DAY 211 TUESDAY 8th April 2008

Yosemite, CA (Miles to Date: 20815)

For our final two day in Vegas we decided to spend our time touring the sights of the city. This place is really a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah – it is all about gambling, drinking and sex- a true adult playground. It is a bit strange bringing children here, but lots of people do, and in amongst the adult pursuits it is possible to find some family friendly activities. We spend our time simply wandering through the hotels like Luxor, MGM, Caesars Palace and the Venetian. The huge buildings are marvellous in many ways and the scale is phenomenal. We love the detail and sumptuousness of the Venetian Hotel and its' canals complete with gondolas, but our favourite thing in the whole of Las Vegas is the fountains at Bellagio. In the past we have spent an hour and a half listening to performances, but they seem to have reduced the frequency of the performances from every 15 minutes to every 30 minutes so we only watch a couple of performances this time.

Jack and Emily just love theme park rides and Circus Circus provides the ideal opportunity with it’s Aventuredome, the largest indoor theme park in the country. Jack is by far the more adventurous of the two and just does ride after ride. Unfortunately on this occasion he takes one ride too many, and Chaos was this ride. From being queasy Jack turns green and empties the contents of his stomach -twice. He is not long put off and the following day we go down to the New New York Hotel where Jack and Karen take the Manhattan Express roller coaster that rides over the top and around the hotel. This time he comes off smiling and to re-inforce his re-found love of rides he immediately gets on again.

We are not too sad to leave Vegas, one or two days is definitely enough. It might be different if we were gambling types, but we love the open spaces and historical sites. Our next stop is Yosemite, a place we had all been looking forward to visiting since the start of this trip. It is a long haul from Las Vegas – something like 470 miles, so we planned to set-off early. The motor home had different thoughts on this so and as Mark was trying to disconnect the city water hose from the van he found he could not remove it. We ended up cutting the hose off and had to get help in removing the hose end from the fitting on the van. Never mind -we could stop at a Wal-Mart en route and get a new hose. Around 70 miles down the road as we crossed the desert towards California Karen starts to calling to Mark, who is driving ,to stop. We pull over – to our horror water is pouring out of the underneath of the cabinet in the bathroom. We mop out the bathroom and let the residual water out of our tank and set-off. After a few frantic calls Karen manages to book us into a motor home dealership in Bakersfield. We pull in around 2pm and have a worrying wait to find out whether the problem is serious or not. As it turns out the repair is simply replacing a fitting that had been worked loose this morning when Mark was trying to remove the hose. Fortunately we did not have a long delay and so we are soon on our way. As we close in on our destination, Midpines up in the foot hills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains ,the twilight falls. It is long dark before we arrive and the roads become very narrow and curved and steep – which is an interesting combination for a 36 foot motor home towing a 3 ½ thousand pound Jeep. Tired and stiff we get into our campsite at around 9pm and it is not long before we are tucked up cosily in our beds.