Holiday to Las Vegas in Dec 2013: Day 4 – Las Vegas to Barlow

Unsurprisingly we woke around 3am – bit early for us to be honest. Decided to pick up a Starbucks at 3:30am which must be the earliest Starbucks ever for us.

Worked on the blog uploading photos. Nice ones of the High Line and Central Park – pleased with them.

Headed down for breakfast at the Beach Cafe which has a separate seating area for Hilton Honors members – didn’t really make a lot of difference since at 6am when it opens if you are only people in the restaurant you can sit where you like! Anyway breakfast was very pleasant – nice and quiet. Food was typical hot breakfast buffet style with the pre-requisite cold plates(!), but Vick did enjoy the omelette station.

We popped out to Walgreens to stock up on toiletries etc ($40 worth!), and then we checked out and headed down the I15 to Barlow.

We stopped at Calico Ghost Town about 15 miles east of Barlow, which is an amazing place. Unfortunately not for the right reasons (in my view). It’s an old town in the middle of the desert which everyone left, and it was then revamped in the 50s/60s as a tourist spot. It’s your classic idea of a town from a western. All the buildings are made out of wood; there’s a bar; the sheriff’s office; a railroad track; a school house and a beer garden(!). All the places you would expect to find in a ghost town from the late 19th century!!!! It cost us $8 per person to get in.

There are shops which sell home made stuff, but luckily the one thing that did keep us there for more than 10 mins, was that one of the shops sold Starbucks coffee and fudge! The other key encounter for us was with the Calico Entertainments Manager who tried to sell us a combined ticket to all the attractions for $5! That tells you a little bit about the quality of the attractions!

We didn’t spend a lot of time there, but hats off to the people who work there who are doing their best to keep it going.

We then left to find our hotel which proved more difficult than we thought. We hadn’t printed out any maps, and we assumed Barlow would be small enough to find it. After about an hour, we finally pulled up into the car park. It was 11:30am by this stage.

There’s an outlet mall and loads of fast food shops close by, so we got some Chinese food from Panda Express. Busy place but decent food at a reasonable price.

Got into our shorts today for the first time on hols – very warm in the sun but very cold in the shade. Nice to feel that we are on holiday now.

We drove out to find a supermarket – Vick wanted to get some nice shower gel. We popped into Chili’s to get something light to eat – I had a Quaesadilla salad which was lovely. Vick just had a starter. The evening didn’t last much longer after we got back, and we had turned the lights out by 8:30pm – lightweights eh?

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to Las Vegas in Dec 2013