A Family Visit in Vegas

Mark of “pulling a Mark” fame wasn’t the only person we know who we saw in Vegas.  I was catching up with Facebook one day and remarked to Gary, My nephew Chuck is here in Las Vegas.  So I sent him a message and while he was here he and his friend Amanda came downtown to visit with us. 

 

It was the first trip to Vegas for either of them and, of course, was an exciting time for them.  To make matters even better, Chuck hit a slot machine for a very good win early on in their stay.  And they were doing it all  They hit the strip but also visited Red Rocks and Hoover Dam and were also planning to go down to Arizona to the Sky Walk at the west rim of the Grand Canyon.  I went to Fremont Street with them and we saw the Viva Vision and the picture-for-hire people.  We also went to see the swimming pool at the Golden Nugget that has a clear water slide that passes through a shark tank

We also exited our motor home one day and looked over a few spaces and saw a familiar fifth wheel.  A year ago in Livingston, Texas we were just about the same distance from the same fifth wheel in an Escapees RV Park.  At the right is the picture we took of Jim and Renee at last year’s Thanksgiving potluck.  We were supposed to meet up with them on Halloween on Fremont Street, but it was such a madhouse that we never made the connection.  But it sounds like our travels will cross again a couple more times in the coming months.

More Monday Night Football and More Pawn Stars

First, let’s start with an update on the TV I won in the Monday Night Football raffle.  We offered it to a couple of workers in the casinos and on Craigslist, but when that wasn’t working, we traced some of the markings on the box and figured out that the casino had purchased it at an area Walmart.  So I drove it over there in the car and explained everything.  They checked it out and after some huddling and hand wringing they approved a full refund and issued me a Walmart gift card in the amount of $214. 

So, what did we do last Monday night – yep, Monday Night Football at the Lucky 777 Brewpub.  It was a game of interest to us as fans of the Detroit Lions – the Green Bay Packers versus the Chicago Bears – we wanted them both to lose.  Now we are getting this routine down a bit.  They always ask a few trivia questions from the Sunday games.  Before we head over Gary studied up on the big performances of Sunday.  Early on, the announcer asks, “how many touchdown passes did Ben Roethlisberger throw?”.  Gary leaps to his feet and shouts out “four” and becomes the proud owner of a shot glass and a shot.  They ask for volunteers to play beer pong.  I stand and wave my hand, am selected, head over and promptly bounce a ping pong ball into a fish bowl – Dos Equis t-shirt with “stay thirsty, my friends” scripted on it.  No, we didn’t win another TV at the end of the game, but they also have a major prize drawing at halftime.  Again, the drum is spun.  A ticket was pulled.  The announcer reads Gary ……..   Sure enough Gary won the halftime drawing and receives a football autographed by Hall-of- Fame running back, Marshall Faulk.  There are likely two hundred tickets or more in this drum each week and we won two drawings between us.

So where does Pawn Stars enter this blogpost.  Well, we thought about taking the football to them to see if they would want to put us on TV trying to sell it to them.  But that seemed so improbable that we decided to take it to the store of the guy they always call in when they are appraising an item of sports memorabilia – Jeremy Brown.  He runs a shop in the downtown called Ultimate Sports Cards and Memorabilia.  Jeremy wasn’t there, but we offered it up to his associate running the store at that time.  He declined to make an offer as it didn’t come with a certificate of authenticity.  But he tells us in all likelihood it is real and that we should be able to sell it for $75 to $150 without authentication and maybe twice that much if we have it professionally authenticated.  This Monday Night Football thing really worked for us.

And in the same complex we see a store by the name of Toy Shack which has “Pawn Stars Toy Expert” written on the door.  It is owned and operated by Johnny Jimenez the guy who they call in to appraise toys.  Ah, but we didn’t have any toys to offer up short of some of Alley cat’s toys and she wasn’t about to part with any of them.

One day were were reading about events in the downtown area and we read that there would be a poker tournament to benefit the Clark County Museum.  The administrator of this museum is Mark Hall-Patton who is another of the authenticators on the Pawn Stars show.  It says there will be a red carpet event before the tournament so we headed over for a look.  We captured this shot of Mr. Mark resplendent in top hat.  He is probably the biggest celebrity museum administrator in the country.

Gary has offered to be the expert appraiser of motor homes for the Pawn Stars, but the phone hasn’t exactly been ringing off the wall.

All this Pawn Stars stuff really is big business for Las Vegas and vice versa.  They even announce on the city busses where to get off for a pawn visit.

Lt. Dan Band

How lucky were we for a Veteran’s Day celebration?  It is tough to keep up with all that may be going on in Las Vegas.  We overhead a bit of a conversation and asked, “did you say the Lt Dan Band will be performing on Fremont Street”?  Sure enough, Saturday night Gary Sinise and his Lt Dan Band gave a free concert on one of the stages on Fremont Street.  And if you are one of the three people in the world who doesn’t know the Lt. Dan character, you will just have to Google it.

Gary Sinise created his Lt Dan Band about 10 years ago and has played hundreds of concerts around the world entertaining troops and benefiting the USO.  This is no small production.  There are 12 people in the band and there is a supporting staff as well.  They play a lot of upbeat cover music that keeps the crowd singing and waving the little American flags they passed out.  They even had Gary Sinise up on the Viva Vision canopy.

A lot of Veteran’s were there for the concert and we made our small contributions to the Gary Sinise Foundation and the USO.  We salute all the Veterans and current service members on this special day!

The Shirt Off Gary’s Back–For $40?

We made another foray to the strip and hit the Bellagio buffet for the third time.  We also caught a bit of a lounge show at Harrah’s featuring “Big Elvis”.  This big Elvis is really big, once tipping the scales at over 500 pounds.  He has done over 7,000 lounge shows in his career.  Big Elvis mainly sits in his Big Elvis chair, but he does put on a great performance.

