Summer Travel Map

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Catching up in Vegas

October 7-9, 2007
Las Vegas, NV

Because we were traveling a day early, we ended up having a few hours of overlap in Las Vegas with Rick and Annette (brother/sister-in-law) who were there for the weekend from Alabama. They flew in on Friday and had an early flight out on Monday. We were originally planning to get in Monday afternoon, but arrived Sunday instead. This presented us with an opportunity to catch up with them for a short bit.

They had tickets to the 10:00 PM Cirque du Soleil show “Love” (Cirque done to a Beatles score) at the Mirage. I tried to get tickets online and by phone, but “no Love for us”. In reality, after getting up early and driving from Reno to Vegas, a 10:00 PM show wasn’t in my future anyway. We made reservations at Onda, the Italian restaurant in the Mirage, so we could catch up over dinner.

We arrived at the RV park around 4:00 PM, deployed, emptied the back of the Range Rover (I call it the “garage”, with folding chairs, fire ring, cooler, and mountain bike stored in there) so we’d have room for 4, showered and changed, and left to pick them up around 6:00 PM. They were staying at the Excalibur, near the beginning of the Strip, so it was easy to get there and pick them up. North of there, traffic really bogs down and gets worse in the evening. Having “been around the block” a few times, we allowed plenty of extra time. At the Mirage, we followed the signs for “oversize parking” since we have the roof pod on the Range Rover. Oversize parking is quite a way from the main entrance, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that they’d send a complimentary Town Car to pick us up and deliver us to the valet entrance. Cool!

We actually arrived a little early for our 7:30 dinner reservation, which worked out fine as we stopped at a new place in the Mirage, “Stack”, for some wine. Apparently, the restaurant name refers to the décor and plating style, not the female staff (really, I went to their web site). We found seats at the bar and realized that a bottle of wine would be more economical than 4 glasses. They didn’t have the Ponzi Pinot Noir I ordered. This was no surprise as I’m pretty adept at picking wines that places don’t have. We switched to a bottle of Ferrari-Carano Siena, a red wine blend from California that was quite nice. We finished up just in time to head for dinner.

We had a nice dinner at Onda, sampling various Italian dishes paired with a couple of bottles of Gattinara (also known as the “poor man’s Barolo” at 30% of the price). I had a Pork Chop, Geri had Veal Marsala, Annette had Lasagna, and Rick had Osso Bucco. The wine went pretty well with all of them. We finished dinner just at the right time for Rick and Annette to head to their show. We requested our shuttle from the Valet, got dropped off at the car, and were back home quickly to call it an early night.

Yesterday (Monday), we were homebodies. Geri tackled several loads of laundry and I didn’t do much at all. We’d made arrangements to meet Cindy and Larry Dybas for dinner, and Cindy recommended a barbeque joint near their place. We had a great time catching up with them (we see them about once a year as we pass through Vegas) and dinner was quite good. Geri had ribs and I had a combination platter with tri-tip and brisket. We ordered onion rings for the table and the plate was huge! The wine list was a little light, but margaritas were more on target for the meal anyway.

Today, we started getting things ready for travel again. I’ve loaded the car and dumped the tanks. Geri suggested that we try the café here in the park for lunch, and it wasn’t half bad. I had a chicken salad (a salad with grilled chicken) and she had a patty melt. This will be enough to hold us so that we’ll just need a snack tonight. After eating out two nights in a row (not our norm any more), salad and a snack sounds just about right. Geri went shopping at the local outlet mall, but ended up just getting her nails done, so at least she’s set in that department for a while.

The next couple of days will be busy. We’ll leave here tomorrow morning and get into Peoria mid-afternoon. We’ll probably swing by the house first and drop off food and meds before moving the coach to a local RV Park. Since we’ll be leaving again in about 5 weeks, we won’t unload everything and put the motorhome “in storage”. Instead, we'll keep everything "on" and ready to go. We'll be able to shuttle stuff back and forth as needed over the next few weeks.

We’ll probably head back to the house tomorrow night because we have the gas company coming between 8:00 AM and 12:00 PM. We can survive one night without hot water and a stove (dinner in the microwave), and it’ll avoid having to get up too early the next day.

It’ll be good to be home for a while. It’ll probably make the blog more bland, but it’ll give us a chance to focus on different things for a bit…

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