Debbie Wade, Kim Carr, and I all decided to sign up for Cycle America's National Parks Tour, with stops at Grand Canyon North Rim, Zion, and Bryce National Parks. This was February when we all decided to do this trip and so the months slowly went by until the time finally arrived.

The plan was for us to drive both ways from San Jose to St.George Utah, with an overnight stay in Las Vegas on the way to the tour, and to drive straight home at the end. We were to use my van for the trip, but Kim insisted that I get a CD player installed first. Kim said that this was more important than air conditioning.

I picked up Kim and then Deb right on schedule. Luckily all of the packing was just as I had hoped. Everything fit. There was room to put a third bike in between the other two. And there was room for the ice chest of drinks to fit in nicely up near the person sitting in the back seat. All of the bags fit in at the back. All of the CD's were kept near the front.

The trip seemed to go along very quickly, but that was because I didn't think too much about it, but just let it happen. We had over 500 miles to go before Las Vegas, which sounds like a very long way, but only if you think about it. Instead, I just figured that we had lots of time available to listen to alot of different CDs. I drove a tank of gas, and then Kim drove for a few hours, and then we finished up with Debbie driving into Las Vegas. It took us a few wrong turns along the Strip before we finally found Circus-Circus, but even with that we were in by 4:00 PM, 9:15 total trip time.

Kim had gotten us adjoining rooms, which worked out very well. Kim wanted to go see a show, and Debbie and I were agreeable, so we let Kim choose. After looking through many choices, we settled in on walking over to The Sahara and seeing The Coasters, The Platters, and The Drifters. This was all good music and we felt our $40 each was well spent.

After the show we decided to walk The Strip to check out some of the other casinos. The Sahara and Circus-Circus were way at the north end and Kim wanted to show us the casinos near the south end, so soon after we passed by our hotel, I offered to run back and get the van and meet them up the road. Lucky for me, my sense of direction was working very well, and so I was able to find where we had parked, even though I was coming from a different direction. I ended up being the navigator for the whole week and I don't think we ever did get lost.

I met Kim and Debbie waiting up the road, so they climbed in and we drove on down the Strip. Good thing, as this turned out to be a long way. We then parked and checked out New York New York, Excaliber, and Luxor, which were all new casinos to me. All of this wandering through the casinos and none of us even put one coin in any slot machine.

Finally, we drove back to the Circus Circus, and went up to our rooms. It was now a bit past midnight. We had maybe been back 5 minutes when the fire alarms went off in every room of the hotel. Being that it was Sept 11, we were going to take this seriously, so we all went out into the hallway and then went to the stairs. We were on the 11th floor, and we were tired from all of the walking, and it was going to be a long way down those stairs, but we had to do this. By about the 6th floor we met a security guy coming up who informed us that it was ok to go back to our rooms. So we just turned around and climbed back up to the 11th floor. It was good to finally get to bed.

Go to the next day.