Vegas and our return to California

We were really glad to get to Vegas as we had a hotel room for 4 nights at the Gold Coast casino. Its not on the strip but close enough for easy access. We checked out different casinos each night. Starting with Caesars Palace where I walked away $140 dollars down within the first hour! My luck didn't get any better the next few days either..but Geo had more luck and ended up leaving Vegas with an extra $100 or so.

As well as the gambling we visited the 'Bodies' exhibition which was in the Luxor. We couldn't take pictures, but its the same as the original Body Worlds with human bodies preserved in various different ways.

The day we left Vegas was the day of our next gig which was Blink 182 again, in Irvine near LA. We hit some pretty bad traffic so the journey wasn't great. It was good to be back in southern California though! The gig was outdoors again but unlike last time the weather was perfect.

They had Weezer supporting this time who were good to see and Blink played great again, including an amazing drum solo from Travis on a flying drum kit.

The next day we had another gig, this time The Killers! They were brilliant as well, and we had a really good view as it wasn't such a huge venue. This was at an arena on the San Diego Uni campus. We were staying a few miles away from there. San Diego has been one of my favourite places. We spent 4 or 5 days there to make the most of our last week. We visited the zoo on the day we arrived which was a lot better than LA zoo was.

The next day we went on a day trip to Mexico which we booked a while ago. This was because we couldn't really drive in because we didn't pay a deposit on the van which would have been about $10,000! It was a typical tourist coach tour. the journey wasn't that long as we were only going to Tijuana. Once we got there we just had hundreds of tourist shops to look around. It was good to have been to see it. Things were a lot different just over the border. We tried some tequila and that's all we bought. The journey back was worse as the queue going into America is 4 times as many lanes and a lot longer.

The next day we went to a football game. (American football). It was the San Diego chargers vs Baltimore Ravens. It was the first game of the season and the stadium was full. It was a pretty good experience and the game was good being fairly tight right to the end. San Diego lost in the end though.

Then one of our worst experiences of the trip...we had parked in a mall near the stadium after having trouble finding a park or even a taxi to take us there. We had been towed away during the game!! Along with quite a few other people who's cars had gone... Apparently they had been watching to see who had parked there for the game. We had to get a taxi over and hand over the fine to get the van back.

We left San Diego today and are now in Oceanside, half way up the coast to LA. We played disc golf again, and then cleaned the van. We now have one day left so have to make sure its in decent condition at least when we drop it off. Tomorrow we're just buying a couple of last things we want to take back and then packing our cases as much as possible. Then on Thursday we drop the RV off at about 10am and then off the LAX for our flight at about 4pm.

We can't believe its gone so quickly. We haven't really told everyone about our change of plans that we had half way. I think most people who read do know, but basically we ran into 'money problems' as we were spending more than we budgeted for at the start. We realised we couldn't really afford all 6 months here so shortened it to 5. We abandoned the 48 states initially, which we're kind of annoyed about now as it wouldn't have cost us much more to do. But we have still ended with a final total of 41 states. We only missed New England and North Dakota, so all but one of the larger states we visited. We have done about 15000 miles.