Sep 2008

Our last week in Whistler positively flew by and it wouldn't be us if we weren't trying to do all the stuff we should have done in the three months prior at the absolute last minute!! Bec sold her bike at 6:10pm with just enough time to make the 6:30pm Greyhound bus out of town to Vancouver. Glenn wasn't quite so fortunate and we had to lug his bike and helmet to Vancouver with the plan of selling it there. We were quite sad to leave Whistler. We'd invested so much time into thinking about it and yet it comprised such a small part of our time away.

We spent a week in Vancouver, the main purpose being to acquire our visas for the USA. This was a surprisingly smooth process given the amount of organisation and paperwork that went into it. And so we found ourselves with an extra week on our hands. The weather was typically rubbish which put the kybosh on our plans to go to Vancouver Island but we spent our days at Stanley Park, Kitsilano Beach, a baseball game and the PNE (Vancouver's Ekka) when we weren't trying to offload Glenn's bike (hereinafter referred to as the BB (bloody bike)). To be fair, there was no shortage of shady individuals around our area of town willing to take the BB off our hands. They just weren't prepared to exchange money for it. We had a lovely dinner with Lori and Wayne, friends Bec's parents made while traveling in Egypt. It was really nice just to have dinner and talk about people that we know!!

Vancouver's Ekka. No show bags, but an inflatable Thomas!!

Baseball in Vancouver. Complete with view of pole.

We flew to Las Vegas from Vancouver for a three day stopover en route to Iowa. Welcome to the USA, where people really do drive cars with wooden side-panels (think Chevy Chase, National Lampoon Vacation) and where the price you see is never the price you pay. We booked a car over the internet for $12 a day and ended up paying a total of $136 for the day when taxes and insurances were added!! Nevertheless, we drove our over-priced convertible through the lights of Las Vegas Boulevarde to our hotel where we planned our assault on the lights and buffets of Vegas.

Vegas by night

Glenn's plan to indulge in as many Vegas buffets as possible began the following morning with breakfast at a casino on the way to the Grand Canyon. $6.95 (plus taxes and tips, of course) all we could eat. And eat we did. We continued on, Thelma and Louise style, in our convertible to Hoover Dam (basically a huge dam with enormous appeal for engineering and farming types), had a look around, re-affirmed Bec's fear of small underwater spaces then took off through the desert (temp in Vegas was a consistent 38 celcius) for the Grand Canyon. We seriously (SERIOUSLY) underestimated the amount of time it would take to get there and really only had about an hour to admire the canyon when we eventually got there before heading back to Vegas to return the hire car. Despite spending three months in Canada, the closest thing we got to seeing a moose was the backsides of two elk (elks?) sticking out of some bushes just outside Grand Canyon National Park.

Dams are ugly. This picture of the lead-up to Hoover Dam is much prettier

Nurse Nasty and her friends at the Grand Canyon. Nurse Nasty has nearly been to as many places as Bec.

Our self-guided walking tour of Vegas the following day began with a hearty breakfast buffet and our rough notes on all the free stuff to see and do in Vegas. If it was free, we saw it and did it. We gambled at the MGM Grand at nine in the morning (definately not free) and drank beer at the Fremont Street light show at eleven at night. The themed casinos are amazingly like the real thing. Our personal favourite was Paris, though Bec was partial to St Mark's Square at the Venetian. We saw countless wedding chapels, however the total bride count for the day was a mere two. Our attempts to reduce our mortgage by gambling were fruitless.

The Luxor in Vegas

Venice in Vegas

We stayed at the Stratosphere Casino which has a huge tower and observation platform at the top of its 880ft spire. We took the lift up there the morning we left to check out the view and to watch a few crazies escape death on the rides up there before getting ourselves to the airport for our flight to Iowa to begin our lives as children of the corn.