Today is a turning point in our summer vacation…as I look at the car this morning, I see that it is pointed in a North East direction. This can only mean one thing… we are heading for home. The vacation is not over, but every day that passes now will bring us a day closer to when we have to return to work in September. Not a pleasant thought… so lets forget about that and go to Las Vegas instead.
When we planned this trip several months ago, we had decided that when we leave Needles CA that we will head for Hurricane UT and just drive around Las Vegas and avoid that traffic.. Well last night I got to thinking that it would be a fun thing to stop in Vegas for an hour and go and see the setting of one of our favourite TV shows.
So we leave Needles CA behind us and cross the border into Nevada. We drove past the large solar generating plant near Searchlight NV. We saw this 2 years ago when we were leaving Las Vegas and heading to Lake Havasu AZ. The layout has grown since then.
Shortly after that we could see the skyline of Las Vegas. Yes, that is air pollution that is hanging in the air.
The purpose of our alteration in plans and driving into Las Vegas today is to visit the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop. No, we are not running out of money and need to pawn something so that we can continue our vacation… If you don’t know this Pawn Shop, then you don’t watch Pawn Stars on the History Channel. This TV show documents the daily activities of the owners and employees in the Pawn Shop and the weird and wonderful things that people bring into the pawn shop to either sell or pawn.
We parked in the pawn shop parking lot and immediately noticed that there was a line-up to get inside. Seems we are not the only ones who watch this show, and the pawn shop has become a tourist attraction. We lined up and waited about 1o minutes before we were allowed to enter.
I guess what surprised me the most was how small the place actually is. Obviously when they are filming there are not 100 fans milling about inside, perhaps that is what made it seem smaller in size than what I had imagined.
We wanted to buy a souvenir of our visit, and there were several different styles of T-shirts that we could have bought, but they were out of our sizes. I asked if they had a hat pin for my pin collection, but no, they didn’t have any hat pins. We followed the line to the back of the shop were we got to pose with Chumlee. I said “hi” to him, and said “it is nice to meet the famous Chumlee”, but he said nothing and just posed with us for this photo. I guess the shop has finally found something productive for Chumlee to do that even he could not screw up, but he really seemed bored with the whole “posing with the fans” thing. All in all, I wasn’t expecting to see any of the stars of the show, they do have a business to run and can’t be standing around all day posing for photos, so having this photo op with Chumlee was a bonus. Apparently the “Old Man” was in the back, but he had already been out on the shop floor posing for photos.
Here is our photo with Chumlee.
We left the shop and headed to our destination of Hurricane UT. By the time we get there, we will have been in 4 states today and moved into a new time zone. California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.
The scenery was flat and desert like as we headed North out of Las Vegas.
We saw the Welcome to Arizona sign as we passed from Nevada into Arizona.
The scenery gets more interesting as we head towards the State line of Utah.
Here is the Welcome to Utah sign as we entered Utah.
Tomorrow will be an interesting day and I hope that we can get some good photos. We are going to visit an observation area and hopefully see some California Condors.
Till then, if you would like to see all of todays photos, you can click on this link to my FLICKR site.
No comments:
Post a Comment