October 2 to 15, 2008 - Las Vegas, NV

We left Zion National Park in the morning of October 2nd and headed to Cummins Rocky Mountain in North Las Vegas, NV to get our engine checked out.  Turns out our turbocharger was broken and we needed a replacement.  Luckily they had a spare in stock and wanted us to come back between 7AM and 7:30AM in the morning.

We moved on to TT Las Vegas and settled in after 166 miles.  Our last stay here was December 2006.

We booked for two weeks to make sure we had time to fix everything wrong. 

In the morning we were up early and had the motorhome at Cummins Rocky Mountain at 7:05AM, about a 30 minute drive from the campground.  They called us about 11:30AM to say the motorhome was ready.  The repair went easy and was all under warranty, so we only had a $100 deductible to pay.  We moved back to TT Las Vegas and started trying to find a place to look at our ABS braking system since Cummins was unable to.

October 6th we moved to a 50AMP site:

We could see our friends Roger and Toni's fifth wheel trailer from our site.

We did get some visiting in with Roger and Toni before they moved to Bullhead City, AZ.  Since they will still be in Bullhead City when we arrive, we will see them again soon.

We were able to get our ABS braking system checked out by Las Vegas Freightliner and it looks to be a loose wire issue.  They cleaned and tightened the wiring connections and told us even if we get the engine check again we do not have to panic since it just means the ABS system is temporarily shut off. 

Except for the early mornings at both Cummins and Freightliner, we took it easy in Las Vegas.  

October 14th we decided to see some of the Las Vegas Strip.  We parked on the south end and here are some photos.

South:

North:

New York, New York:

Bellagio had a nice "garden" display inside with this animated apple tree:

Video of the "tree" saying "Nice" (2.88MB WMV)

Some more photos from Bellagio:

An Ent (Lord of the Rings):

We watched the water show outside at Bellagio, the music for this one was "Viva Las Vegas" by Elvis Presley.

We also took in the free "rain storm" show at Planet Hollywood and visited the Lion Habitat at MGM Grand. 

MGM has a $9 Million display for the lions, where the lions have purified air, water and the sound of the casino is blocked.  They bring each lion from their out of town ranch for up to five hours once or twice a week.  We got to see this big guy eat ground horsemeat off the windows in front of us.  There were two people inside the enclosure with the lion, including one guy holding a couple pounds of horsemeat in his hand.

Video of the lion eating horsemeat off the window (2.30MB WMV)  Note the red light in the video is the focus light from the camera.

We took advantage of having Costco, Sam's Club, Trader Joe's and Fry's Electronics locally.  We had the buffet at the Red Rock Station Casino twice, the Silverton Casino once and the lunch buffet at India Palace once.  Other than some quick meals while waiting for the motorhome, we only ate out one other time, a nice dinner at Bahama Breeze.  Most days were hot, 80s to low 90s, but we had a few days with wind, a smattering of rain, and a couple days of cooler weather.   The local city traffic made it a bit noisy so we are glad we do not live here.

We decided it was now time to have an engine monitor.  The one we wanted was VMSpc but we did not want to secure one of our big notebook computers while traveling.  But the new category of low priced, low weight, small sized notebooks called "netbooks" had come out.  We saw an Acer Aspire One at Fry's Electronics but it was just a display model and they had no idea when they were getting more in.  Mail order to the rescue.  Here is a web page showing the setup we ended up with.

Next we are off to Bullhead City, AZ and then Grand Canyon National Park.

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