Ooooooops! One more

Since the casinos might be opening up next week, we decided to snoop around (in the car that is) to see what is going on construction wise in Las Vegas. We were surprised to see that amount of construction activity that was going on! On Las Vegas Boulevard on the main entrance into the downtown and Fremont Street area we spotted this new welcome sign – impressive!

On Fremont Street we had been aware when we left that there were planned projects. We simply assumed that with the pandemic that all activity would be on hold. However, we were surprised to see ongoing activity on the significant remodeling of the old Lady Luck Casino into the Downtown Grand Casino. As far as we can tell, if not for the Coronavirus, it would probably be open and operating now.

My brother and I would occasionally spend a few minutes at the seedier establishments (except for Glitter Gulch of course) on the north end of the Fremont Street Experience. The Las Vegas Club was a sports themed casino with a façade like you were looking into a MLB park from the outside. Mermaids Casino was ever seedier than the Las Vegas Club, always giving away worthless trinkets to anyone the aggressive hawkers outside could get to come in. And Glitter Gulch was a sleezy strip club, as though the adjective for this kind of establishment is really needed. They were all imploded to make way for Circa Las Vegas, a 777 room (huh, three 7’s in Las Vegas?), 1.25 million square foot facility is now planned to open in December. We’ll see.

When the financial crisis hit in late 2007, Boyd Gaming had acquired the old Stardust property, imploded it, and began construction of Echelon Place, likely their most high-end property. Of course, they immediately halted construction, and the H beams that were in place already weathered many years. In 2013 the Genting Group bought the site, and planned to construct a $4.3 billion casino, making it the most expensive property in all of Las Vegas. While opening has been pushed to summer of 2021, we saw a considerable amount of current construction activity going on when we walked the perimeter.

Not only is there gaming construction going on here, but there is also significant sports related construction. The Las Vegas Raiders were scheduled to have their opening game against the New Orleans Saints on September 21 this year. While its hard to tell if the stadium will be ready for that game, it does look to be complete, at least from the outside. They seem to be just doing ground work around the stadium, but there is no way to see what it might be like inside. It is massive, however, and when Raider Nation in the post-Covid 19 era is actually able to sit in the seats, I hope to be able to check it out myself.

We hope to be talking to you soon.

Moved in

We’ve settled into our temporary residence in Henderson to hunker down and wait until some more reassuring developments occur in this pandemic. We thought we would head out a bit and see what it was like with everything being closed down here. We had heard in the news that the Grand Canyon of Arizona would be open for visitors for this Memorial Day weekend. However, we learned first hand that the Grand Canyon of Nevada was still closed. We saw very few cars on the Las Vegas Strip, and even fewer pedestrians!

Since we were out and about, we decided to check out one of our favorite state parks in the area, Valley of Fire. We assumed it might not be too busy, but we were wrong. When we got to the western entrance there was a line of at least a dozen cars waiting to get in. Every parking area was packed, and the one time we did get out of our car, the only two masks we could see were the ones on our own faces. There was not much social distancing going on, and the average age of folks we saw could easily be potential non-symptomatic types.

So, we decided to not hang around too much and headed for the road along the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The traffic was much lighter, and we managed to find an empty parking lot with an empty picnic table near a really cool spring. Despite the heat there was plenty of water in the spring, which was lined on both sides by lush green palm trees and reeds. We had a nice, pleasant and isolated picnic lunch before we headed back. Kona was beside himself being able to get out and smell some unknown smells.

We put Colectiva II in storage for now, which was bitter sweet. Since we won’t likely be doing any traveling for a while, we will sign off on the blog for a bit.

We hope to be talking to you soon.

Moving in - we hope!

We made it to Vegas and got settled into the Oasis RV Resort. Today is the day for our appointment at the property managers office to pick up the keys for our temporary rental property. We hope we have everything we need – cashier checks for May rent and the security deposit, proof that we have renter’s insurance, and hopefully that is enough. We have already been working on getting our utilities going – we have an appointment this afternoon for a representative from Southwest Gas to start our gas service, and a representative from NV Energy is coming to check our meter reading and start service. Hopefully all will go off without a hitch.

We are adjusting a bit to being hunkered down, but basically that means going outside on a walk every time we get bored – which for me is about every hour. We are redoing many old puzzles since you can’t get a puzzle on Amazon in less than a month or two delivery time. The woman got creative and made us our first face masks, since you couldn’t buy any kind of masks anywhere. I wonder if Trump, after seeing how stylish she made them, might change his mind and wear one of these.

Other people have formed their own routines to deal with the boredom and fatigue of being sheltered in place. Our primary solution is the walks. But others seem to have come up with more creative answers. This two-person private yoga matt workout is one example, complete with makeshift weights of a coffee pot filled with water, and a gallon Zip-Loc bag filled with all kings of objects. Nice!

We have stayed at the Oasis RV Resort when we came back to Vegas since we sold our house and moved into Colectiva 4 years ago. Each year we have been here, we have seen some of the same people who obviously live here year-round. We spotted the old Blue Bird Wanderlodge (Blue Bird makes all the orange school buses) named “Bird of Paradise”. We also spotted the green Mazda Miata with the distinctive license plate – the driver is not even close to 18, so we are not sure what the reference is.

As the country attempts to reopen the economy, everyone is adjusting to the pandemic. Restaurants are opening at between 20% and 50% occupancy, depending on where in the country you live. The casinos are trying to formulate how they are going to reopen, with many of the local operators in Vegas planning which properties they are going to open first. The cruise lines are scheduling departures in August. Even the weed industry has had to adapt to Covid 19.

