Saturday 30th July 2016

Saturday 30^th July 2016

All the camp was up well before 5am and we had everything ready for the jet boat at 7am.  We formed the usual bag line to load everything onto the jet boat then boarded ourselves for the 40+ mile journey to Pearce Ferry.  It was great seeing the canyon slowly get lower and lower, or the water level getting higher, as we entered Lake Mead and the approaching Hoover Dam.  We saw the “Sky Walk” high up on the rim in a side canyon.

We arrived at Pearce Ferry and saw our deflated rafts already loaded onto a huge trailer with all the other kit, ready for the return to Lees Ferry and another party of people ready to raft the great Colorado River.  After collecting our packed lunch and downing a few very welcome cups of ice cold water, we said our goodbyes and loaded our bags onto a (supposedly) 5* coach for the 3-hour trip to Vegas.  It soon became apparent that, again, the air conditioning on the bus was not strong enough to circulate the cold air around the driver’s seat to the passengers sitting more than 2 rows behind him so we all sweated and melted for the whole 3 hours.  The first 7 miles were on a dirt track where the air-con was turned off altogether (to stop the filters clogging up with the dust).  During this time the air in the coach got extremely hot and the dust filled the coach like a fog.  After that we drove another 4 miles to the nearest town (a desert town with widely spaced bungalows, square and functional but ugly, and a convenience store where I bought a milk shake with ice cream and vanilla and some sweets for Axel.  After that it was just miles of desert!!

We got into Vegas and booked back into The Bellagio, showered (oh how we had been longing for that first, long, clean, shower in warm water after 13 days of bathing in the freezing, sand-ladened water of the river).  We then went to a small mall for bottles of water, crisps etc, got back and snoozed for an hour.  We then went to look at the restaurant which Bob Katz had booked for our post-trip meal.  This was in The Bellagio (The Harvest Restaurant) and we asked to see the menu.  We were told that it was a private party and the menu had been pre-selected by Bob and was a set price of $75 plus drinks, tax and tips.  We all agreed that it was extremely presumptuous of Bob to book a meal in the most expensive, glamorous Las Vegas Hotel, without canvassing our opinions, where we were being forced to pay quite a high price for one meal without being able to choose what to eat!  As we all felt more than a little jaded after the gruelling 3 hours in the roasting coach, we decided to give the meal a miss and Kevin went down at 7pm to pass on our apologies.  He was presented with a yellow duck as a memento of our trip (one of the ducks given to the ‘swimmers’ – people who fell out of the boat.

The next day we packed our things again and got a taxi to the MGM Signature Towers where we had an apartment on the 34^th floor for 5 nights.  The room was spacious and contained a large king-size bed, a sofa bed, easy chair, dining table and chairs and kitchenette.  We had to request bedding for the sofa bed as well as crockery and cutlery for the kitchenette.  However, they did hand out free bottles of cold water, unlike the Bellagio where they charged $50 per day just to store your own water in the room minibar fridge.

This is the view out from our balcony, then the view down!!