Vegas for dinner.

Friday was the last day of school before the Winter Break, and the very next day I went down to Las Vegas with a friend for dinner.  She’s got ciliac really bad and can’t eat anything with the slightest hint of gluten without getting sick.  At the edge of the strip in the Fashion Show Mall, there is Maggiano's Italian Restaurant, which according to my friend has the best gluten free pasta in the west.  She goes down there every year for her birthday, the last time she went alone.  She was planning on going alone again this year, but asked me in passing if I wanted to join her.  I said yes.

So we left late Saturday morning around 10:30 and headed south on I-15.  Somewhere around Spanish Fork we noticed a Subaru that was driving erratically, it liked straddling the center line, sometimes even when there was a vehicle next to it.  Turns out she was texting, talking on the phone and who knows what else while driving.  We tried speeding up and getting away from her.  10 minutes later she had pulled her head out of the cloud and caught up and passed us.  We tried slowing down and letting her get ahead of us.  10 minutes later she would be in the middle of a particularly interesting slew of texts and had slowed down and we caught up to and passed her.  This went on over and over again for over two hours.  We nicknamed this driver-vehicle combo “Psycho Subaru”. 

At one point “Crazy Kia” joined in on the fun.  Psycho Subaru would take an opening in the right lane to pass several cars, Crazy Kia included, and squeeze back into the left lane as she came to the back end of a semi in the right lane.  Then Crazy Kia would do the same thing 5 minutes later.  This kept up for a while, to the point where I started giving blow-by-blow descriptions in my best NASCAR announcer voice.  The Kia left the freeway somewhere before Cedar City where the Subaru pulled off, and the rest of the drive was uneventful.

We stopped in St. George for an hour or so, tried to figure out the license plate on the sports car above, then went to Mesquite just long enough to check into our rooms and head off to Vegas.  There was a 1 hour wait for a table at Maggiano’s, so we walked around the mall until our table was ready.  Had a fantastic dinner, way too much food, and then spent an hour or two walking down the strip to the other end and back.  After that we were exhausted and headed back to Mesquite for the night.

Sunset somewhere between Mesquite and Vegas.

Sunday we got up at the crack of noon (well, just before the 11:00 check out time), went to the Black Bear Café in St. George for a great breakfast and then headed straight home.  The weather was beautiful (in the 50’s) all the way down and back, until we hit the rain right around Nephi.  Even with the rain, pretty heavy at times, the drive was easy and I made it home around 6.

Sunrise in from the hotel room in Mesquite

Great, short trip out of town.

Nice trailer for sale somewhere near Toquerville, Utah.  Interested?

Can’t see the forest for the trees.

Heading into the storm.

Low flying clouds near Mona.