day 1 - the long drive to vegas
This post is part 1 of the "trip-2006" series:
- day 1 - the long drive to vegas
- day 2 - down in the valley + speed trap!
- day 3 - the Racetrack !
- day 4 - us395 + the badwater road
- day 5 - crator then back to vegas
- day 6 - the long drive home
We got up at 6AM, and left shortly after 7AM to drive to Las Vegas. Since it was the weekend before/of Christmas, traffic was especially crappy on I-5. I ended up deciding to cut east on CA-152 at Los Banos, and that definitely helped alot. We ended up hitting some fairly thick fog, which was an added bonus to keep the cops from looking for speeders. CA-152 was completely empty, and I flew across it to CA-99 without any problems. CA-99 was also socked in by fog, and I made excellent time all the way down to Bakersfield. Cutting east on CA-58 was the usual, and expected smooth drive out past Mojave, and then slow trucks made it crappy when the 4 lane highway became two lanes just west of Boron. From that point onward, all the good time that I had been making was gradually eroded. I-15 was an absolute nightmare. Everyone seemed to be heading up to Las Vegas, and the congestion was horrid. There were tons of expensive/fast/fancy cars fighting it out (i swear that half the cars cost over \$60k) to get there, which meant that people were trying to drive upwards of 90MPH on a 70MPH road, where the traffic was barely going 60MPH in many spots. We got to the hotel just after 3PM, and then headed out to dinner at the (7 month old) Redrock Casino/Hotel.
The food was fairly decent overall at the buffet. The reviews that we had read either were glowing or hated the place, so I guess we lucked out. The one thing that really impressed me was a station with alot of jewish deli food. They had lox, whitefish salad, gefilte fish, and herring in cream sauce. The lox wasn't that great, however the other three were as good0 as I remembered from years ago.
Following dinner we drove back across the western suburbs to the airport to pick up the rental car. Per a recommendation from someone online, I had signed up for the free Thrifty Rent-a-Car 'Blue Chips' club. This membership basically means that I can just show up and not have to fill out any paperwork, and also I get to choose the car that I want (rather than having them assign one to me). All of the 4x4 SUV's that they had were Jeep Liberty's, so I didn't really have much of a selection from that perspective, but I still got to inspect the 4 that they had on the lot. We ended up picking a black one that had a full size spare that was never used, and less than 4k miles. After that we drove over to the Mirage parking garage, parked the two cars, moved everything from the Passat to the Liberty, and headed back to the hotel for the night.
This post is part 1 of the "trip-2006" series: