Baking in the Desert - Not!

We travelled from San Diego to Palm Springs in the pouring rain. Temperatures hovered around 5 C during much of the drive along the Mexican border.

Spent three wonderful nights courtesy of my sister and her husband, who took us to all of the local hiking spots around the area. In spite of their best efforts to wear us out, we survived the ordeal.

The weather was cool and we even got to see snow in the desert. Apparently they have winter down here too - all those tales our friends have told us about the wonderful golfing paradise are complete fabrications.

Sue says that I exaggerate somewhat, but it was really not the blistering heat I was led to expect.

So it was with some trepidation that we left the freezing valley of Palm Springs to travel to the real desert in Nevada. We stayed overnight in Laughlin before heading for Las Vegas. We had breakfast in California, lunch in Arizona and dinner in Nevada. Still jacket weather but at least it stopped raining for a while.

Las Vegas is pretty cool - a lot different than we remember it from 20 years ago. Not many of the old hotels are still a going concern, and a lot of the new ones are hurting because of the down turn in the economy. This is all good news if you are looking for cheap accommodations, so we are taking advantage by staying her for more than a week. We are using the Las Vegas Hilton as our temporary home.

Because there are less people in town, and the hotels are offering a lot of deals, we are actually enjoying ourselves a lot more than we thought we would. About the only real complaint we have is that the Internet is not very readily available here unless you are willing to spend some money (which is just against our basic nature) - that is my excuse for not updating this site sooner.

Our original plan was to drive to Edmonton for Christmas, then go back to the coast. But the weather reports we are getting from the north do not sound very encouraging, and we are really enjoying this extended drive though the south. So we are now going to stay put here for a few more days, then fly to Edmonton for Christmas and New Years, then back to Las Vegas to continue the journey.