed, we could have made Albuquerque to Kingman on a single 27-gallon tank of fuel, although it would have been close.

Turning onto Future Interstate 11, Lisa drove us in to Las Vegas while I navigated us to the Palazzo. We checked in without incident, and they helpfully gave us a mini-fridge to store my supplies. However, inasmuch as this is a very upscale hotel, they won't let you use their carts to move things into the hotel the way we prefer. (With the Holiday Inn Expresses and even the Sheraton, we pretty much had this down to a science by this point on the trip.) Lisa does not like having bell staff handle her stuff, so it took four trips between the parking garage and our room to move stuff in. The security guard at the elevator lobby asked if we were moving in for a month.

( Too Much Hotel Room )

I'm glad we booked this trip, but to be honest, if I'd had to pay for this room rather than use the free-night and point offers on my IHG account, I'd be saying I wasn't getting value for money. While the room is absurdly luxurious, it misses things that I take for granted at the much-lower-level Holiday Inn Express like a microwave oven and an in-room coffee/tea service. Of course, the hotel doesn't really want you to stay in the room; they want you to go downstairs and gamble, or maybe show in their high-end stores. In our case, we are going to try and confound them by actually using the room, which in the first night's case meant falling into bed with the luxury of not setting the alarm for the next morning.

The Road from SMOFCon, Day 4: It's Da Bomb

Today was a real vacation day: no alarm. I slept until about 8 AM, which is at least two hours longer than most days on this trip, and I needed it. After taking my time getting moving, we went across the street to Treasure Island for their breakfast buffet. It was okay, although we've had better (and worse) at casino hotels.

We did not come to Vegas to gamble. If we want to do that, we can do it at home and earn casino loyalty perks to boot. Vegas trips are for things we can only do in Vegas. Today, that meant the National Atomic Testing Museum.

( Boom Boom Room )

The full set of photos is in a Flickr folder of our museum visit.

We spent between three and four hours at the museum. If you plan to go, give yourself more time to read the displays if you enjoy the history.

After our time in the museum, we found that we were still pretty fatigued from travel and went back to our luxury hotel room, where Lisa took a bath and I worked on processing and updating SMOFCon Fannish Inquisition videos.

In the evening, we went down to the Grand Canal Shops (more pictures later; I'm too tired to process more of them). The Palazzo-Venetian is sort of like a gigantic high-end shopping mall with huge hotels and casinos attached to each end of it. We didn't buy anything, but we did look at a couple of the shops, including a nice hat shop where the staff were very kind to Lisa (they polished up her hat for her) and where we might come back and buy a new hat for me before we leave that will be better for summer and high-wind conditions. We brought take-out lobster mac & cheese again from one of the food court shops and made more use of our hotel room.

After dinner, we felt we needed to do some walking, so we headed back to the Canal Shops, which were closing (it being 11 PM), looped down to the casino floor, dropped $20 on slots much faster than we would at any comparable Reno casino, and headed back to the room. I guess we're getting old; staying up all night partying at a noisy, smoky casino isn't, ahem, in the cards for us tonight. Instead, another night in a comfortable hotel room where we don't have a set time to get up tomorrow is a nice prospect.