Framedlight

We spent another night in Loa and then Anne and I drove back to Las Vegas. We went by some of the more interesting byways before we got onto I-15 and the big roll into the city. Unfortunately there was not time or opportunity to stop and take pictures. Even though there was the memorable experience of a road runner running down the road, naturally. Our plane left in the early evening for the journey back to Florida, a 4½ hour flight. This takes you over Lake Mead, the Hoover Dam, and then after about 20 minutes, the Grand Canyon. I had a window seat and was able to take some pictures.  It got dark about 7.00pm and then we seemed to fly over vast tracts of nothing with the occasional oasis of light from a small town. Eventually we crossed the Gulf of Mexico and shortly after landed at Orlando Airport. The next day, before I took my flight home to the UK, Ron, Anne's husband took me for a tour to see the hurricane damage. We also saw, from their driveway, a rocket launch fro...

Mike left Las Vegas early in the morning for a flight back to Chicago. You probably don't remember that the holiday had been complicated by Hurricane Irma, who had arrived the weekend I departed for Utah with Mike. Anne, my sister-in-law, was supposed to be coming with us, but the hurricane necessitated her staying in Florida for work. I had changed my flight to the UK for a later one, so allowing me to have a few days more with Anne and Anne to have a holiday. She was due to fly into Vegas later that day, letting me to do another bout of photography on the 'Strip'. Inside the casinos everything was in action petty much as it was the previous evening, except a little quieter. Outside the sun was beating down. I survived it for a few hours, then threw in the towel and came back to my hotel room to do a little photo processing and read. I had had enough of Las Vegas and wanted to get back to the landscapes of Utah. ...

Which I know is in Nevada, but it helps to keep things together.  It was early evening when we drove back into Las Vegas. It was warm and muggy and on the road we had seen rain storms over the neighbouring hills. Mike had booked rooms at the Excalibur Hotel, a rather faded 'resort' on the Strip, as he thought I should get the Las Vegas experience, which we did, in spades. Checking in seemed to take ages. There was a long line of receptionists and long queues of customers. We were wearing walking boots and jeans and looking generally dusty, in contrast to the others who were ready for a night out on the town, or at the tables. My room faced out over a flat roof and the facade of something out of Camelot. You can exit the hotel on high pedestrian walkways and there was lightening playing in the sky, although the rain never came. We descended to street level and spent some time in a hotel called Paris, for obvious reasons. This had a long internal boulevard with a ceiling o...