Our First Plane Trip in a While

 

A Report on a Return to Traveling in two parts: the trip and travel impressions.

Our recent trip to Las Vegas was our first plane trip since October 2019—for frequent fliers that’s a long time between trips. The trip to Vegas was a nervous trip because we had spent so much time trying to be careful and safe. All the data said we should be fairly safe, but the crowded airport and boarding line-up were a tad unsettling. 

We felt a little better after the Southwest attendant unceremoniously told one passenger to pull his mask over his nose and he quickly complied. The preflight announcement reminded all of us that more than 30,000 passengers have been banned from flying in the US by the airline industry.

Worldmark Las Vegas Blvd

Our lodgings for the six days were at Worldmark Las Vegas Blvd. (timeshare), a large resort facility. Contactless registration got us to our one bedroom apartment which was super clean. 

Our Patio

For the most part masks were worn and social distancing was observed by staff and guests. We had only two encounters with people without masks and they were either coming or going to a pool.

One of our biggest joys was eating again in restaurants. We had good experiences recently at the Oregon coast, but found Las Vegas dining to be less controlled in many cases with regard to social distancing. We ate mostly in casual diners—Black Bear Diner and The Omelet House were favorites.

Black Bear

The Omelet House, Boulder Hwy

The famous buffets are still closed and we didn’t opt for anything fancy, but we did visit other casino eateries such as Coronado Cafe at South Point and the Noodle House at Red Rock Casino. 

Coronado Cafe, South Point Casino

The casino restaurants had made only token efforts to space diners out, but did follow mask mandates. We got more comfortable with the situation as the week went along—possibly that’s not a good thing.

Although we did spent time in the casinos, they weren’t our main recreation. We played golf twice during our stay. 

Wildhorse GC

Desert Willow GC

Golf has been a safe haven throughout COVID-times and it was also in Las Vegas. At Wildhorse GC and Desert Willow GC, both in Henderson, we were paired with locals who were interesting and friendly. 

Playing Partners Dave and Nick, Desert Willow

Golfers' Handshake, the Fistbump

Starbucks Stop after Golf

Even though quite warm, the Vegas golf was enjoyable. 

Visitors' Center

We also spent half a day at Red Rock National Conservation Area just east of Las Vegas. The rock formations

—colors and texture—

made good subjects for my cameras. 

A Chucker

Maybe a Climber Chuck

I had also planned a morning at Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve, a 140-acre water reclamation area (nine ponds) with paths around the ponds. 

Yellowheaded Blackbird

Marsh Wren

Ruddy Duck

Tino the Tortoise, a Local Celebrity

We saw a variety of wildlife including hawks, roadrunners, ducks, geese, small birds, and even a tortoise, but good photos were hard to come by—too hot. Our last outing was to be a day in the Valley of Fire State Park, but that day the temperature was a hundred in Vegas and hotter in the desert. 

Much nicer to sit around the pools.

There are two special photo moments I’d like to share. First, on our approach into Vegas I got a good shot of the plane’s shadow on the ground. 

And second, on our flight back to Oregon I photographed a Glory

Photo Not Enhanced

—an atmospheric phenomenon where a shadow of an object is circled with a rainbow-like halo—hard to see and harder to photograph.

Back in Portland

Now for some impressions and reflections:

Travel for me is possible, if…

* I am more than two weeks past my second shot,

* I am aware that a few won’t be concerned with others’ safety, 

* I realize I have to adapt—can’t work in my favorite coffee shop, have to pay a reservation fee now where I didn’t before (Red Rock Park), wear my mask,

* Plan ahead more than usual, 

* Learn to plan to do less than usual (learning my limits, or as Anne says, we’ve lived a very active life, and now we’re paying for it), 

* No more air travel with golf bags—too heavy and awkward--glad I've got clubs in Scotland, and

* I make informed choices.

Next: I’ll be as surprised as you.

Viva Las Vegas!

Why would anyone want to go to Las Vegas, 

except for the pleasant fall weather, the good golf you can still find under $40, the exciting variety of food, the shows (if there are any good ones that you can afford), the sights, and the chance to win a million?  Anne and I planned an anniversary getaway (our 44th) of three nights at our Worldmark timeshare in Las Vegas, then a drive through the Mohave over to Palm Springs to spend three nights with our friends Nick and Kathryn in their condo before returning to Vegas to fly home.  Plans, though, have a way of changing, as you’ll read.

Our Vegas adventure began at PDX with an early morning United flight to San Francisco.  

We pulled back from the gangway right on time and then stopped on the tarmac.  After ten minutes the pilot told us that all United computer terminals just went down and we’d have to wait until they came back up.  With that they pulled the plane back to the gangway and let passengers disembark with the warning that the plane could leave at any minute. Two hours later we began our taxi to the runway--the pilot and crew had done a good job keeping us all informed about United’s progress with the problem or lack of it. Of course, we had missed our flight from SFO to Vegas, but we discovered soon after arriving that we were already booked on the next flight.  To United’s credit, within a day we both received emails with an apology and awarding us $50 each in future travel credit.  

