Desert Southwest - The Checklist Edition - The End - September 2014

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Wind-up and Return Home

Sunday, September 28

Finished with our visit to Valley of Fire State Park, we decided to take a scenic route through nearby Lake Mead National Recreation Area (NRA). In addition to being a more pleasant way to get to Las Vegas, we also wanted to find a suitable location to organize and pack our bags for our upcoming red-eye return flight, and - if possible - clean up and have a shower. We figured that one of the several campgrounds along the shore of Lake Mead would do the trick.

We stopped at the first campground facility in the NRA, a spot called Echo Bay. It looked like a large enough and prominent enough facility, but after a bit of investigation, nope, no showers. We had a look at a faded Lake Mead NRA overview map and divined that the closed park facility with showers was down at a place called Boulder Beach.

courtesy RHanel

Campsite Packup

Upon arriving at Boulder Beach, we scoured the campground, but could find no sign of shower facilities. Seeing as it was now around 3pm - and because we were tired of searching - we decided to use an empty spot at the campground to pack up our gear, and to use an adjacent washroom facility as a way to do a quick freshen-up, and possibly a hair wash.

courtesy RHanel

Pretty-up the rental

We then drove into Henderson (a suburb of Las Vegas), where we stopped at the REI store so that Roland could buy a few items (he'd felt left out when many of us got some discount outdoor clothes back at the start of the trip). We then had a nice pizza dinner at the nearby Settebello Pizzeria, then gave the van a clean-up at a do-it-yourself spray-wash.

Nice and Clean

LAS Wait

After dropping the rental van off (3 minutes before the appointed time of 9pm - not too shabby), we checked in for our flights and chilled out for a couple of hours. Our flight home - despite requiring three hops - went remarkably smoothly. I'll have to give kudos to United for punctuality and no surprises for this sequence of flights.

Bright-eyed Travellers

And so, another trip completed. Based on the "checklist edition" scorechart, I give the trip a three out of five stars, one for each of the three succesful major objectives that we achieved. That's the wrong way to look at it, of course - everything went remarkably well despite some logistical challenges, and we had had excellent weather (I'm including the heat-blocking clouds on the first Grand Canyon day and the wonderfully-interesting flash-flood-generating weather in Zion). We did what we could and rolled with the punches when we couldn't.

Thanks again to all who came. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

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