… obviously, stays in Las Vegas. But I surely can talk about what happened outside of Las Vegas, no?
During the Thanksgiving hols (for kids, more than us parents), we had an opportunity to claim a decent hotel rate and airfare, so decided to take the plunge and plan a trip to Las Vegas. Mrs. Porcupyn and I took three days off work apiece for this purpose.
The original plan was to leave on Friday evening, the week before Thanksgiving, and return next Friday, i.e., Black Friday. However, Katya’s soccer schedule interfered (which, in hindsight, was good – she managed to participate in her first non-loss game). As a result, we rescheduled to leave on Monday morning and return on Saturday night.
Our initial thought was to hang around Las Vegas for three days and then head over to San Diego and spend three days there (or the other way around) before returning. However, the changed schedule resulted in the loss of a day. Besides, by this time, I had realized that though Las Vegas proper might not be my cup of tea, there was plenty to do in the surrounding area by way of nature. So, even a week exclusively devoted to a stay in Las Vegas appeared to fall short of stuff that I wanted us to do.
So, we decided to limit ourselves to Las Vegas. In spite of starting to plan a couple of months before the trip, we soon got bogged down in our respective schedules, with the net result that even the week before, none of us had a concrete idea of what we were going to do, except fly out and back!!
In a frenzy during the week prior to our departure, I managed to ask around (on and offline) and get information about the basic nature attractions in the general vicinity that could be visited as a day trip. Here was our short list (some of the names might not be the official ones):
- Red Rock Canyon
- Zion National Park
- Grand Canyon National Park
- Bryce Canyon National Park
- Death Valley
- Hoover Dam
- Some place with sand dunes (that I had read about somewhere but did not remember when and where)
- Joshua Tree National Park
- Arches National Park
As you can see, the list got out of hand pretty quickly. There was no way we could have gotten to some of these places with the five-six days we had in mind, and even to those we would have gotten to, we could not have done much.
So, we decided to play it by ear based on weather conditions. Fortunately, the weather was not going to be too bad – I had worried that we might run into snow and/or ice/sleet. In hindsight, once more, it appears that I had not done my homework properly – even the weather we encountered was apparently colder than normal. It was ironic to face weather in the 40s in Las Vegas while friends visiting the Atlantic coast up north got 60s!! Oh well … [more to follow]
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