The second trauma of the trip occurred the day before we were drive to Palm Springs to stay with our friends.  Anne got a call from Kathryn which told us that their condo which they hadn’t visited  for a few months had become the domicile of one or more large rats.  The rat or rats had gotten into everything, severely fouled the carpets, chewed the bedding, and generally performed normally offensive rat behaviors.  Nick and Kathryn would be living in a hotel while busily doing cleanup duty (hopefully wearing full PPE-personal protective equipment). Needless to say our travel plans changed.  Without much trouble we extended our stay in timeshare the extra three days.  

Anne and I certainly kept ourselves busy in Las Vegas, somedays bordered closely on doing too much.  

                                                          Black Mountain GC Golf was high on our list, especially since the previous couple of weeks in Oregon had been ungolfable [Is that word?].  To get good prices for golf in Vegas (or Phoenix, Portland, or almost any other major city) I use GolfNow.com for reduced rates.  You have to pay in advance and there are no refunds, but the savings can be anywhere from 20 to 60%.  Our first tee time in Vegas was for Black Mountain GC in Henderson about 20 minutes from our Worldmark unit.  Price was right, the course was nice, and the weather was perfect--scores could certainly have been better, but then you can’t have everything, even in Vegas.  Next was The Legacy, 

                                                             Legacy GC an upscale dessert-style course with some problems.  We had a noon tee time and found later that they stop marshaling the course at noon.  Twice we ended up with five groups on one hole--for non-golfers that means the play was slow and crowded.  We played 13 holes and could see that we wouldn’t get our 18-hole round done before dark.  What we played was good, but we have some words for the management--GolfNow has a system for reviewing courses.  Our third golf was in Boulder City southeast of Las Vegas at Boulder Creek GC.  

                                                           Boulder Creek GC This was, for me, the best of the three courses--interesting holes, well conditioned fairways and greens, very good price (almost 60% off).  It’s hard getting into the spirit of Oregon winter golf after the dry, 65º of Vegas golf.

Our next adventures concerned dining Vegas-style.  It used to be--now I’m talking about the 60s and 70s--that you could eat on the cheap all over Vegas: steaks all day for $4.99. Today, though, the prices in Vegas assume everyone has already hit the jackpot, so we saved money by eating breakfast in our unit (except for one day) and skipping lunch on golf days.  Dinners were still dear.  For instance, in New York New York at Nine Irish Guys Pub I had a wonderful pork porterhouse (pork chop on steroids) with apple chutney for $28--no sides, no veg, no starch, just the meat.  Anne meanwhile had a good, but not distinguished, fish and chip supper for $22 and a simple side salad for $6.  We did find inexpensive steak and prime rib ($16) at the Coronado Cafe in Southpoint Casino and good prime rib for a little more at the Red Rock Cafe in the Red Rock Casino.  It seemed to us that the off-the-strip and away-from-downtown casinos had quality fare for decent prices.  We definitely did enjoy a shared seafood mac and cheese (one of the best we’ve ever had) at Margaritaville on the strip--the Jimmy Buffet tunes in the background certainly didn’t hurt the ambiance.  The star of our meals, at least for the story, was our first night’s dinner at Hash House A Go-Go in the M Resort south of the strip.  

The restaurant has been featured on the Food Channel and Travel Channel, especially on the program  Man vs Food which features places serving huge portions.  Anne’s meatloaf sandwich was humungous! It came with a side of mashed potatoes which must have weighed three pounds and came covered with bacon and cheese.  We both had the leftovers for breakfast for two days!  For me the best meal of the trip was our one breakfast out the day we played golf in Boulder City.  We had breakfast at The Coffee Cup Cafe,

a restaurant featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.  My pork chile verde omelet was outstanding and a bargain as well.  Prices at times may have been high, but overall this trip was an gastronomic success.

We did manage a little sightseeing during our six days, but only a little.  One night on the strip was enough.  

Even off season it was crowded everywhere we went.  The shuttle from Worldmark dropped us off at Caesar’s Palace and we walked about a mile south on one side of Las Vegas Blvd. and then back to Caesar’s for our ride home.  

Street performers made the sidewalks even more crowded.  Though some were very interesting, 

like the Gene Simmons of KISS impersonator and a string quartet, but most were mediocre at best. The other street performers were the young ladies partying in Las Vegas.  It seemed like roaming gangs of twenty to thirty-year-olds (and a few older) were undressed to impress, 

                                    This is about how short the skirts were in real life.

though whom they were trying to impress I’m not sure since the groups of guys we saw wandering were significantly less than impressive.  We heard one young lady in a micro-mini skirt tell her friend that she didn't thing she could "walk up the steps into the casino with this dress on."  The Fremont Street Experience, the remake of old downtown Vegas, was rather boring, 

especially in the afternoon with not much neon aglow.  

