Leaving Las Vegas
We strolled to Ceasar's Palace to do their IMAX 3D simulation ride, "Race for Atlantis", which is the only simulation ride I've ever been on that's even vaguely realistic. Usually the flatness of the image, or the fact that you have such a narrow field of vision, or the graininess and low frame-rate of film ruins it. IMAX 3D has none of these problems, and we were thrown around by our moving seat platform too.
After that we got the car back and drove up the strip to the Stratosphere, for another go at getting on that rollercoaster of theirs. The weather seemed fine to us, but one again the rides were closed. We didn't see the point in going to the top without a ride to enjoy, so we left. Sure enough, before we got out of Las Vegas the clouds burst and we were in a thunderstorm again. They're obviously not used to it: in places there were huge puddles in the roads where the drainage wasn't up to the job, and a lot of our fellow drivers were clearly out of sorts with all this water falling out of the skies.
We set off on our canyon loop, which started with a drive through the Lake Mead National Recreation Park. The views were great but the best bits were clearly lost in the fog. Bowling along merrily, we had to brake suddenly for what appeared to be a ford. A car coming in the opposite direction drove through it, but we could see it was being buffeted around quite badly by the current, so we got out of the car for a closer look, to decide whether we should go for it. As we pondered, the water reached our car and we backed up a few metres.
Within 10 minutes we'd retreated five times or so, were 200 metres back from where we had been, and there was a raging torrent of water coming up the road towards us and eventually off into some gulleys. At the bridge (for bridge, and not ford as we had thought, it was) the water must have been about 7 feet above road level -- not that anyone went to find out.
By now several other vehicles were stuck with us, mostly Sports Utility Vehicles, their owners presumably delighted to at last have a justification for owning their beast of a car. In another ten minutes, the water had subsided, and the bridge was dry. We let the SUVs try the bridge first, just to be sure, then drove over it ourselves. It was a bumpy ride: the road was covered in a deep layer of rippled sand carried onto it by the river.
We pressed on, out of the park, and onto Interstate 15, seeing a double-ended rainbow along the way, and eventually decided to stop at the next town we saw with a motel. That town turned out to be Mesquite, Nevada. We thought we'd escaped gambling towns -- but Mesquite is a resort town of casinos and golf courses (golf courses look utterly bizarre dumped in the middle of a desert, incidentally). Not that this affects us: we're vegging out eating delivery pizza in the Valley Inn motel, and we're going to sleep very deeply tonight.