The Long Drive Home

This blog post is going to cover the long drive home. Las Vegas to Green Bay. Two and a half days of driving. It was the longest part of the trip because we just wanted to get home, sleep in our own beds.

The first day we drove through some of the most beautiful scenery on the entire trip. Well, the first few hours were more desert with the mountains in a haze in the distance. The haze was so thick that it seemed that mountains just appeared out of nowhere. Later I realized the haze was probably caused by all the forest fires in the Northwest.

Does anyone know what these are for? They are like little hills that just end at a fence. They were on the sides of the roads ever mile or so just before we got to the mountains. This type of stuff intrigues me as we sit for hours and hours.  There was no cell signal anywhere near there so I couldn't look it up but I still can't think of what search terms to use anyway. 

After a couple hours, we started climbing into the mountains. We saw real trees again and lots of green besides the rocks and mountains. And it got beautiful!

We went through quite a few tunnels, the longest is called the Eisenhower tunnel. Kind of freaky that a whole mountain was above us!

I wouldn't want to have to drive this in the winter, but watching people float down the river and trains glide along the mountain was so beautiful!

That night we stayed at a Super 8 northwest of Denver. Kind of gross, we were there less than 10 hours and there wasn't an AmericInn near there (which we prefer when available).

The next day's drive wasn't nearly as exciting. Even Spencer took a nap. Something tells me that he is not going to like this photo when he's a teenager, but he did give me permission to use it now. 

That night we stayed at a nice AmericInn in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Much nicer than the previous night. 

Only 5-6 more hours to go, with a stop in Oshkosh to pick up Lego, have a delicious apple crisp that Oma made and chat a bit.

According to my fitbit, I walked 160,733 steps, 476 floors, 66.39 miles, and burned 49, 231 calories. I'm sure I ate more calories than that, but this was definitely not a sit and relax vacation, which is perfectly fine by me.

We made it home finally. 5200 miles, 100 hours of driving, 12 states, and countless memories. We had so much fun and can't wait for our next epic Kline road trip next summer!

A Day in Las Vegas

 Neither Jeff nor I had ever been in Las Vegas before. We are just a bit too old for the bachelor/bachelorette party weekend phenomenon and we don't really gamble or drink much. But we definitely wanted to have a look around and show the kids cool things. The Excalibur, which we chose based on recommendations that it was one of the more family friendly resort hotels (Circus Circus is the other one, but I hate clowns). Plus it was cheaper than a campsite, and had air conditioning.

Las Vegas seems to be like Disney for adults. Lots of gluttony in food, shopping, drinking and gambling. We helped the kids partake in gluttony in food as you can see. Carson loves Cinnamon rolls, and often begs Jeff to make them on weekend mornings. Well, this is from Cinnabun and he was in heaven!

Spencer and Jeff shared a dozen Krispie Kremes and Jeff flashbacked to college with a breakfast Mountain Dew. I decided to just grab a coffee and go to some of the shops in that area while they ate themselves silly.

We took the tram to the nearby hotels, Luxor and Mandalay Bay. Then we walked back to the Excalibur on the sidewalk. So hot! The temperature reached 109 degrees that day. Who ever thought it would be a good idea to build this city in the middle of a desert? 

After that, we walked across the skywalk to the New York, New York resort and escaped into the cool lobby. 

We spent some time in their arcade after getting a picture with Zoltar. We will have to show kids the movie "Big" for Kline Family Movie Night soon. 

We then wandered around at a lot of the shops. The Hershey store was really neat, and the kids had fun getting silly for the camera.

A Twizzler Statue of Liberty

And a chocolate one!

We have a tradition in our family when the kids are begging for things at stores. I take a picture of them holding it up and they can "remember" that they want it and add it to their Christmas wishlist. Works like a charm to stop the begging. I'm not sure if Carson really wants a stuffed Hershey bar or just wanted his picture taken, but I actually got a real smile out of him so it's going on the blog!

Spencer thought that "drinking" out of this huge chocolate sauce bank was hilarious!

It seems like walls of candy are popular here. I saw three stores with candy walls. This wall is full of all the varieties of Hershey kisses.

 This is a huge sign out front of the Hershey store. If you are on the Vegas Strip, you can't miss it!

 The Swatch store brought Jeff and I back to middle school. Did you know that they don't make the guards for them anymore? You can only buy them on ebay now.

Being in the stores must have tired out all the boys because we only made it to one more resort, the MGM.

The bathroom faucets had TVs in them! 

We ate the MGM Lunch buffet and it was delicious. Jeff is the one who usually loves to take pictures of his food and post it, but I just couldn't resist showing off the yummy desserts!

We headed back to the Excalibur and headed down to their arcade called the "Fun Dungeon". It was a lot more kid-friendly than the New York, New York arcade.

This game rocked and moved as they got the bad guys.

Jeff had just as much fun as the boys playing games like Guitar Hero.

