A Giant's Sandpit

Despite trying to get an early night we still didn’t manage to get back to the hotel until just before one in the morning. This meant our 6am wakeup was a bit of a challenge! We eventually managed to get our sorry asses out of bed and down to Flavors for a quick breakfast, before heading out on the road at half past seven.

Our first stop was the Hoover Dam, which is only half an hour out of Vegas. This isn’t that surprising given that the construction of the Hoover Dam is the reason Vegas exists. The Dam is an amazing piece of engineering, a giant wall of concrete with Art Deco decorations in a tight canyon. The level of water in the lake was pretty low, which we could see in the gap between the water level and the bleached high water mark on the rock. While the road is no longer a means of transport you are still able to drive over it.

The Dam also marks the line between Nevada and Arizona, and the change from Pacific to Midwest Time.

After leaving the Dam we headed off on the drive to the Grand Canyon, which is another four and a half hours away. After the early start Kathryn was soon fast asleep in the warm car, even as the outside temperature dropped as we climbed higher up onto the Colorado Plateau.

After a couple of hours we’d climbed onto the Plateau and Kathryn woke up to find that we were driving past fields caked in snow. While we’d expected it to be cold we hadn’t realised quite how cold, and how much snow would be on the ground. All the roads were ploughed and so were perfectly clear, but the surrounding fields were completely covered. This continued right up to the Canyon itself, with the stereo display showing the external temperature dropping to -2 degrees Celsius.

We briefly pulled into the township and picked up a prepaid access pass to skip the lines at the park entrance. After driving a couple of more minutes down the road we pulled into the Canyon car park and headed off to the Rim Walk.

If you haven’t been then as you may imagine, the Grand Canyon is an amazing experience. It’s huge. 10 miles across and scarily deep, it does a great job of making you feel very small. The snow continues here and most of the walkways were covered in it. This gave you quite an eerie feeling around the parts where you are close to the edge with no barriers! It is very pretty though, and despite being cold we felt very lucky to see the canyon in its winter cost.

Kathryn managed to get her nose into a book about those who had died falling into the canyon so we bought this to read now that we’d seen it (obviously not great to read before you go!). We checked out the info centre and took some photos at the sign, and then we were back on the road.

We were both still tired at this point so I picked up an energy drink from the gas station. This turned out to be a horrible grape flavoured disaster so I won’t be buying Rockstar Energy ever again!

Four hours later we pulled back into Las Vegas, and despite being tired we had tickets to see the Cirque de Soleil show Mystere, so after freshening up we headed out into the city to pick up our tickets. We headed over to the VIP line at the box office to pick up our tickets. The snob behind the counter decided that we didn’t look VIP enough so told us to go to the other line, until I pointed out that we were simply following what was written on our ticket voucher.

Tickets in hand, we then needed some dinner. With our trip to Grand Canyon a bit flexible we didn’t have a reservation so we had to do a bit of work to find somewhere to eat. In the end the only thing we could eat at fast enough was Denny’s so in we went. It was here that I found that one of the $5 notes we’d received on the trip to the canyon was counterfeit! Having used $USD for a couple of weeks now, I really appreciate the effort that has gone into our New Zealand currency. Small bills, easily distinguishable by colour and extremely difficult to fake means that you can deal in cash with no issues, unlike here we you need to always be on your guard.

The show itself was a great display of acrobatics and colour, as is always done will by Cirque de Soleil. The Mystere show has been running for a very long time so is very slick, although I did find that it had less of a story than I expected.

To wrap out the day we tried to catch a late night showing of the Bellagio fountains, but unfortunately we missed the final show by five minutes and then waited half an hour before finding out that it had finished for the night. We headed back to the hotel, very cold by this time, and hit the hay to get ready for our last day in Vegas.