Vegas

Our week is about up here at Sam's Town RV in Las Vegas, we have had a good time but we did miss not having the grandkids here to visit, they are now in AZ.  Our favorite place to visit here is Henderson Birding Preserve, we can walk around the ponds watch the ducks and look for other birds  we can add to our year list like the Gambles Quail, Roadrunner and Costa Hummingbird.

We drove out to the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, it is a large refuge north of Vegas.  They are building a big beautiful visitor center which seems a bit much for a refuge with just a few short trails and the all roads in the refuge are for high clearance vehicles only even the road into the refuge is a rough gravel road.  I think building better roads would be better than a fancy visitor center.

Another park that is very popular is the Red Rock Conservation Area just outside Summerlin, NV, we took the drive and stopped and walked the boardwalk where we did see a Hermit Thrush much to our surprise. 

Before we moved down to Las Vegas we visited the Valley of Fire State Park which is between Mesquite and Vegas.

 

We did visit the strip Tuesday, Sam's Town has a free shuttle bus to the Strip and to Freemont St. so we took it down.  We decided to see a couple of places we hadn't been before Circus Circus and the Mirage. It was a long walk to  Circus Circus and back to the Mirage!  We watched the free circus act and  bought a ticket to see Mirage's Secret Garden with the beautiful white tigers and Dolphin pools.  We didn't put a penny in a machine and we ate at Subway.  Big spenders we aren't!!

 

 

I have cousins that live here and we called and had lunch with them, it was nice to see them it has been a few years.

 

We also like to visit the cactus garden at Ethel M Candies,  they were decorating it for Christmas but we enjoyed it and saw a couple of birds.  We of course went in and watched them make the candy and had a couple of free samples also had some ice cream.  The candy factory was started by the Mars family, yes the very same who make M&M's, etc but the father wanted to create gourmet chocolates the

Ethel M Candies.  They were making chocolates hearts for Valentines.

Maybe tomorrow I'll get some laundry done before we head down to Lake Havasu City, AZ.