Las Vegas (5/1/2005)

I am labeling this Las Vegas although we spent last night in Mina (between Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe). Mina is in a dead zone so we did not have internet access and I could not publish this blog on Sunday night as usual. We have now started moving north towards Seattle and Alaska.
We spent most of this last week in Las Vegas at the Oasis RV Park, a nice Park close to the strip, although we did not use many of the amenities of the park like the exercise area and the pools. We did take advantage of the store and the shuttle to the strip.
On our trips to the strip this week we saw penny slots which sound pretty cheap except that in order to cover all the lines in the machine it takes 500 pennies, so each bet is $5.00 which is a pretty steep bet on a slot machine for me. In addition, this week the Wynn opened so we spent some time walking around to take a look at it. I carried a camera (for the pictures below) although Rich thought I was tres gauche.
This week I got caught up entering our expenses into Quicken so we could see how we were doing against our budget at month end. We also did a cash audit (it is easy to get behind in entering cash expenditures) so we could know all of our expenses. After the audit, we were still pretty close to the budget which makes us feel pretty good about the budget since we went on a cruise during this period.
In addition, this week we got the XM radio working. It is pretty neat: 6 ‘Decade’ stations (40’s through 90’s), 7 Country stations, 10 Pops & Hits stations, 3 Christian stations, 15 Rock stations, 7 Hip-Hop & Urban stations, 7 Jazz & Blues stations, 4 Dance stations, 2 Latin stations, 4 World stations, 3 Classical stations, 2 Kid talk stations, 11 News stations, 5 Sports stations, 3 Comedy stations, 12 Talk & Entertainment stations, and 21 Traffic & Weather stations from several metropolitan areas (including Seattle & New York). Each station has a slightly different focus. We have it set up so we can move it to the truck or the RV.
As we are traveling on Sunday we passed from a desert with Saguaros, to a desert with Joshua Trees, to a desert with low green bushes, to mountains with pines. The desert is still green with many flowers and we saw a fair amount of standing water (it apparently has been raining although we did not see it).
A of today (Monday), we are in Lake Tahoe. More next week.