April 25, 2014 Las Vegas

Botanical Cactus Garden at Ethel M Chocolate

We visited the Ethel M Chocolate shop, which opened early and was right on the way to our planned destination.  It really was not much of a tour, just walk though and look at some signs and check out the factory behind large windows and then receive a sample of chocolate. The chocolate was okay. 

We then headed to the Lake Mead Alan Bible Visitor Center. The visitor center is quite new and had some really nice displays. We then drove towards the Hoover Dam, but decided that we did not want to pay $10 to park the car thus we headed back towards Las Vegas, visiting  a majority of the pull offs on the portion of Lakeshore Drive that we did not drive the prior day.  Lakeshore Drive between the Visitor Center and Las Vegas Bay is much nicer than the portion to the north.

Lake Mead 

The afternoon was spent visiting miscellaneous places around Las Vegas. Some places we visited included:

We drove by Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, as featured on Pawn Stars.  There was a huge line out front. Needless to say we did not visit the shop.

Counts Customs, also seen on TV, was neat place with a quite a few cars on display. We got to see some of the guys from the TV show since we were there around lunch time.

Counts Customs

So-Cal Speed Shop had a couple of cars in the shop. Mike got a tee-shirt and some stickers for the garage cabinets.

We also walked the strip. We had a list of “free” things to see at the hotels so we checked some out some of the things we did not see in the past including:

A live act at Circus Circus – kind of neat.

The wild life habitat at the Flamingo – lame.

What we think was the World’s Largest Chandelier at the Cosmopolitan – okay I suppose.

Las Vegas Strip

We had dinner at Holsteins, a burger place, inside of Cosmopolitan. It was tasty. We also stopped by The Cheesecake Factory for a slice of Carrot Cake Cheesecake!

Originally, hitting the downtown area was the plan, but we were just too tired to stay up and check out Freemont Street.