After too weeks of the sea and the fog and the beaches it was time to do something different. So off we went to Las Vegas. 3 day weekend 1300 miles.
Not many pics this time.... most of the time was spent in driving!
Day 1: The departure:
At 7am I wake up rubbing my eyes. Its a saturday, and 7am is an unholy time to get up on any day, let alone a saturday!
7:30am I get the call that the taxi is there. No light rail to rental station this time, its a tight schedule, so plan is to leave home by 9am.
A little before 8am I am standing in front of the counter of Dollar car rental with my confirmation number.
"We give you a free upgrade". Well they always give you a free upgrade, but sometimes the upgrades are scarier than the economy segment cars which are upgraded.
Its a "avenger", a Dodge avenger o be exact. Now if this had been a few months before, I could have bragged I got something from the ownership of the mighty Diamler, but now dodge is Chrysler LLC.
Anyways the car was a little ugly to look at. Very similar to its cousin the charger RWD, but different under the hood. It has a 2.4L engine and is actually a very confused car. It tries to be a mercedes, smells like a mitsubishi, but is actually an american car who loves korean food.
Confused, well even I am after reading up on this thing.
Oh, it loves to drink fuel. 173bhp sure, but it drinks gulp gulp gulp.
We got around 22-25mpg on our trip.
The trim we have has a sirius satellite radio(which plays mostly useless channels) mp3 player blah blah blah. An almost top spec version, no AWD though. For that you have to get a AWD, and thats not the "rental edition".
So I come back with the car, we get ready, and eventually its 9:30 as we hit the 101 freeway 1.5miles from home.
Soon its traffic jam time, with everybody heading towards LA for the long weekend. So the tiny connecting road from 101 to I-5 is totally jammed up.
But finally we are on the open road. Wife takes the wheel and I take a short nap. I wake up and see we are in the left lane(the fast lane), whipping a little too fast by the cars in the slow lane.
I ask her how fast is she going, and she says "Speedo's ended".
I look groggily and its 120mph. I tell her to slow down and never never cross 80. But I am sure she was doing 80-90 frequently. Thankfully there is no LIDAR on that route(atleast then there wasn't any) and the Bel 940 was our guardian angel
As miles go by we pass through rural california to desert california, where I take the wheel we we are entering into Nevada. I don't know whether its the UFO's or Air bases, or cops hiding, the RD kept beeping all the time. As we enter nevada, we find somebody or the other always stopped by cops.
With my eyes on the speedo, I am very careful to never cross 80.
Arund 6:15 we are sitting in the room, tired and hungry, and its the time to hit the streets. We are sleepy and groggy(9 hours on the road) but still we see some casino's roam the strip.
Its midnight when we retire, not chance of seeing much nightlife, besides we are finding it okay, nothing too great.
Here are some pics
Eiffel Tower: You don't have to go to Paris you see
A Casino-Hotel called the Bellagio(Oceans 13 fame)
Musical fountains at bellagio
Day 2: The Desert and the mountains
After a good nights sleep we wake up at around 10, and decide to visit the hoover dam. The avengers thermometer tells us its 110F outside. 110F is very high temperature, around 44 degrees. Since we are bay area californians( heh heh) we cannot tolerate heat, and in all probability the hoover dam is going to be 120 degrees.
So whats the next best option? Drive around the countryside and go to mount charlston. Its 36 miles from vegas and cold. Hooray.
Thankfully we miss the turn and go a bit further towards something called snow mountain. Now you cannot drive to snow mountain, just near the base, and its around 15 miles from LV.
The landscape is awe inspiring.
After hanging out in the hot desert, off we go to mount charlston.
Its a long and winding road all the way up, and would you believe it, here also they have speed traps!
To go the peak you need to trek, but we are not in mood of that, so off we go to the base lodge, and take a few pics of the scenery. Its nice and cool, thats about it
Thats us you see:
I am not that fat actually, its just the wide angle lens
Thats the avenger parked there. Menancing, isn't it?
View from the dash. I accidentally clicked it
After a few moments here we decided to drive on the road to lee canyon for 30 minutes and see if we get some nice views.
Views we did get. We unknowingly reached a place which was used by tourists to observe the A-Bomb tests in Nevada!
This is while looking towards the test site. So if I grow scales or a tail, you know its hot my fault
This is us again, I told you I was not that fat, see
Another pic
Here is the Avenger
That scratch was there beforehand, I did not cause it
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