Ahh, those Las Vegas bunnies!

We don't  often 'do'  traditional boxed Christmas gifts at our house. In fact, Joel still points to an elephant trek on Christmas Day through the jungles of Northern Thailand - now many long years ago - as the best gift I've ever given him.

So, it shouldn't be a surprise that this year we gave ourselves a trip to Las Vegas for the holidays. And, by holidays I mean:  Christmas, New Year and BCS "Bowl Week" with its dozens of play-off games marking the passage of  football season for another year.

Since we'd opened the college football season in Las Vegas back in September, it seemed fitting to head back to the comfort of its many casino 'sportsbooks' where we could be surrounded by frenzied fans sipping adult libations while cheering the on-field action, their heads whirling to watch sometimes multiple games being shown on as many as 50 television screens that wallpaper these areas. 

Note: we were't among the 230,000 New Year's Eve revelers who Vegas officials estimate headed to The Strip and Fremont Street to celebrate the arrival of 2011 despite temperatures dipping below freezing. And we left town as the estimated 120,000 attendees were arriving for the highly publicized International Consumer Electronics Show and the lesser talked about Adult Entertainment Expo.  

We opted to take the window of opportunity between NYE and the conventions when room rates drop and football games headline activities.  We spent our first couple nights at the Suncoast in Summerlin, about 15 minutes -- and light years -- from The Strip and its night life, Playboy Bunnies, glitz and glamour.

Late afternoon looking toward the Red Rock Canyon

But in this quiet Vegas suburb, a gateway to the Red Rock Canyon, there are plenty of wide open spaces as evidenced by this image taken from our room.  Out here when you say 'bunny' it means the four-legged kind; the kind that seemed to play hide-and-seek with us on New Year's morning, when bundled up Pacific-Northwest-style to brace against the 34-degree 'high'  of  the day, we took a long walk along the neighboring golf course.

Getting our Kicks On Route 66

We began our road trip in Santa Barbara following Highway 101, that wonderful stretch of highway that follows the Pacific Coastline. We headed inland and around Los Angeles via Pasedena, looping just south of the San Gabriel Mountain's sparcely snow capped peaks.



We had just entered the desert country when the fancy little gizmo in the rental car alerted us to the fact that we were on the Historic Route 66. We don't use GPS things, preferring the old fashioned map system but this came with the car and it was on so it provided some entertainment. . .and we wouldn't have known we were on Route 66 without it as it wasn't marked by roadsigns. It was a kick so we should have suspected it, right?

Our route (pun intended) took us between Death Valley National Park to the north and the Mojave National Preserve to the south. A long barren stretch of highway - the topography a sharp contrast to the lush tropical beachside we had left.


The dry desert landscape was misleading as we found ourselves climbing - in fact reached 4,730 feet at Halloran Summit - much higher than our Snoqualmie Pass back in Washington State.

We made a brief stop in Barstow and had lunch - couldn't see much reason for staying there any longer (apologies to anyone reading this who lives there. . .but what does one do when one lives in Barstow anyway?)


We arrived in Summerlin, just northeast of downtown Las Vegas seven hours after we had left Santa Barbara. We had traveled 364 miles. Traffic nearing Los Angeles even in the middle of the day had slowed to a crawl and we slowed again as we circled the outskirts of Vegas, (photo taken as we crept past The Strip) but the rest of the trip had been open road and easy driving.