The Road To Vegas

We left Mt Carmel Junction on Thursday.  We stopped for a little service on the motor home ten miles down the road.  We didn’t know how long the service work would take so we planned not to get to Las Vegas the same day.  The service work was done very quickly.  They immediately worked on us and we were back on the road in less than an hour. 

We certainly didn’t want to take the road through Zion Canyon with its tunnels and cliff-side switchback highway.  We talked to a local couple about a route south of Zion through northern Arizona then back into southern Utah.  They told us the route would be fine and then proceeded to tell us we would be traveling through a very infamous place – Colorado City, Arizona which is the home of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) which was headed by Warren Jeffs until he was sent to prison for child sexual assault and rape as an accomplice for arranging marriages between girls and older men. The local couple also told us to observe that many of the houses in Colorado City are not completely finished as a way of avoiding them going on to the property tax rolls.  We saw many houses without siding as we passed through the area

But as we don’t seem to sleep well the night before traveling we still chose to stop and make it a two day trip to Vegas.  And of course we needed to see some more rocks.  We camped in the Virgin River Canyon.  It is a very scenic stretch of highway in the very far northwestern corner of Arizona as you travel from Utah into Nevada.  The campground didn’t have any hookups so it was only $8 a night, except that Gary’s senior parks card got us a half off discount.  We hiked a ridge above the Virgin River that offered great views of the canyon.  Later, we had my third-ever wienie roast – I am making up for all the time I lost until Gary first introduced me to the wienie roast last year.

 

The next morning fully rested we enjoyed the journey on down through the canyon, across the Nevada State Line and finally our first glimpse of the skyline of Las Vegas.