The Chambers

On one of our vegas days, I had organised a Ford Mustang rental through Hertz. The plan was to get the car and do a drive through the desert and check out the scenery and sights and stop in at an outlet store shopping centre outside of Vegas. This turned out to be a fantastic day out. We all got in a cab at about 8am to go out and get the car. The cab driver we had tried to scam us into a big tip with a sob story on this and that and a whole raft of bs, which he wasnt very good at telling and he was a bit disappointed (and told me so) when I didnt give him the tip he was expecting. ah well….

The car rental place in Vegas is massive. You dont just pick your car up at the airport, they have a whole other “terminal” for car picks up and all the major car rental companies have a presence there and the parking garage must hold thousands of cars – hertz alone had over 700 parks there.

We had hired a mustang, but they had a Shelby GT available, which was a little more $ wise, but a much nicer “zoomer car” as Jackson likes to say. The Shelby is a convertible, which was very nice!! We took the upgrade and I am glad we did. What an awesome car and it was a lot of fun to drive out on the highways they have there. I even got to slow right down to a near complete stop and plant it and accelerate very quickly (up to the speed limit – i promise)! Jackson said he thought the car was Lightning McQueen when I did this… so, you see when I was doing this I was making my son happy (and me too)

We drove out of Vegas headed for a little town called Searchlight. We had to detour off the highway for an accident – which got us a bit turned around and lost and back onto the highway heading in the wrong direction (oops), but we got back in the right direction and headed along the highway. The scenery was made by the large mountains / hills which were a few miles off the highway, the scenery nearby the highway was tumbleweeds and cacti. The folk at Energex will be really interested with the photos kylie took of the very low hanging power lines and the incredibly large solar power station we drove by (these photos will go nicely with the pictures Kylie had me take of the nuclear power station we drove by in Florida).

We found searchlight and realised calling it a town was a bit generous, it was more a construction site – I presume they were building a by-pass…..

We turned onto the Joshua Tree Highway towards a township called Nipton. The Joshua Tree Highway is aptly named as the highway is lined by literally thousands of Joshua trees, we only saw 4 or 5 cars on this highway and it was a nice straight open road. This road was good for lots of doing whatever you do wen you hire a convertible zoomer car and you have miles of straight highway, with literally no other cars around…. (tige, you would love it…)

We then turned Northish onto the interstate 15 highway for Vegas and our stop in at the outlet stores. This was another succesful shopping venture, with Jackson picking up a couple of fighter jets, I got a nice die-cast model of a Shelby as a momento of the car and we all got (what felt like) another suitcase worth of clothes…. These outlets stores were really good and are worth the trip out – you can catch a bus for $15 return from the MGM in Vegas to them, or you can hire a “zoomer car” and have a lot more fun.

We left the outlets mid afternoon and headed back to Vegas. We arrived back into Vegas near to sunset, so we decided to drop our shopping off at the hotel and do some laps of the strip. We drove up and down the strip a couple of times, once with the top up and then a couple with the top down and the car in convertible mode. This was a lot of fun!

All in all this was a top day! I only got lost once, I NEVER ONCE drove on the wrong side of the road but I did manage to turn the windscreen wipers on instead of the indicators quite a few times…..

I have added one picture, from the hertz website, of the car. We have about 150 photos from this day, so we’ll post them when we get home.

cc, kc and jacko