Does Venice have a replica Grand Canyon?
Aug. 21st, 2006 06:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerYesterday ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bugshaw / taffbug got her birthday present: a look at a very, very big hole.
Off by car at 0615 to the Stratosphere hotel, where we loitered in the dedicated tour pick-up lobby (this says something about Las Vegas hotels) until a bus took us, via a couple of other hotel pick-ups, to Las Vegas North airport. At the tiny little Vision Air terminal, not only did our bags get weighed but so did we - important for smaller planes, I suppose - and B had the amusement of having her handbag flight-tagged. Baggage check-in consisted of dropping it in a crate next to the plane as you boarded and picking it up after landing, which I can see might not work for a 747 but makes a nice change from carousels.
Our Dornier 328 took off over over the north of the city, past Nellis AFB, Boulder Dam and Lake Mead. Saying that LV is laid out as a grid doesn't convey the bizarre chequerboard that results; grid squares are zoned differently, so one is low-density residential, another light industry, and others as yet unallocated patches of desert scrub. It looks for all the world like one of those games where you build terrain by laying down tiles or clicking Age of Empires style on a map grid. (Come to think of it, perhaps this explains a lot about LV planning. Evidently there is a Build Mad Casino Complex option once you have accumulated enough credit.)
The ground beneath got wrinkly, then jagged, then opened out into a maze of ravines and mesas - the western end of the Grand Canyon. As the canyon turned north we descended over the southern rim plain, which is high enough (7000 ft) to be only semi-arid desert, and covered in sparse pine forest. At the South Rim airport we transferred to a coach for the trip to the rim itself. The tour was well-run, with a knowledgeable ex-ranger guide with a good supply of interesting information and, by his own admission, very bad jokes. We stopped first at Bright Angel Trailhead, where you walk through a rimside hotel looby out onto a terrace and your first view of the Canyon itself.
Apparently it is normal at this point to spend about five minutes just gawping. We certainly did. You are looking down about a mile; the far canyon wall is about 13 miles away, and the stretch of far wall visible is about 18 miles long. It's almost impossible to grasp the scale, and I can quite believe how the first Spanish explorers thought they were looking at a valley only a few hundred feet deep until they tried descending into it.
We walked a little up and down the rim trail, then took the coach a few miles up to Mather Point and a different set of views - from there, almost 30 miles of the Canyon is visible. I doubt that pictures can quite do the view justice, but we'll be sure to try posting a few once we get home. Then back to one of the local hotels for buffet lunch, before a flight back, which was noticeably bumpier with midday thermals rising from the Canyon floor and surrounding desert.
Once back in LV we had a couple of hours to kill, so we took a look at The Venetian, a hotel a little to the north of the ones on the Strip we'd already had a look around. Aside from the obligatory casino, the Venetian's special attraction is a shopping arcade modelled on Venice, complete with canal and fake sky; the evening lighting, sky detail and cool temperature do fool you for a few seconds into thinking you've walked outside except for it suddenly being sunset and much cooler than Nevada! As I commented to Bridget, it wondered if someone was tempted to build a replica Grand Canyon for real Venetians to go and look at...
Today - off down towards Lake Havasu via Kingman and bits of what remains of Route 66, then Joshua Tree National Park before Los Angeles and Worldcon.
bugshaw / taffbug got her birthday present: a look at a very, very big hole.Off by car at 0615 to the Stratosphere hotel, where we loitered in the dedicated tour pick-up lobby (this says something about Las Vegas hotels) until a bus took us, via a couple of other hotel pick-ups, to Las Vegas North airport. At the tiny little Vision Air terminal, not only did our bags get weighed but so did we - important for smaller planes, I suppose - and B had the amusement of having her handbag flight-tagged. Baggage check-in consisted of dropping it in a crate next to the plane as you boarded and picking it up after landing, which I can see might not work for a 747 but makes a nice change from carousels.
Our Dornier 328 took off over over the north of the city, past Nellis AFB, Boulder Dam and Lake Mead. Saying that LV is laid out as a grid doesn't convey the bizarre chequerboard that results; grid squares are zoned differently, so one is low-density residential, another light industry, and others as yet unallocated patches of desert scrub. It looks for all the world like one of those games where you build terrain by laying down tiles or clicking Age of Empires style on a map grid. (Come to think of it, perhaps this explains a lot about LV planning. Evidently there is a Build Mad Casino Complex option once you have accumulated enough credit.)
The ground beneath got wrinkly, then jagged, then opened out into a maze of ravines and mesas - the western end of the Grand Canyon. As the canyon turned north we descended over the southern rim plain, which is high enough (7000 ft) to be only semi-arid desert, and covered in sparse pine forest. At the South Rim airport we transferred to a coach for the trip to the rim itself. The tour was well-run, with a knowledgeable ex-ranger guide with a good supply of interesting information and, by his own admission, very bad jokes. We stopped first at Bright Angel Trailhead, where you walk through a rimside hotel looby out onto a terrace and your first view of the Canyon itself.
Apparently it is normal at this point to spend about five minutes just gawping. We certainly did. You are looking down about a mile; the far canyon wall is about 13 miles away, and the stretch of far wall visible is about 18 miles long. It's almost impossible to grasp the scale, and I can quite believe how the first Spanish explorers thought they were looking at a valley only a few hundred feet deep until they tried descending into it.
We walked a little up and down the rim trail, then took the coach a few miles up to Mather Point and a different set of views - from there, almost 30 miles of the Canyon is visible. I doubt that pictures can quite do the view justice, but we'll be sure to try posting a few once we get home. Then back to one of the local hotels for buffet lunch, before a flight back, which was noticeably bumpier with midday thermals rising from the Canyon floor and surrounding desert.
Once back in LV we had a couple of hours to kill, so we took a look at The Venetian, a hotel a little to the north of the ones on the Strip we'd already had a look around. Aside from the obligatory casino, the Venetian's special attraction is a shopping arcade modelled on Venice, complete with canal and fake sky; the evening lighting, sky detail and cool temperature do fool you for a few seconds into thinking you've walked outside except for it suddenly being sunset and much cooler than Nevada! As I commented to Bridget, it wondered if someone was tempted to build a replica Grand Canyon for real Venetians to go and look at...
Today - off down towards Lake Havasu via Kingman and bits of what remains of Route 66, then Joshua Tree National Park before Los Angeles and Worldcon.
