We left Death Valley in a rush. All night long, a strong wind was blowing, sometimes gusting up to 50 mph. Our tent rattled and shook all night long, making for a restless sleep. In the morning, we packed up our stuff in a hurry stuff, hoping to drive away from the wind storm to a place where we can get organized and calmly put ourselves and the car back together. As we drove, we got to death valley junction, a tiny city with a hotel and an opera house with a very interesting story. Unfortunately we missed the guided tour of the operate house, so we only got this one picture of its outside.
As we looked for a quiet spot we tried to stop at Red Rock State Park. Despite the strong wind we took a moment to organize the car and our bags, and took a quick drive through the scenic road. It was very pretty, but we were ready to get to a hotel with a warm shower after two nights in death valley and a restless wind swept night, so we didn’t linger.
After Red Rock, we arrived at our hotel, the Luxor on the edge of the Las Vegas strip. It is a really weird hotel built during Las Vegas’ “Disneyland” era. During that time casinos were built that resembled giant theme parks, and this particular one was Egyptian themed. It looks like a pyramid, and used to have way more Egyptian paraphernalia that it does today. I was especially impressed with the elevators, that move diagonally along the outer axis of the pyramid. You might miss the slight side jerk as the elevator starts and stops if you are not paying attention. There is an excellent 99 percent invisible episode about Las Vegas’ history if you want to hear more (thank you Amir for the tip!).
Vegas is known for having many loss leader deals, designed to lure you into the money making vices of shopping, gambling, drinking, and “adult content”, as the corporate term goes. I think they lost money on us.
We did find a nice hipster cafe in a normal people’s neighborhood outside the strip called PublicUs, which was really really nice. We enjoyed a good breakfast and professionally made lattes in a familiar hipster setting, and felt for a brief moment like we never left the bay area. Their shakshooka dish was not necessarily the original Israeli variety, but was an interesting interpretation of it.
After less than 24 hours we left Las Vegas and headed towards Grand Canyon National Park. We did most of drive in one go, and stopped as the sun was starting to set in a little side park about an hour away to have a quick snack of leftovers, and to organize our car.
I’ll write more about our adventures at the El Tovar Hotel, where we are staying tonight later on, but I had to include here the Elk we just saw as we went for a night walk along the south rim.
(previous post here)
(next post here)