Well, I'm now ensconced in the Las Vegas Hilton. So far my big accomplishment (besides recovering from the shock of paying $11/day for Internet access) has been to get an autographed picture of Suzie Plakson who was making a guest appearence dowstairs at Quark's. No doubt her 6' 1" height (along with her good looks) played a part in her casting. But more on Vegas later. I wanted to share some observations about our recent trip east.

 

I arrived in Vegas yesterday after returning to Seattle only the day before. For our trip back we decided to alter the route slightly. (Though we still had to return through Billings because we left one of our daughters special blankies there--and subsequently left our coats in Missoula on the return trip!) Instead of heading south out of town to I-80 we went northwest on NE-2 to Alliance and then north through the Black Hills in South Dakota. In you're really that interested, here's a route map:

 

 

I really enjoy driving through the Black Hills. We made the trek once before when our sole dependent was just a dog. <g> The rolling hills dotted with trees are beautiful and the winding roads are a nice alternative to straight-line interstates. I did notice, though, that the GPS in our car, a Lexus RX330, did not have very accurate data for the region and there were many times when it showed us going off-road--not something you want to do in this part of the country! I have also flown over the area, when I was bringing my new Maule back from the factory in 2001. I got to spend a lot of quality time with the GPS on our trip and made a couple other interesting observations. For instance, the road data for Anitoch, Nebraska, a potash ghost town, still shows a very dense downtown core, even though only a few houses exist today. Another interesting observation is that based on odometer readings the two routes varied in distance by only about 10 miles. All in all we put about 3200 miles on the car.

 

And, once again, our two-year-old handled the trip with patience and grace. A big factor in that was the portable DVD player we took along. I had bought a travel case that includes straps for hanging the DVD between the front seats but I was never happy with the way this worked. So for this trip I simply attached a couple of binder clips to the moon roof opening and hung the travel case using two large paper clips. Other than a bit of swinging back and forth the setup worked great and it was simple for mom to change discs.

 

Anyway, hopefully I'll have time before the New Year's Eve festivities begin for another post. I've got a bit of prep work to do and then I'm picking my wife up at the airport (she's going to spend a couple days here) this evening. But if I don't get time, have a great new year's celebration!