Personal Experience: My Father Son Vacation Trip

This is a father/son vacation trip that is based in Las Vegas but moves to many different areas. When we go this far out west we like to cram as much as possible into the time we have. You only live once after all and later Austin is going to think that it isn’t the coolest thing in the world to go adventuring all over the Southwest with his Dad. But then again he is 20 so perhaps that day is not soon upon us.

We left, courtesy of some U.S. Airways frequent flyer miles on Wednesday, June 18th at 3:35 PM flying through Philadelphia and arriving in Las Vegas right on time at 8:02 PM. Note that I wouldn’t call these the best flight times in the world but again they were sort of free since we used frequent flyer miles and they did save me around $600 so that’s okay. We picked up our car, a 4 wheel drive Durango at Dollar without any hitches and were shortly on our way to the Fiesta Henderson to check in. Note on the car rental: I now always use Dollar Rental Cars when I travel to Vegas. They are the most inexpensive and if you sign up for their Fast Lane program also

Along the way we crossed over the Hoover Dam for the umpteenth time. Hoover Dam is one of those must see places if you visit this area of the country. If you are there in mid-summer you can get an idea of what the workers had to experience some 70 years ago when it was being built. We then traveled down I-95 to Kingman, Arizona where we picked up the main interstate across Arizona, I-40. Kingman is an okay small city that sits at the junction of I-95 and I-40 so there are a lot of motels, restaurants and such catering to travelers. It is also the birth place of Andy Devine, a character actor in Westerns of the 30s, 40s and 50s. The longest section of the old Route 66 intersects the interstate here and since we had time we decided to try it