And We’re Off! (West Coast Van Trip – Post 1)

As we started on our latest van trip Saturday morning, I fought an unexplained sense of unease. If I believed in such things, I would say it was a premonition. Instead, I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out what might be causing this unnecessary worry.

Usually I’m quite upbeat the morning we head out on a van trip – relieved that the packing is done and excited to be at the beginning of a vacation and heading toward fun places to be. And this trip should be much easier than towing a boat to Florida!

I think we’re just not in the mood for a road trip. We planned this trip a few months ago, back before John ended up having to work in Albuquerque more than expected. With all the driving back and forth between Tucson and Albuquerque, we are actually getting tired of road trips. Not a great mental space for starting another road trip.

I’ve been having some trouble with my back for a couple of months, so John bought me this bead thing for my seat. LOL, remember back when these were popular? I’m guessing circa 1970’s, but John’s thinking more like 1990’s. As we get older, it all starts running together.

Our first stop is Lake Las Vegas, in Henderson, Nevada where we once owned a condo. It’s a little resort area with a hotel, casino, shops, restaurants and golf courses around a small lake. We first stayed there shortly after the real estate crash of 2008, when the place was in bankruptcy. John fell in love with the area because it was all new and fancy but also completely deserted. I thought it had a bit of a dystopian feel, with coyotes ambling across dead putting greens. But we were able to pick up a nice condo with beautiful views for next to nothing, which we enjoyed until we sold it in order to afford our move to California in 2012.

We have occasionally gone back since then. Many of the condos are vacation rentals, but this time we are staying at the hotel. We have gotten tired of airbnbs, which we felt were safer during the pandemic – some of them were great, but some were terrible. Usually with a brand name hotel, you can at least expect a fairly consistent experience. This delta variant of covid is worrisome, but John and I are going to trust in our vaccinations, as well as take decent precautions.

After driving through 4th of July weekend traffic for 7 hours (yep, America is on the road this summer), we made it to Lake Las Vegas at 4:00 PM. Big snafu at check-in; no room! Our reservations were for a lake view room with a balcony but they had given them all away. More rooms were coming available and we were willing to wait, but they refused to assign us a room before it was cleaned because – what if there was something broken? They wouldn’t know until they had the housekeeper’s report. They would not guarantee anything and we wondered if we’d end up scrambling to find a last-minute room in Las Vegas for the holiday weekend. Dozens of people milled around in the lobby with suitcases waiting for a room. What a fiasco.

I think the new question to establishments nowadays, instead of asking about covid-prevention practices, should be, “Are you paying your staff sufficiently such that you are fully staffed and are operating smoothly, or are you unable to keep your establishment running properly due to a critical lack of staff?”

After about an hour wait we were given a room with a beautiful view (but no balcony – I hope they don’t charge us for the balcony that never materialized). There’s no housekeeping available during our stay (another new-since-covid), but the room is clean enough and we’re only here for a couple of nights.

Here’s the view out our window. The hotel lobby is practically as far away as those buildings in the right hand section of the picture. It’s 280 steps just to get down the hall from our room to the elevator, and another 100 from the elevator to the lobby! (Yeah, I counted, lol). All told, about 500 steps from our hotel room to where the van was parked, which roughly translates to a quarter of a mile!

At least the view is excellent.

It costs an extra $25 per night to park our overly-tall van that doesn’t fit into the parking garage.

Here’s a funny picture of John trying to clean the outside of the very dirty window with a wash cloth tied around a coat hanger. The window only opened a few inches so he couldn’t reach very much of it. I was surprised it opened at all!