Red Rock Canyon National Park was a pleasant drive with some decent photo stops.  Most interesting were two special tours going through the park--

a three-wheel scooter group and an exotic auto tour (supercartours.com) which cost $399 for an hour drive in a Lamborghini, Ferrari, Audi, Porsche, or other exotic.  Also on this trip we finally got to walk on the Memorial Bridge to view Hoover Dam, though Anne mostly clung to the back rail instead of looking over the bridge at the 600 foot drop to the canyon floor.   

As for shows, luck wasn’t with us.  Even the discount tickets to Blue Man Group or Cirque du Soleil shows were in the $130 range each.  Carrot Top, whom we’ve seen before but wouldn’t mind seeing again, was sold out for our entire stay.  Other than those everyone interesting had either been in town last week or was coming next week.  Other attractions we had planned to see were either closed or open at the wrong times.

So how did we fill the rest of the time in Las Vegas?  The games, of course.  Both Anne and I love to play the slots--oh, we know it’s a poor bet, that they are set to take your money, that the likelihood of even breaking even is remote.  We still enjoy the bells and whistles, the chance for even a small jackpot.  We also know that the only way to play is set aside an amount we can lose and never go beyond that limit.  The game then becomes can we stay ahead of our loss limit. 

This trip had a twist to it: we had brought our casino stake based on spending three days in Las Vegas and we we’re now spending six days.  At the end of the six days we actually brought home about a fourth of what we had planned to spend in three day.  That made this a successful gaming trip!  We did come away with some general impressions about the gaming in Las Vegas.  First, stay away from both the strip casinos and the Fremont Street Experience casinos.  We certainly had little luck and, with the exception of some jackpot winners in New York New York, we didn’t see anyone else having good luck.  Second, we had significantly better luck at the satellite casinos, such as M Resort, Southpoint (where we walked right by basketball star Bill Russell--I don't know how Anne, who was walking beside me, didn't notice 6'11" Bill Russell), Red Rocks Hotel, and The Orleans.  Third, the slot of choice this year in Vegas is called “Buffalo.”  

Every casino had banks of this game throughout and most of the time they were filled with players.  I’ll admit the reason our money stretched from three to six days was because “Buffalo” often paid well for me.  The obsession with “Buffalo” reminded me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation 1991 episode “The Game,” where a mysterious alien tries to take control of the crew of the Enterprise through a euphoria inducing game.  The slot machine’s variable ratio reinforcement creates the same kind of anticipated euphoria.  Oh, well, even knowing the theory we still enjoyed the games.  

We are sorry we didn’t get to visit our friends in Palm Spring (victims of the Rat Effect), that we didn’t get to Joshua Tree Park, or get to play golf in Palm Springs, but despite missing that part of the trip we still enjoyed a nice six days in Fun City, USA.  In fact, we’re ready to begin saving for another visit next year.

ROAD TRIP WITH ADVISORY

Washington Road Trip

The idea was a good one when we planned it in early June, but we began to doubt the wisdom of our planning when the temperature peaked at 102° two days before we were to leave.  The forecast wasn’t bright either (actually it was too bright) with hundred degree heat to continue in the eastern Washington area we were scheduled to visit.  It didn’t help matters that I had to visit the ER for heat exhaustion after the first round of our golf club’s championship tournament in that 102° heat.  Our Washington golf Road Trip included golf in Pendleton, Walla Walla, Spokane, and Leavenworth, all predicted to be 95+.

The only course we’d played before was Wildhorse GC at the Wildhorse Casino and Resort just east of Pendleton.  The course is a nice example of desert golf with wide fairways and plenty of sand.  But at 100° at 1:00, even riding in a cart was hot, hot, hot--especially after my recent bout with dehydration.  We pulled our cart back into the parking lot and abandoned golf after thirteen holes.  For the rest of the afternoon the air conditioned casino brought welcome relief from the scorching sun and luckily didn’t lighten our wallets.

The next day, Tuesday, we had a tee time at a relatively new course outside of Walla Walla on our way to Spokane.  

The four-year-old Wine Valley GC is links-like in design and can be a fair test from whichever of the five tees you decide to play.  I hadn’t heard of the course before but our club assistant pro Bruce said we should try to play it if we could. His recommendation was spot on.  Although we only had time for nine holes, at 10:00 in the morning with a nice breeze the Dan Hixon design was fun with fast fairways and greens. Besides the nice course, the staff in the golf shop make a visit here very memorable.

