We drove from LA to Vegas and arrived after dark

We hired a car and set off in what we thought was good time. It should have been easy…

After 2 hours we were still in LA :^) LA is huge and sprawls for many miles, it was a new experience for Peter and I and we didn't really enjoy it. We were driven on by our excitement about going to Las Vegas. This was the early 2000s; we had no clue that we would be living in Vegas by 2017.  It's an interesting journey of around 270 miles and I did fall in love with the giant thermometer in Baker (Young Electric Sign Company for Willis Herron 1991); it is a great example of advertising a place, a little less than that of the moving of the 19th century London Bridge to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, but a commitment all the same.

Lake Havasu City was put on the map when Robert P. McCulloch bought the bridge in 1968. He was developing the city and saw the value in having a unique attraction, and no he didn't think he had bought Tower Bridge, that's an urban myth.

We finally arrived in Vegas after dark; we parked on Luxor Drive and wrote the names of the hotels we wanted to stay at and then pulled them out of a bag. Paris Las Vegas was mind-blowing and was Vegas!

Before the internal combustion engine and the car, the journey from LA to Vegas would have taken several weeks by horse and wagon. It was dangerous, travelers could get lost in the desert or mountains, access to water was restricted, and it wouldn't be something you would undertake lightly. This drawing is of a V6 engine. A V6 engine is a six-cylinder piston engine where the cylinders and cylinder blocks share a common crankshaft and are arranged in a V configuration.