Tuesday and Wednesday, April 2/3, 2019

As spring arrives I’m always keen to break the winter gloom with my first road trip of the year and, this time, I decided to do things a little differently. Instead of driving my own car from Washington I flew to Las Vegas and rented a car for three weeks to drive a loop through the southwest desert states.

Things did not get off to a “flying” start on Tuesday when my direct flight to Vegas was cancelled 45 minutes before departure due to a “maintenance issue” with the plane. I was quick off the mark and managed to arrive 7th in a line of over 80 people at customer service seeking to be re-booked. I ended up having to fly to Newark at 10:15 PM that evening, stay overnight (at United Airlines expense) and then catch a flight to Vegas on Wednesday. This flight was also delayed so I finally arrived in the early evening – some 23 hours later than planned. I do, however, consider myself lucky as the customer service agents were already running out of timely options when I was served and it would have been a much lengthier delay had I been further back in the line and my luggage also arrived with me. Once in Vegas I picked up my rental and headed to the Rio Hotel and Casino but did little beyond scouting out the place and eating.

Thursday, April 4, 2019

After a good night’s rest and a hearty breakfast I returned to the rental car to set up my tablet and camera for recording road video. Every vehicle is different in terms of possible camera placement, reflections from the dashboard, power ports and suitable locations for mounting the GPS and tablet. I encountered a couple of issues and had to make a trip to Walmart to buy an extra magnetic phone mount but everything seems to be working and I plan to start posting road videos when I leave Vegas tomorrow.

Once that was sorted I felt I could begin my vacation and the first thing I did was to ride the Voodoo Zipline which is an attraction at the hotel I’m staying at. It looks more like a high altitude ski lift than a true zip line, just a chair with a lap belt which is hung from a cable between the top of the hotel’s tallest tower (51 floors) and the top of the shorter tower (28 floors). The ride down takes just a few seconds and then they haul you back more slowly. Since they do not allow any hand-held cameras I used my video glasses to record the view and, although I thought I was moving my head fairly slowly, the video below shows I was mistaken. It was fun but very quick.

As I write this it is about 4:30 PM local time and, once posted, I will visit the Strip to see what’s new in the 6 years since I last stayed here and this evening am going to LOVE which is a Cirque du Soleil show based around the music and lives of the Beatles.