Apr 21st to 23rd - Las Vegas to Hawthorne

Apr 21st – Thurs
We hugged Claude & Val goodbye about 9:30 and then headed to a nearby casino. We were going to have the breakfast buffet but they only have breakfast on weekends. We thought about waiting for the lunch buffet, but shortly after it opened at 11, we moved on (with money ahead) to a small casino which had a breakfast special that we took advantage of. This small casino had older machines so we didn’t stay long after eating. It was quite windy and we didn’t have other plans so of course we ended up at the huge Boulder Station casino. I hit a reasonable bonus on the first machine that I played there so we were able to stay for quite a while and for the whole day we spent $40. With the price of fuel this is not much more than a day trip!
The rest of the evening was relaxing, dinner, phone calls & TV.

Apr 22nd – Fri
What we thought would be a bit of sewing to fix a sagging curtain turned out to be a job that entailed removing the valence and re-stapling a Velcro strip that supports the curtain on the inside. Since the chairs moved out, I figured it was a good opportunity to vacuum and was just finishing when Billy & Lauri asked if we wanted to join them at Arizona Charlie’s for breakfast. They moved to our park this morning and of course we said we would join them. It is hard to beat $3.99 for ham or steak, eggs, potatoes & toast.
We can’t leave a casino without playing something so we each took $10. I picked a machine and Terry sat down beside me. I lost $5 while he turned his $5 into $45. As he was cashing in his ticket, I picked another machine and cashed out with my original $10. Again, Terry played a machine beside me and turned $5 into $43. Since we were with Billy & Lauri, we actually left with the money in our pockets.
I did 3 loads of laundry and did some cleaning. Terry went to an RV supply store and got a new clip for the sliding door on the wardrobe & installed it. We went to B&L’s to get some pictures as the battery on my camera was not fully charged when we went to Valley of Fire. I ended up putting a lot of their pictures on a DVD and then showing Lauri how to backup pictures using Picasa.
Just as we were finishing dinner, Billy came over and asked if we wanted to watch “The President’s Speech” with them. We have heard a lot about it so went to watch it. I really enjoyed it and so did Terry but he prefers “action” films. Our great host even provided popcorn!

Apr 23rd – Sat – to Hawthorne NV
We headed north this morning and ended up at the parking lot of a casino for a free night of dry camping. We paid an exorbitant $4.69 for diesel in Tonopah and had lunch there.
After putting out the slides, we went for a short walk and saw an Elks club with 3 camping spots but didn’t feel like moving. We lost a few dollars in the casino and went back to the rig. Terry hooked up the generator so he could watch TV and chatted with some neighbors while he was outside. Shortly after dinner, we put away the generator and watched TV in bed for a while as the TV in the bedroom is DC.