Talk to you soon.

Made it - hopefully

By the time this blog publishes, we should be safe and sound back in Vegas – at least that is the plan. Our old plan, that we still have in our written itinerary for now, was to visit some sites we had not seen before either because we didn’t know about them, or they were lesser attractions. We managed to visit Louisiana’s Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge; however, we could only drive through it as it was closed due to Covid 19. Also, in Louisiana we visited the Cane Creole National Historic Park. However, we had the same result. We could drive through it, but all facilities were closed. Dang!

We did manage to at least see one of the items we had planned on. Old Route 66 runs through historic Holbrook Arizona, and we had planned to go there to and walk on Bucket of Blood Street. In 1886, Terrill’s Cottage Saloon had a reputation for being exceptionally violent, and one night that year a gunfight broke out between the cowboys that ended in so much death that the floors were said to be slick with a “bucket of blood.” Given the state of things, we didn’t get out and walk around to find it. We did manage to find the Empty Pockets Saloon which dates back to that time. However, before Coronavirus, we would have been excited to go inside to have a beer. As you can see the doors are closed and the Covid notice is posted.

It seemed to us that it was time to try to get home safe. As we mentioned, they opened the beaches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and while it isn’t as insane as Jacksonville, the day before we left, you couldn’t even find a parking spot at the beach. As we wandered through Louisiana, the mall parking lots were simply packed. In Texas, a lot of dine in restaurants had parking lots that looked to be 80% full. We’ll feel better to be in our house where we can decide if we go out, rather than in an RV Park where social distancing is hard. Did I say “our house”/ We actually do have a house in Vegas, but we have a tenant, and because of the Governor’s emergency order, we can’t ask him to leave so we can live in our own house! We had to find somewhere else to rent!

Even though we seem to dwell nonstop on the pandemic, we still find ourselves in RV parks every night. Occasionally we are pleased to see things that make us feel bit more normal, although in most cases the feeling is rather fleeting. At the KOA in Williams Arizona, if you wanted to experience first hand the old west, you can spend the night in a teepee. We have seen this before, but what we had not seen in any other park we have visited the ability to spend the night in Conestoga wagons.

 

We have also found another way to pretend we aren’t in the midst of a national pandemic. Even though all hell has broken loose, there are still geocaches out in public that are being maintained by their owners. When we stop at a rest area or in an RV park at night, we check to see if there is a cache nearby, and luckily, there usually is. It gives us just a few minutes to feel more in the past – that is until we open the cache container, sign the log, and then douse our hands in sanitizer!

Talk to you soon.

Taking the chance now

Well, despite the pandemic and its impact on the economy, we still see clear signs of the ingenuity of our consumer product behemoths. While on our morning Kona walk, we didn’t see who it was that was wearing Victoria Secret flip flops on the beach today. However, we did get to see his or her footprints all over the impressionable sand.

We decided that it is time to try to get back to Vegas. While we have a house there, the governor’s emergency orders prevent us from giving our tenant notice, even though we only have a month to month lease. So, we have found a home for rent with sufficient furnishings for us to get by until the emergency order is lifted. We hope to get back to Vegas before things get locked down more tightly when the infection rates spike from the states opening their economies too early and too quickly. As we have seen, public maintenance is not a high priority during a pandemic.

Our normal travel habits include 3-5 hours of driving, and we always try to pick a stopping spot we haven’t been to before. We try to leave time at our destination for exploring, but obviously with the pandemic, there is really no need for that. In addition, there is so much ins and outs in RV parks that they really don’t feel very safe. So, our plan is to try to drive as long as the sun is up, and stop as few times as we can handle. We wished we could stop and visit our loved ones along the way, but it just doesn’t seem very responsible.

Talk to you soon.

Casinos closed – bad! Public schools closed – good!

The author is back! Apparently, he or she did not go to California as I thought. And there were some new rants we hadn’t seen before. However, we also saw some repeats with just some updated numbers – now 30 million without jobs.

While we didn’t actually see who the chalk author was, we had the opportunity and just missed out. We did our usual walk to the end of the paved beach walk, Kona mostly running on the beach. We read each of the rants as we passed by. After we turned and started back, we noticed that the first rant had been edited – an additional thought had been added – on other rants as well. But, we failed to see the author in action – dang!

Talk to you soon.

Creativity challenged

Well, we thought that with the relaxing of shelter orders that seem to be happening all over in the southeast that chalk manifestos that we had been encountering would go away. But we were wrong. On this morning’s walk a new batch of right-wing red neck thoughts of the day appeared. My brother suggests the use of “rants” rather than thoughts of the day.

At first, we only saw repeats of rants we had seen before, or ones with only one or a few words changed. But then we saw a few new ones we had not seen before. I don’t know if the creative juices are beginning to dry up, or if the author is just getting a bit tired of coming up with completely new ideas on such a frequent timetable..

We had a heavy rain that washed all the chalk off the beach walk a few days ago, and we haven’t seen a single thought of the day reemerge. With Gavin Newsom ordering beaches in California closed after just opening them up due to the mass of crowds and lack of social distancing, I wonder if the author may have headed to California where his talents are more keenly needed than here in the southeast where the economy is opening.

Some folk in the RV park were not going to let a pandemic keep them from their fishing priorities. Down here most of the cars have high performance engines, and all the trucks have huge diesels, like the one pulling this boat. But why stop at the truck – you might as well deck out your fishing boar with appropriate levels of power as well!

Talk to you soon.