Hello from the desert...

Tonight I’m in Henderson, Nevada, which is just a few miles south of Las Vegas. In fact, driving toward the hotel, we were able to see the city – blanketed in a gray haze – just a short distance away. Driving through the dry landscape toward the hotel was like visiting the surface of an alien planet… and then, as if an invisible line of demarcation were in place, we made a right turn and wound up in the middle of a green oasis. Yesterday’s hotel theme was Santa Fe – today, it seems to be more along the lines of, oh, I’m going to guess Moroccan. The coffee shop is called “Marrakesh Express,” the restaurant where we ate dinner was “Café Tajine,” and the gift shop is called “Souk.” I’m actually loving this hotel – it’s huge and airy and surrounded by palm trees, and the Casablanca décor makes it seem as if we’re some place much more exotic than Las Vegas…

We started the day in Albuquerque, which really seemed like a nice city. If we’d had more time, I wouldn’t have minded wandering around to explore for a while. Then we made our way through Arizona – I was surprised when we reached Flagstaff by how piney it was. Meaning it was covered with rolling hills and evergreen trees – not nearly as barren as the rest of the state had seemed. (When I mentioned this to Rick – “I’m surprised by how piney Flagstaff is” – he thought I said TINY. He then proceeded to explain that we hadn’t driven past the entire city yet…) We also drove over Hoover Dam today – we didn’t want to take the time to stop, but we’re thinking of driving back this way on our way home. Rick said he’d really like to take a dam tour… er, a tour of the dam…

So tomorrow we’ll drive the final leg of the road trip before San Francisco. I have to say that one of the greatest recent car-entertainment innovations has been XM radio. Driving across country without the annoyance of constant radio static makes for a much more pleasant journey. Even better than the music channels are the baseball channels – we were able to listen to the entire Yankee game this afternoon without the inconvenience of dialing through random stations to find it.

And of course, what road trip would be complete without a rousing game of Choo-choo? Wait – you’ve never heard of Choo-choo? Yeah, maybe that’s because it’s a really idiotic game that Rick and I invented in the midst of a monotonous car ride a few years ago. The game is pretty simple – if you see a train, you call out “choo-choo.” It doesn’t have to be a train that’s actually moving – it just has to be a train with an engine. Over the last couple years, we’ve refined the rules to add bonus points or take points away. For instance, if a train has a blue engine, and you call out “blue choo-choo” you get an extra point. But if you call choo-choo, and someone ELSE calls out “blue choo-choo” then your point is taken away. See how it makes perfect sense? Okay, yes, it’s the lamest game EVER… even more lame than that license plate game where you try to find a car from every state…

So today in Las Vegas, the high temperature was 100 degrees, and the humidity was about 5 percent. And by tomorrow night, we’ll be in a city where the high will be about 65 degrees, with 70 percent humidity. Confusing? Maybe. At least the XM radio will stay exactly the same…

View from hotel window...