Our whole family went to Las Vegas, Nevada from April 8-11, 2021 over the kids’ spring break. I was restless after a year of Covid, and driving six hours each way seemed doable while still avoiding the virus. We booked a house in nearby Henderson through Vrbo, which was the way to go for a family—the Strip was chaotic and kinda scummy, plus my husband had a bad headache most of the time, so it was nice for him to have his own bedroom to retreat to.
We spent our first day at or near Boulder City. We rode pedal cars on train tracks with a company called Rail Explorers:
visited the stunning Hoover Dam:
and went to one of my favorite places I’ve ever been: the Clark County Museum. Thank goodness the quirky travel site Atlas Obscura alerted me to it! They had various historical homes we could walk through that were set up with appropriate decor and MANNEQUINS! Sister was so scared that she wouldn’t go beyond the doorways.
There were many exhibits that had historical information too. My family patiently waited for me as I read lots and lots of plaques.
On the second day, the kids got in the house’s hot tub, then we went and walked the Strip, stopping in at the M&M and Hershey stores, the New York, New York shops, and we ate lunch at Tom’s Urban.
We saw the excellent Nathan Burton magic and comedy show too:
On our last day, my husband humored me and went along to a Henderson cemetery where we found the graves of Robin Leach and Tony Curtis (pictured below although it's hard to see):
Then we spent some time at the Pinball Hall of Fame playing their many cool tables:
It wasn’t just pinball that they had. For example, I got a pink Pluto dog made from hot liquid plastic from this machine:
May 19th was our 20th wedding anniversary, so I planned a 3-day visit to Palm Springs, California for my husband and me. We had both received our two Covid vaccine injections by this time, so we flew to Ontario airport (after almost missing our flight because of the Salt Lake airport remodel, which had us taking a 30 min. walk/run from the security checkpoint), then drove 1.5 hours in a rental car. We woke up the first night in our hotel to an apparently drunk guy in the room below us yelling and ranting to his wife (?) about mask policies. Management quieted him down and we switched rooms the next day.
I paid $14 to download an audio driving tour of Joshua Tree National Park, and we spent most of one day there, getting out to hike once in awhile. I would love to go back and see the stars at night; it was very cool:
Since we were fairly close to it, we decided to drive to the Salton Sea, a huge lake that formed by accident after the Colorado River was diverted then overflowed for two years. It became a fabulous tourist destination in the 50s and 60s and then a stinky environmental disaster. The resort town is now mostly abandoned.
The visitor center was closed for the day, but I did buy a poster online that’s done in a vintage travel style. Glow-in-the-dark paint comes through to show a fish carcass and No Swimming sign when the lights are turned out.
Palm Springs is associated with celebrities, and I almost paid a tour company $100/person so we could drive by some former homes of famous people. We ended up paying $5 instead to download a self-guided tour that I found online! It had addresses and some history and the neighborhoods were lovely.
I was most star-struck by the Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant homes. This is the gate to Cary Grant's property with a "CG" on it:
We didn't plan to golf, but we had some extra time, so we rented clubs and played the Dunes course at La Quinta. I didn't get pics, but the most memorable part was seeing roadrunner birds run across the greens and fairways a couple of times. They were wild-eyed and funny.
On our last day, we ate breakfast at Shield's, a date farm with a restaurant and a bunch of statues depicting scenes from the life of Jesus that are out in the orchards. It was weird and I liked it.
We ended by visiting the attraction that sent Palm Springs to the top of my travel list a few years ago after a friend mentioned it in a Facebook post: the Cabazon dinosaurs from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure! They were built by a retired portrait artist and sculptor named Claude Bell who did a lot of work for Knott's Berry Farm amusement park. He first built Dinney the brontosaurus, which took 11 years and cost $100,000 of his own money in the 1960s! You can see some sort of tattooed Instagram model-type person posing in front of Dinney in the picture below; that made me laugh a lot:
Claude was in his 80s when he built a T-Rex. He was quoted in a newspaper article as saying, "Got to keep busy you know. A lot to do before the sand runs out." He died in 1988 and did complete Mr. Rex.
We paid extra to go inside and sit in the mouth like Pee-Wee and Simone:
We so appreciated my sister watching the kids for us while we were gone! Now that we live near family, making arrangements was easy. She even had cousins over and they all followed an art lesson on YouTube:
