Las Vegas–Part One

Although I’m a little behind on posting about our trip to Las Vegas in March, I wanted to share some of the scenery we enjoyed while there.  Some of you may remember that I got a new DSLR camera for Christmas.  Between my new camera and my old point and shoot camera, I took over 800 pictures in 7 days.  You have no idea how hard it is to pick a “few” of those to give you a sense of our trip, but I’ll give it a try.

Here is Part One.

We had never been to Las Vegas before and neither of us are gamblers, so we spent several days checking out the amazing desert scenery.  Check these out:

This is the hotel we stayed in – The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas.  Brand spanking new and very cool.

This is the scene from our hotel room balcony at 6:00 am.  And yes, I went right back to sleep after taking this one :)!

And this is the view down the strip later that night from the same balcony.

Our first big adventure was the flight and tour of the Grand Canyon.  There are no words to describe the Grand Canyon, so I’ll let some of my pictures do it for me.

Taken from the airplane on our flight from Vegas to the Grand Canyon.

First glimpse of the vastness of the Grand Canyon.

More.

And here is a panorama using a cool feature on my Canon camera Photo-Stitch.

Our next big adventure was a trip to the Nevada State Park – “Valley of Fire” which gets its name from the red sandstone formations throughout the stark landscape of the Mojave Desert.  We paid our $11 entrance fee and drove through some of the most amazing landscape either of us had seen.

Here are some rare plants and flowers seen in the desert.

The next stop was Hoover Dam, which was too big to get a single picture of.  I won’t bore you with the amazing details of this man made structure, suffice it to say “WOW”!

Lake Mead before the dam

The new bridge over the Colorado River next to the Hoover Damn  (from which you can see nothing I might add)

In Part Two, I will share some of the Vegas lights and interiors.

Stay tuned…