 

 

 

We also walked through the Flamingo Hotel to tour their gardens that feature what else – pink Flamingos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We passed this one store in the Flamingo selling men’s clothing that was, well, way out there.  They had extreme paisley sports coats, every form of ruffled shirt imaginable, and the craziest shoes we ever had seen.  We asked the salesperson just who buys this stuff, and he informed us that is it largely the club crowd that want something extreme to wear when hitting the clubbing circuit.  Gary spotted the sale rack where he scored this shirt for 75% off its tagged price of $48.  At $12, he had to have it.  The next day, he wore it to the poker table.  One guy became so enamored with it that he offered Gary $40 for it and an exchange of the t-shirt he was wearing.  The money was actually out there on the table.  It is tough to turn down such a profit, but Gary really likes the shirt and didn’t want to make another trip down to the Flamingo.  He told the guy where we purchased it and of all things he gave Gary a breakfast bar for the information.  I have to say, this shirt certainly attracts a lot of attention and commentary.

Pawn Stars Spinoffs

Just as we watch the show Pawn Stars, we have also been watching its spinoffs – Rick’s Restorations and Count’s Kustoms.  So if we visited the pawn shop, we might as well visit their shops as well.

Neither one was too far from our downtown location.  First we headed over to Rick’s.  They gave us a guided tour of the facilities.  That consisted mainly of walking down an L-shaped hallway and peering in a few windows of work rooms.  We saw “Cowboy” in the woodshop building a crate.  But we also happened by on a day that they were doing some taping so we caught glimpses of Rick, Kelly, and Tyler as well.

 

 

 

From Rick’s we proceeded over to Count’s.  You don’t get to see the workshop (best we can tell, there is not a great deal to it).  But there is a collection of Count’s cars and motorcycles that you tour and just as at the pawn shop and at Rick’s, there is a large selection of apparel and trinkets and trash that you can purchase.

Top Of The Stratosphere

Another place we like to visit in Las Vegas is the tower at the Stratosphere hotel.  It’s tower is the tallest structure in Las Vegas and the ninth tallest in the United States.  There is a revolving restaurant in the tower as well as an observation deck and thrill rides.  Yes, for whatever reason there are amusement (if they can possibly be called amusement) rides at the top of an 1,150 foot tall tower.  This time we went up to the observation deck for a view of the city at night. We had a “twofer” from our coupon book.   A few years back, we dined at the restaurant for one of my birthdays but you don’t get to enjoy the crisp night air inside in the tower that we experienced this time.

Here is a view of the strip from the observation deck

 

 

 

 

And here is a view of downtown with one of the rides as it has rotated out beyond the guardrail and is about to open up and start spinning all outside the perimeter of the tower.  There is a “demon drop” ride that falls from a vertical structure sticking up out of the top of the tower.  There is a another that propels a little car out over the edge of the tower down an inclined track and there is also bungee jumping.  There is no way I am even thinking of trying these rides.

But the Stratosphere Tower is going to have some new competition for city viewing.  Caesar's Entertainment (formerly known as Harrah’s) is building a gigantic Ferris Wheel behind the Flamingo Hotel that will be taller than the London Eye.  Here it is under construction with the installation shown at the left of one of the very first cars it will carry.  And if that isn’t crazy enough, at the west end of Fremont Street they are building this giant slot machine known as Slotzilla and there will be a zip line from the top of it that will carry you the length of Fremont Street underneath the Viva Vision canopy and above the crowd below.  It’s always something in Las Vegas.

A New Bike On The Trail

I got my “new” bicycle back in Salt Lake City as we reported in an August blog.  Gary finally found his “new” bike here in Las Vegas – another Craigslist find.  His bike is the same brand as mine – Specialized.  It is not the same model but they are very similar.  We now both have plenty of gears for all types of riding.  The streets here in downtown Las Vegas are a little too crazy for bicycling, so we sought out a trail away from the city  One couple who follows our blog mentioned the Railroad Tunnel Trail in Boulder City.  We had read about that one as well.  So off we went with the bikes.

This railroad bed was built to rail the building materials including the dry concrete and the powerhouse equipment to the Hoover Dam construction site.  This is some rough and rocky terrain so they had to build five tunnels in the four-mile length of this trail.  The bikes performed just fine.  The trail was packed gravel with some looser gravel on the top with some grades at times so we were glad we had those gears.

 

 

 

The views are great as you are up above looking down on Lake Mead  The trail ends at a high landing where all the concrete was dumped, mixed and then bucketed down to the many sections of the dam.  We parked our bikes and walked on down to the top of the dam.  We had been there several times before but it is always amazing to see this marvel of engineering and construction.

And there is another new marvel of engineering and construction now in the very same area – the Mike O’Callaghan/Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.  This bridge spans the very top of the canyon walls and routes the majority of the traffic off the dam road.  It is especially valuable to trucking as trucks have been banned from traveling over Hoover Dam for a number of years.  They have had to detour through Laughlin, NV/Bullhead City, AZ with about a 3,000-foot descent and climb through the Colorado River valley.

The bridge road is 900 feet above the Colorado River.  It is the second tallest bridge in the country.

We wanted to see and drive the bridge in the car as we will have to cross it in the motor home whenever it is that we finally leave Las Vegas.  (Yes, we are planning to leave.)  There are two lanes of traffic each way with a wide shoulder and then a wall that is tall enough that you cannot see over it.  If we had not known about the bridge, we might never have known we were on it.  When we go over it in the motor home, we likely will see a bit of the drop, but they instruct tall vehicles to drive the inside lane so it should be just fine unless the winds kick up; they do close it at times because of the winds that can whip through the canyon.  Even I who hates bridges think we can do this one.