Vacation 2012, part 1

This past week was very busy for us: the kids stayed with my parents for the whole week, and Mark and I went to San Diego to visit my sister!  I took a TON of pictures, so this will have to be multiple posts to cover everything we did.  But first, a picture of the kids at my Mom and Dad's:

They all had a wonderful time!  My folks said that the kids were very good and that they didn't have any problems, which is always such a blessing for a parent to hear.  :-) It was such a good time, in fact, that my parents want to watch the kids for a week every summer!!!

We dropped the kids off at my parents house Friday morning, then started the looong drive out to California!  We drove non stop till about 2 a.m., then pulled off the road and slept for a few hours before heading on to our first tourist type stop, Las Vegas.  We wanted to see some of the casinos, what they were like inside, not to gamble.  So, we were a bit different from the average tourist there.  :-)  (Sales people kept trying to talk us into staying longer, trying different games, etc. but we had to be firm with them and tell them no.)

Our stop off point, in the hills of Nevada

Our way of locating the casinos was very scientific:  drive down the road till we find one!  We did make a detour to a Dennys restaurant for some breakfast though, we were both starved!  I wish I could have taken pictures of some of the people there, it was incredible that anyone would appear in public looking as crazy as they did (big short puffy skirts, hair in various unnatural colors, and other ludicrous looking clothes).

After breakfast it was on to our first casino, Circus Circus.  We were both amazed at the number of slot machines and other games they had.  It was like a giant mall, with all the stores located on the perimeter and the gambling section in the very center.  We were not very impressed with this casino.  It seemed old and kind of scuzzy.  They have circus acts somewhere, though we couldn't find them, so we saw lots of families with small kids.  We both got the feeling that this was a casino for "poorer folk", if you can say such a thing.  They even had penny slots!

I did get a kick out of this sign, just outside of the gaming area:

Both Mark and I got a good laugh out of that one!


*This post is taking me longer to put together than I had anticipated so that will have to be it for now, but I will post more as soon as I can.  Thanks for your patience!*