Our lodgings in Spokane turned out to be fantastic, Five Star, at barely above Motel 8 prices.  The Northern Quest Resort and Casino in Airway Heights, a suburb of Spokane, was quite a find--lovely rooms, good eateries, and machines that left something in our wallets.  Do you notice a definite trend to the trip--golf, casino--a great combination if you can control the urge to over spend.  

It was the pro at Wine Valley who suggested our next golf venue. 

The 1930s designed Indian Canyon GC, a Spokane municipal course, is a grand tree-lined course which fits naturally into the land.  The course was even a little Scottish in the way you played with tees close behind previous greens and open fronts to the greens so that you could run the ball up--in Scotland golf is played mostly on the ground rather than the air game played in America.  It would have been a perfect day of golf (we played early and there was plenty of shade) if it weren’t for a group of three in front of us who were loud enough that we could hear their conversations on the greens when we were 350 yards away on the tee.  If they weren’t all partially deaf before they started their round, I’m sure they were after the round.  

That night we accomplished another one of our Road Trip goals: dinner at one of the recommended eateries from one of our favorite Food Channel TV shows, Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.  

We chose Waddell’s Neighborhood Pub and Grille in southeast Spokane.  Beside our choice of the over 50 beers and ales on tap, 

Anne and I split two of the pub’s signature dishes: Super Cheesy Lobster Mac and a Lamb-Strosity (shredded braised lamb on a giant hoagie with lamb au jus).  Sinfully delicious!

Wednesday was a touring/travel day as we moved from Spokane west to Leavenworth.  We decided to find breakfast on the road and grabbed a latte and scone at Starbucks to hold us until we could find a real breakfast.  As had been the road from Pendleton to Spokane, the road from Spokane toward Leavenworth, US 2, was rather featureless--miles and miles of rolling wheat and alfalfa fields--not really boring, but not very picturesque either.  We also discovered that our plan to have breakfast on the road was ill thought out.  Aside from a few road-kill birds, the little spots on the road we passed through offered up nothing in the way of breakfast.  Finally, turning before Wenatchee we came to Monitor where I spotted an open drive-in named Tom, Dick, and Harry’s. 

A true drive-in Guy Fieri would be proud to display on his show!  The hamburgers were huge and homemade and the shakes made with real ice cream.  Since we’d had no real breakfast and it was now after 1:00 we pigged out.  Thankfully, we left room for our next stop, Liberty Orchard’s  Aplets and Cotlets Factory in Cashmere, WA.  

We nibbled the samples, took the short tour, browsed the shop, bought boxes of the special candy for gifts and for us.  I’d give this stop an A for apples.  I’d only give our lodgings in Leavenworth, 

the Evergreen Inn, a C at best.  Inexpensive and clean is the best I can say of it--a throwback to the 1950s motels styled to fit the Bavarian Village motif of Leavenworth.  Leavenworth itself was a bit of a disappointment.  

Tourist shops and German restaurants, the village took about 20 minutes to see the whole thing.  The one exception was the Nutcracker Museum which was fascinating. 

Anne has ten or twelve nutcrackers that get displayed in the holiday season.  The museum displayed thousands upon thousands of nutcrackers from all over the world--from beautiful to garish, including a Hillary Clinton model which cracks nuts between her legs--look out, Bill!  To be fair to Leavenworth, others we’ve talked to say that the town is best in the autumn and winter, decked out for the holidays.

Our golf on this leg was an early Thursday morning nine holes at Leavenworth GC.  

A 1920s designed course set along the Wenatchee River, Leavenworth GC is a beautiful, tight, tree-lined test of accuracy with lovely mountain views.  It was a test I enjoyed taking.

The last part of our Road Trip, from Leavenworth to home with an overnight stop in Issaquah, was with the exception of a side trip though part of Tumwater Canyon

 like the airplane ride home from Scotland--just a way to get home.  Photographically the trip was rather a bust.  As a golf trip it was a huge success with fun rounds at three new courses--all of which I’d love to go back to.  For a food trip it was quite successful with good buffets at the casinos and some great diner/drive-in stops.  Our next Road Trip will be quite different, though.  It will be to the southeast of Scotland along the Solway Firth.  That trip to Scotland in two weeks will also be fodder for the next entry to this blog. 

A Trip Advisor Advisory

I contribute to Trip Advisor, the website where attractions, eateries, and lodgings are rated by visitors.  I use Trip Advisor as I plan what to see, where to eat, and where to stay.  Something I learned recently, though, has tainted the image I had of Trip Advisor.  Friends who own a B&B have told us that if an establishment buys advertising with Trip Advisor they get a higher ranking on the website regardless of what raters say.  You can check it out for yourself by looking at reviews and seeing that sometimes establishments with fewer reviews or not quite as good reviews will get a higher ranking  than others with actually more and better reviews.  I’ll still contribute to and use Trip Advisor, but I will use it with more caution and pay less attention to the rankings and more attention to the comments by raters.