Our Vacation So Far

Since I am at a desktop Apple computer, I can easily blog. So I will quickly write about our vacation so far:

Las Vegas:

• Chuck and I flew to Las Vegas from San Antonio on Wednesday. We left Corpus Christi at 7 am to get to the airport in time, though we were early enough to buy sandwiches at Whole Foods to eat on the plane.
• Two nights in Las Vegas. We are "foodies" and so loved the restaurants we went to there. The first night we paid more for taxis than for our meal at a faraway spot I found on TripAdvisor called Off the Strip. Fantastic and reasonably priced meals had us wishing we could eat there frequently. 
• The main reason we came to Las Vegas was to see the Cirque de Soleil show of the Beatles Love.  We enjoyed it so much that we would even go to Las Vegas again to see it, and we didn't like the smoke-filled casinos. The show was beyond our expectations--we are Baby Boomers, after all!
• Since Chuck and I don't smoke, gamble or drink (much), Las Vegas is not really "our" town. To get to the elevators to our room, we always had to walk through all the slot machines and smoke. 
• One good thing is I got up early both mornings and walked for an hour along the Strip. It was fun to see all the buildings with few people around.
• I was disappointed by the lack of recycling depositories on the streets, because bottles of water were sold on every street overpass. People were drinking all the time in the heat, and all those plastic bottles were thrown in the trash or on the sidewalks. (On my early morning walks, I observed people cleaning all the streets and sidewalks.)

Salt Lake City:

• We flew here on Friday, with MJ picking us up at the airport. There was the quickest delivery of luggage at the terminal, which impressed us with Salt Lake City.
• MJ was kind about ferrying us around today to the Farmers' Market, the Salt Lake City Library, and to the card stores I love to frequent. 
• We bought fresh nectarines and raspberries that are so flavorful that we are sad to think of the more tasteless fruit we've become accustomed to in the stores in south TX. The raspberries remind me of the ones we picked in my parents' backyard in Bellingham, WA.
• Next to the Salt Lake City Library is The Leonardo Museum, so went and saw their current exhibit from Australia about the 101 most important inventions of the world.  One of the major inventions was the creations of Legos! I noticed that the refrigerator was invented in 1922, which was the year my dad was born; when he was a teenager in Arkansas, he delivered cubes of ice for ice boxes.
• We had a light meal tonight so that we could have dessert! Chuck had molten chocolate cake; MJ and I had salted caramel gelato between toffee chunk cookies with chocolate dunking sauce. That was a dessert worth the calories!!