Road Tripping: Welcome to Mesquite, Nevada

Mesquite, Nevada, is a small town. Like, very small, with a population of roughly 18,000 people. It's a quiet little place with a single school for each grade level, and most of the kids I interacted with at the Virgin Valley High School Grad night I was drawing at boasted of how they were going to nearby Dixie university if not jetting off on a mission trip somewhere. There was a Wal-mart, where we stopped to refuel and use the bathrooms and several casinos as are mandatory of most towns in Nevada (except Boulder City, because they're special- literally no Casinos allowed within their city limits). We stopped at their local vape shop for some juice, and the guys working there were extremely friendly and pleasant to interact with. There's a LOT of truckers coming through and a lot of stop-over traffic from people traveling the highway, so we weren't surprised to find that most of the casinos (and gas stations) had designated truck lots for their overnight stays. Antho and I enjoyed our little visit, and had fun exploring the town though even in our short stay we found we quickly ran out of things to do. There was a lovely park we found, which I'll be posting about soon, and their recreation center was quite nice with pool slides and things, but that comprised the bulk of our options. There's a movie theater, and arcades inside the casinos, but they were crowded with kids or cost too much (time and money). I can see why many of the high school graduates had plans to leave and strike out for bigger cities, even if they're only a short drive down the road- making it a safe option. A lot of kids from Vegas tended to go North when I graduated, up to Reno (still in state, but far enough to feel like freedom) or the Pacific Northwest (because f*ck Vegas summers, guys). I get it. I don't blame them. I can also understand why new families would choose to move here, to get away from the bustle and crime in the cities. Did you know Vegas ranked high in the top 10 worst places to live in the US recently? We weren't number 1- but we weren't far from it. Pretty sure we were beat by Detroit and Flint in Michigan, and one other city I'm not remembering right now. It was due to our levels of crime...

Speaking of crimes, most people who hear about Vegas are probably familiar with the recent incident at Mandalay Bay. While I don't want to dwell on such traumatic, terrible things here on my blog, I will say that the man who perpetrated the shooting was from Mesquite. Make of that what you will. 

Vegas: Wetlands Park

As part of our personal quest to see all the pretty places scattered around our fair city, we suited up and found ourselves driving over to the Wetlands Park in Henderson one fine day. By this point we'd gotten Vanticore, our big Van, and were eager to stretch her legs. Eventually we want to get her fully converted to be livable so we can travel about in comfort, not unlike my much loved tortoises who carry their homes with them, but for now she's getting us out and about as we break her in. She's gone to Valley of Fire since this, but since she was still pretty new to us and we were finding new mechanical errors here and there, we kept it close to home and the Wetlands Park is pretty conveniently located just off of Boulder Highway on none other than Wetlands Park Drive ( 7050 E. Wetlands Park Lane

Las Vegas, NV 89122)... it's free to visit and there's quite an extensive network of trails running throughout the park to explore, so we barely just scratched the surface of all there was to see and do during this trip. The museum was preparing to close shortly after we got there, too, so we weren't able to spend as much time checking out the various exhibits (giant flying mechanical insects, animals pelts and more) as we would have liked. The ladies working inside the museum were very cordial and friendly despite being ready to leave, and when it was time for them to start closing up for the day they were still polite. Perhaps it was Antho's enthusiasm, which can be pretty contagious to be around, and he was pretty excited to be there. We'd talked about going several years back when I lived nearby, but it never panned out at the time. Perfect excuse to take Vanticore for a drive and stretch her legs!  It's free to visit 

More photos after the cut!