#Gates50States

Our original plan for Nevada succumbed to Covid in March 2020. Just a couple of days before we were to leave, the Nevada governor shut down Las Vegas, and while we hadn’t planned on gambling, the uncertainty of all things, including whether or not the airport would shut down leaving us stranded, prompted us to scrap our plans and move them to October. Certainly the nation will have settled down by then, right?

Right?

Well, not exactly. But things had settled down enough for us to at least travel. The massive Covid casualty for us was the Hoover Dam. Way back when we first visited the Hoover Dam, Jenn and I said to each other, “We can’t wait to bring the kids here.” Unfortunately, that’s gonna have to come at another time. But there were still some Nevada things for us to explore during our limited time.

Taking kids to Las Vegas is a tricky thing. The smut is all around, but we’re here to tell you it can be avoided for the most part, and what can’t be avoided can be used as object lessons for home education. Of course there are amazing restaurants, interesting people watching, and sights of extravagance we just don’t see in Ohio, or just about anywhere else for that matter.

Because Nevada shares borders with amazingly outdoorsy states, we wonder if it often gets overlooked as the beautiful state it really is. We always include some degree of hiking on our #gates50states adventures, and we didn’t have to drive far to find a good selection of hiking trails at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area (more info can be found here).

Having dined on the strip and enjoyed a wonderful meal at Mon Ami Gabi, we wanted an off-the-strip experience for our second night, so we drove out to Honey Salt. This proved to be a great idea, one with zero regrets.

While the younger two were working on school work, Lincoln and I visited The Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas. It’s really a well-organized museum with three floors full of really informative and engaging interpretive displays depicting organized crime from the prohibition era through what organized crime looks like today around the world.

While we spent fewer than 90 minutes in Rhyolite, I do believe it left a big impression on the kids. After a birthday dinner for Lydia back in Death Valley NP, we hopped in the car and drove in the pitch black to Rhyolite to see the ghost town and interesting outdoor museum under the stars.

I hadn’t really appreciated a night sky devoid of light pollution until Jenn and I visited Zion NP a number of years back, but since that time, I’ve longed to spend late evenings away from city lights. It’s just not possible where we live. It doesn’t take a high bar argument to convince me to travel for an absence of city lights. The kids, though, had never appreciated such a view.

When we stepped out of the car in Rhyolite and looked up, the kids (and Auntie Haley) gasped. That’s when I knew we’d hit on a winner, even if it was to be very short-lived. The art is weird, the old buildings difficult to relate to given the presence of chain link fences and barbed wire. But the stars, and Mars, and Jupiter, and Saturn, though they were the farthest away, seemed so close as to feel.

On our way from Death Valley to Flagstaff, we stopped in Boulder City, Nevada for an evening. As I mentioned above, the Hoover Dam was off limits, but we needed to break up the drive, we needed some hours to devote to schoolwork, and we had to get dinner at The Dillinger. You know how oftentimes when you attempt to repeat an experience you’re left with unmet expectations and disappointment? This wasn’t one of those times. The burgers were just as amazing as they were on our first visit, including my burger with a fried egg and peanut butter. Yes, peanut butter. The sweat potato fries alone were worth the price of admission. Gotta make it to The Dillinger when you’re in southern Nevada.

While the kids were doing some of their school work, I looked for something fun and relatively not too time consuming to do in the area, and I wasn’t disappointed with finding out about Hemenway Park. Just around the corner and down the road from the Best Western, and with a pleasant view of Lake Mead is Hemenway Park with its irrigated lawn around the playground. This means it’s the most healthy grass for miles, perfect food for a herd of big horn sheep. Lydia and I went for a visit with her new camera, and we sat on the playground and watched a couple dozen big horn sheep mosey around us for awhile. They wouldn’t let us get too close to them, but they also knew we and the others around weren’t going to mess with them. It was fascinating to watch them just hang out around the playground.

There is so much of Nevada we would have liked to have seen. Tahoe, Great Basin NP, Area 51, any of the nuclear testing sites… 🙂 … but our time in all of the states is budgeted. Retirement will bring Jenn and me back, for sure.