Day 8 - Mammoth Lakes, CA to Las Vegas, NV

This was a long, tiring day of driving. We drove for a total of 8 hours and barely stopped along the way in order to cut down on the amount of time we were on the road. We had decided the night before to avoid driving through Death Valley, NP in order to shave 30 minutes off of our drive time. We did fill up a few times even though we weren't in need because we were afraid of being somewhere there wasn't any service stations since they were few and far between driving through Nevada!

In addition to being a long day of driving it was also a dull day of driving with absolutely NOTHING to look at but desert and brown mountains. That is until we came across a herd of cattle standing in the middle of the highway and refused to move! We sat and honked our horns at them for a minute and when it was obvious they weren't going to move, we just drove around them and they still did NOT move! It was pretty funny! Of course, we had to stop and take a picture of the "Welcome to Nevada" sign on our way across the border. As you can see in the picture, there was nothing for miles & miles in either direction.

Welcome to Nevada - Craig thought the bullet holes in the sign were a nice touch!

As you can see - we were in the middle of NOWHERE!

The sign said "Open Range", but we didn't quite believe it until we saw this...

Even though we didn't drive through it, we were able to get a few pictures from the road of Death Valley & Big Dune. We definitely think we made the right decision by avoiding it!

Big Dune

Death Valley in the distance.

At about dinner time, we finally arrived in fabulous Las Vegas! It was amazing that you can drive for hundreds of miles with nothing around you and then all of a sudden you are in Vegas and surrounded by towering hotels & casinos & shopping centers & busy highways! We were definitely thankful to arrive at our hotel and have a day off of driving to tour the city. We're staying at Excalibur or "The Castle", as Kylie likes to call it. The girls love it and Kylie even got a princess hat & magic wand when we walked around our hotel last night. She loved every minute of it!

Our hotel - Excalibur Hotel & Casino - "The Castle"

We all enjoyed a good night's rest and are now relaxing with a quick afternoon rest before heading back out on the strip for some more sight seeing! We didn't update the blog with yesterday's events until now because the hotel charges for internet access so we waited until today....so stay tuned and check back later tonight to check out our sights from today! Viva Las Vegas!! ~The Thayers & Mom-Mom :)