Father and son, head-to-head in a race!

Spencer and I played a few rounds of air hockey. We will have one of these in our basement someday!

Star Wars Pod Racers!

The boys had a blast :)

Time to go back to the hotel where the boys were very excited to watch TV, while Jeff took a nap. We got rid of cable last year, so the kids were happy as clams to watch Spongebob, and reruns of Full House while I went out exploring more shops in the desert heat.

I went to a bunch of shops in Mandalay Bay and then went back to the strip and made it to a huge Coca-Cola store, a 4 story M&M store, and Marshall's where I bought a couple shirts so I wouldn't have to do laundry until we got home. 

An M&M wall of candy!

Our hotel, the Hershey store, and the roller coaster and Statue of Liberty. I couldn't take the heat after this and started back.

It was dinner time by the time I got back so I picked up Popeyes for Jeff and I and hot dogs from Hot Dog on a Stick for the boys. Funny that it's the only thing they have on their menu, hot dogs on sticks.

After watching one more episode of Full House, we all crashed in preparation for a long drive as we finally head for home. 

San Diego Safari Park and the Drive to Las Vegas

 After cuddling up with the ants, we packed up and headed out to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. We decided not to go to the actual zoo, because we go to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago (which is awesome) almost every year. The Safari Park is connected to the San Diego zoo, but is where their breeding programs are held as they help to save species from extinction. It was pretty cool!

We got there right when it was opening, so many of the shops, restaurants, and safaris had not started yet. We walked around and saw many of the animals, most which are endangered in the wild.

The boys now love hamming it up in front of the camera. We tried to get them both in the same photo, but the taller bat was just a little too high for Spencer to get his face in. They both still wanted a bat picture though, so here they are.

We went into the Lemur enclosure. They were freaking out about something and just shrieking. The workers thought that maybe they saw a snake or something and they were warning each other. 

We went to see the Cheetahs and they were just lying in the shade. Later in the day, there was a demonstration that we could have paid extra for, and we could actually see them run. We couldn't stay that long though.

Our entrance fee included one safari (though there were many more we could purchase as add-ons). We were on one of the first trips of the day and many of the animals were out with their babies, enjoying the sun. Lots of animal species were intermingling just like they would do in the wild. It was very cool!

The Safari Park is also a licensed Botanical Gardens and there were unusual plants everywhere. The first flower is the same as one type of singing flower in the Tiki Room at Disneyland, called a Bird of Paradise.

Spencer posing with a "giraffe. Looks real, doesn't it?

There was a tiger feeding that was timed just perfectly. The zoologist talked about how they are breeding this tiger and how the tigers are becoming more and more endangered due to deforestation. Many of their forests are being cut down for agriculture. Palm oil is a big export in these areas right now. Here is an article from Time Magazine that talks about the issue. "How Palm Oil is Killing the Sumatran Tiger"

The zoologist put chunks of meat right on the window ledges so we could see the tiger up close and personal. Unfortunately, the tiger went for the big huge bone in a box and ran away. It was kind of funny, though, because the tiger was prancing away with the box in front of herself and ran into the the wall. 

Once everyone got sick of waiting around for the tiger to come back out where she could be seen, most people wandered away. We were hanging out in the shade and she came back. We got some great photos.

There were lagoons with a lot of different birds.

The last section that we explored was the Gorilla exhibit. Again, we timed it just as they were being fed. There were about gorillas with this big guy as the head honcho, and one juvenile.  We learned that you are not supposed to stare directly into the eyes of a gorilla, because they consider it rude and possibly a challenge. I find it hard to look them in the eye anyway, they all seemed to have such intelligence. I wonder what they are thinking of all those people looking at them all day.

After that, it was lunchtime and time for us to head out to Las Vegas. We were also ready to get back into air conditioning. As we were leaving the area, I finally saw baby palm trees. All the trees I have seen were really tall and I wondered why I never saw small trees. Small palm trees do exist!

San Diego was very dry but it got much drier as we got farther out of the city areas. Here is a dust devil right in the field next to us. 

This was the outside temperature as we passed the exit for Death Valley. Very desolate area of the country, even on the Interstate.

The Mohave Desert. This was basically the landscape during most of our drive today. I read Harry Potter, and Jeff played some podcasts. 

We did start to see these cool cactus trees. I think these are Joshua Trees? 

Right around sunset, we arrived in Las Vegas.  We had to walk through the casino floor to get registered for our room. This was my first time in Vegas, but I imagine that I would have had a completely different mindset if I was there with just adults. I felt extremely nervous and had a death grip on the boys. There wasn't anything obviously inappropriate for them to see or anything, but it still wasn't a place for kids at that time of night. We also got approached almost immediately with offers of half price tickets to  (kid-friendly) shows, but there was no way we were sitting through a 3 hour hard sell of anything. Those people are really aggressive!