Apartment in Vegas

We called around this morning and found a one bedroom apartment in Vegas to rent week to week while we look for a house so we checked out of the motel in Searchlight and headed back to Vegas.  The apartment complex is just north of UNLV and it’s just a couple of miles east of the strip and fairly centrally located in the Vegas metro area. It’s got a pool and hot tub. There is also a park kitty corner across the street that has three small fenced off leash dog areas. That’s the good. The place has roaches that of course were all in hiding when we inspected the place. There are also frequently people screaming at each other across the park or in some cases just talking to themselves and this is not the kind of neighborhood where Leah will be going out at night by herself even with the dogs. Tomorrow we’ll get a Sunday paper and begin the rental house hunt.

Searchlight, NV

We looked at a few rental houses today and drove around the west and south sides of Vegas this afternoon just to get a feel for it. Both areas were all newer construction and suburbs just stop all of the sudden with no visible development as far as can be seen. One of the houses we looked was a decent sized four bedroom all on one floor but the backyard was pretty small. There others we non-starters, but hopefully we can find something even better. On the way down to Lake Havasu City we came across a little spec on the map called Searchlight that had two motels. The first one was full but the second had a vacancy and took dogs. It isn’t a great place, but it is only 30 minutes from the southern edge of the Vegas metro area, so at least we can get to Vegas to look for a house to rent tomorrow.

Here is a shot of the Pilot and the blue wagon just before left the La Quinta parking lot.

No rooms in Vegas for us this weekend

We’ve got to be out of the room by noon and we haven’t been able to find any hotel rooms for less then $350 a night this weekend that will take our dogs.  There’s a big music festival this weekend and it’s also the weekend before Halloween, so we figure the two things must have the hotels pretty booked up.  We tried to find temp housing as well, but no one we left messages for got back to us.  We’re just going to have to head south out of town towards Lake Havasu City, AZ.  They’ve vacancies at hotels that will take our dogs at reasonable rates and it looks like it will be a nice area to relax although its to far from Vegas to be able to do any looking for rental houses.

The blue covered wagon arrives in Vegas

We made it to Vegas without any major incidents. The blue tarps covering the loaded trailer are pretty torn up but they did their job. The only place we could find a room at that would take our dogs as a La Quinta on the north west side of Vegas and we could only get the room tonight. We’ll have to find something else for the weekend.

Picture of the moon from a log stretch of lonely road.

Princess Tula riding along

Duncan with his head wedged in between the side of the Pilot and the seat. He spent a lot of time with his head jammed in there like that.

Silver lining

We forgot to get gas on the way out of Ely and didn’t come across an gas stations in the 40 minutes of steep mountain driving before we got to a sign that said no gas for 80 miles. Rather then back track we decided to head for a dot on the map near the Utah border that we hoped would be less steep of a drive, since the front brakes were shimmying around even with the electric brakes on the trailer and that combined with the prospect of having to dig the gas cans out of the trailer was stressing me out.

The road wasn’t any less steep but at least the destination amused me and lightened the mood.

The dogs and straddling the Nevada/Utah state border.

The pumps are clearly in Utah.

While the building is clearly in Nevada. My guess is that the gas taxes are cheaper in Utah so the pumps are in Utah, but of course there is no gambling in Utah so the building is in Nevada.

Utah sign and the business signs.

Close up of the Utah sign including the time zone change.

Hotel Nevada

Last night we made it to Ely, NV and got a room at the historic Hotel Nevada. It’s cafe serves breakfast 24 hours so a little late night breakfast was in order. In the morning the dogs and I found a fenced in pond with a fountain and water foul shelter next to the library. There were geese, ducks, swans, and some others I didn’t recognize.  The dogs were fascinated.

The blue covered wagon heads to Vegas

We finally finished loading up and hit the road a bit after six in the evening today. The original plan was to leave the previous Thursday but all of our stuff didn’t fit in five vaults so we had to have a sixth delivered that we loaded ourselves on Thursday evening trough Friday morning (yeah up all night, joy). Thursday afternoon we also found a big dent in the fender of our new trailer that had been parked on the street to allow the UPS Freight forklift to pick-up the loaded vaults and drop off the new ones (they brought two even though we only asked for one). From the angle of the dent and the lack of any debris on the street I seems highly probable that it was the UPS Freight forklift that did it, but they denied it was them. While we were trying to determine if they we’re going to anty up we didn’t want to move the trailer, but on Friday afternoon we called the cops and got an incident report and then took it to a guy on Saturday morning who runs a body shop from his residence and was willing to work on it on a Saturday. We could finally get to loading our trailer with trash for a run to the dump on Saturday evening, but that meant we didn’t start loading it with stuff to move until Sunday after we went to the dump. Packing our remaining stuff into the trailer, Pilot, and car top carrier also took longer then expected thus why we didn’t hit the road until six today.

The loaded trailer before it got its blue bonnet.

Empty living room.

Empty Josh’s office.

Empty Leah’s closet.

Empty bedroom.

 

 

 

 

 

Empty space.