Thursday, Day #14

A quick morning packing up (we actually had to wake Mr. “The Dark Is Gone” to get going!) with a brief breakfast, and we were headed to the main entrance for showers. The campsite was SO dirty that I decided if we showered and came back to the site, we’d all be dirty again! So after we checked out, we checked into the shower facilities. They were SO expensive! (Mesa Verde: Free, Grand Canyon: $1.75, Sequoia: $3.75 for 8 minutes!!) We decided the girls and Pete would go into the Ladies Shower and Andy and Steve would go in the Mens.

Unfortunately, Emily and I decided to shower ourselves first. Once we got Peter completely soaped up, the shower stopped! So, I grabbed a towel, wrapped it around me, walked a completely naked, completely soapy baby (who was rubbing more soap into his eyes) across the entrance to the boy’s showers and yelled to Steve and Andy to take Pete in with them. Poor guy. He wailed all the way in. There were people sitting outside the showers watching this entire thing take place. After I went back into the Ladies Shower, I got dressed as quickly as possible so that I could get Pete’s towel and clothes to the boys. I kept running back and forth between Emily in the ladies shower and the boys in the Men’s shower. The people sitting outside the showers just kept watching the show.

At one point, we realized that Emily really needed something from the car but Steve had the keys. I went across to the Men’s shower once more and yelled in to Steve. There was still one person sitting on the ledge outside the shower. She looked at me and said “The boys went to the car.” It was pretty funny. I think we put on quite a show.

Once we were clean, we finally headed out of the park. It took us an hour to get down the mountain. Unfortunately, we decided to skip Death Valley on our way to Las Vegas. We decided that the kids had seen enough of desert and it was already so HOT, and we would have added another 2 hours to our journey. So, we just headed straight for Vegas. We were feeling lucky.

After as quick a trip as possible across the Mojave Desert, we found ourselves in Sin City. We checked into the Las Vegas Hilton (home of the humongous Barry Manilow Billboard) and into our room. We had a nice view of the strip in the distance (the hotel is one block off of the strip, but it is on a Monorail, so it makes it easy to get to everything.)

We convinced the kids that there wasn’t time for swimming, and so headed out into the night. The Monorail was very easy to use and very clean. We took it all the way to almost the last stop which was the MGM Grand. We walked around for a bit and ended up at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant (there are a million high-end restaurants to choose from…but we didn’t want to be out of place if it was a really dressy place.) It was very nice, but very pricy, compared to what we’ve been used to (our dinner was more than our hotel!)

After dinner we started walking around the hotel. We saw the Lion’s Habitat, where you can actually stand under a plexiglass walkway and look up at the lions lying above you! After a brief stop for dessert, we left MGM and started walking down the strip. We hadn’t realized how hot it was outside. The more we walked, the hotter (and crankier) we got. We made it to the Bellagio Fountain to see the water and music show playing every 15 minutes. We also passed the Flamingo, and Caesar’s Palace (two hotels I remember from when I was in Vegas with my parents when I was 15). We tried to get to Treasure Island to see the free pirate show that they do four times a night in front of the hotel, but it was so crowded, and by then we were SO hot, that we decided it just wasn’t worth it. Peter had decided he was done and so just wanted to be carried everywhere.

We crossed the street and headed toward the Monorail. It was nice to be able to take that right back to our hotel. We felt bad that the kids hadn’t had any swim time, and we had gotten a call from Mema saying that there was a ton of rain in Utah and Colorado, so Steve and I began to consider staying another day. We’ll try to figure that out tomorrow.