drivetofive

Odometer (Legend):  540,151

Odometer (ILX):  146,276

Trip Distance:  600 Miles

This was a quickie!  For < 48 hours, some friends and I slummed it in Sin City for the Las Vegas Rock & Roll Half-Marathon this weekend.  In the interest of time I’ll let the photos tell the story today.

Lance (center) flew in from Dallas for the occasion.  He and I share an affinity for Sour Patch Kids.  I guess James probably doesn’t mind them either.  We fueled up with proper road trip treats in Wickenburg after departing Phoenix.

Pit stop in “Nothing, Arizona.”  What was once a gas station and convenience store called ALL MART has been abandoned for over a decade.  The building is spray painted with “population 4.”  It’s located along a desolate stretch of Highway 93 between Wickenburg and Wikeup, Arizona where cell phone signal is pretty much nonexistent.

James was driving a 6-speed manual 2016 Scion iM.  Fun little car for $20k!

Lunch at Mr. D’s Route 66 Diner in Kingman, Arizona.  Kingman is a city in northwestern Arizona that embraces its Route 66 heritage in a big way.

James and I added an over-easy egg to our burgers.  So good!

View of our hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada:  The “Downtown Grand”.

Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, just a block from our hotel.  There’s a 4-block stretch which has been closed to vehicular traffic since 1994, including 2 permanent concert stages and a nightly light show set against the curved roof.  It was bustling with people, as was expected!

A zipline was running the length of Fremont Street.  One of the many restaurants in that area is Heart Attack Grill:  A place where you can eat for free if you’re heavier than 350 pounds.  They even have a scale out front.

My friend Ryan (at left in the striped shirt) came out to hang with the gang, too.

I spent $5 at the slot machine in the historic El Cortez casino and walked away with 11 cents.  So much for my luck at gambling.

Race day!  Mom came down from southern Utah to participate with us.  The pre-race “starting village” was in the southern part of The Strip in a large open lot, where the thousands of runners could congregate and get ready to pound the pavement when the race started at 4:30 p.m., just after sunset.

View of New York New York casino.

Mom, Tyson, Lance, Beau – ready to rock & roll, in corral 3.  There were 23,000 finishers.  This event was huge.

Running past my employer – CVS!  It was awesome that The Strip was shut down for the occasion.  There was heavy crowd support along the way.  It was windy, cold, and even rainy for a portion of the run.  Even so, we enjoyed running at night under the city lights.

Traffic closure on Las Vegas Boulevard meant that all the side streets were totally jammed when we all finished.  It took almost an hour in the ILX to get back to our hotel which was only a few miles away.

Tomorrow:  I’m off to Los Angeles for this year’s Auto Show, where I’ll be working in collaboration with Redline Reviews to bring you the latest in car news!

This entry was posted on November 16, 2015 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.