Chased by the sun to the land of the fire

We left in the middle of the night to out race the coming sun.  The sun rise caught our tails at the airport and beat us to Vegas.  Second place still included breakfast so we were off to a great start of our adventure and well worth the lack of sleep that made it happen.  Of course they were cat naps along the way.  We rented a mini van that quickly was christened "Juicy" because it had plenty of take off. That spirited little van would give us some memories late in the day too.  We spent some time on the Strip and hit all the chocolate stores that we could find.  All the kids had more than a few eye opening views as we wandered the street and that was all before ten am. That was about as much of Vegas as any of us could handle and we made our way eat to the Valley of Fire to get a little hiking logged in the books.  The colors were spectacular and the kids quickly found their agile climbing feet and scaled the Beehives and Sunken ship rock.  I told the kids to be careful and Sophia quickly retorted that she felt safer here than on The Strip. We found petrified trees and massive numbers of petroglyphs.  Merrick and I also found some cactus and we handled those for the last time.  At a trail called Mouse Tank we saw two mountain goats high on the cliff face eating browse and leaping carefree along the red rocks.  We found Chuckwalla lizards to be plentiful and everyone got to watch why they were so plentiful as two of them labored on love longer than our attention span would hold.  We started​the trip with orange cones and ended the day with more road building that delayed our travel time a little.  We also got to see how friendly the Vegas patrol interacts under slept tourists rental vans.  He seemed truly concerned that I was doing twice the actual speed and didn't even touch my brakes when I saw him.  He let us go, speeding in his jurisdiction was the only gambling I did all day.  We made it to Mesquite for a great dinner, conversation and some splashing on the pool as the sun set on the mountain view.