170 Miles
7:47 p.m. - 2007-08-28


My husband had to attend a conference for tax folk in Las Vegas last week, so now that I am no longer gainfully employed, I got to go too. I like a vacation where someone else is paying for the hotel! It was held at a big big casino hotel just off the strip, and our room was on the 17th floor. I have never stayed anywhere so high before, and I thought it would bother me, but strangely, it did not. Our windows looked out over the LV landscape down Flamingo Road. The weather there was very hot, 109 degrees on some days, so I planned my activities to be back in the hotel room shortly after noon to escape the worst of the heat. While the spouse immersed himself in the wonders of tax accounting, I drove all over the place looking for yarn shops, antique stores, and thrift stores. I did not realize just how much I was driving around until the spouse told me I had driven 170 miles in the three days we were there. I knew the blocks in LV were long, but I didn't think they were that long.

I had some wonderful luck at a thrift store. My father-in-law has long wanted some soup bowls with two handles on them, teacup-type handles on opposite sides for lifting and sipping soup. I think they saw some in a restaurant somewhere and wanted some like them ever since. I found some for about 50 cents apiece, bought a good number of them, and will give them to him later this week. Finding just what he has been wanting really made my day. I think that originally the bowls must have come out of some defunct hotel because the same kind of bowls were in 3 or four different thrift shops.

I visited two yarn shops and really liked Wooly Wonders. At first I couldn't find the shop and had to make a lucky U-turn through a shopping center, having spied the shop address across the street. While making the turn, I passed right in front of Freed's bakery, which I had heard about on the Food Channel. Of course, I stopped and checked it out, resulting in a pleasant few minutes in the car snarfing down a slice of whipped cream/strawberry cake.

All in all, I got lots of nice sock yarn, most of it for Melissa, some beads, and some vintage patterns and needlework pamphlets. After the conference was over, we drove to Reno and spent one night there before driving back home over the Sierras.

It was also a good book vacation. Some vacations bring me bad or so-so book luck where the books I bring to read are duds. One time I brought 5 books and only one, my first Maeve Binchy, was good. The others were about concentration camp horrors, cancer deaths, prisons, vampires, or devil worship, all of which I hate to read about and try to avoid. I think that they should mention on the book jacket when this kind of subject matter is in the book so that I can reject it right away. This time I brought several Catherine Coulter FBI thrillers, and they were excellent vacation reading material. For the long driving stretches to get to LV, we listened to books-on-tape, two Sue Grafton books and some short stories by Rosamund Pilcher.

Now I am home again and feeling like sewing. I have a new pair of socks in the works, but I feel like making some more T-shirts for Abby and another jumper for me. I took my denim jumper to Las Vegas and used it often in the heat. I would just pop it on over a T-shirt, slip on some flipflops, and I was out the door. My flipflops did not survive the trip though. They got so dirty and had gum stuck to the bottom after three days, so I just threw them away in the hotel trash can when we left. Sin City killed my flipflops.