Scion United Registration

For those that don’t know already, a quick recap. Scion is hosting a massive party in the Las Vegas desert. Its part ad campaign, part owner rewards. Scion selected 500 owners from pictures submitted back in early March to be part of the event. I was lucky enough to be selected.

Today was the first day of the event, and for Kerry and I it was mostly just driving and registering. We woke up this morning at 4:30am, took our showers finished some packing and got on the road headed towards Vegas. We made pretty good time and got in around 3pm.

I had the car washed the night before, but it collected a pretty good deal of bugs on the way, so I stopped by a car wash and did some final pampering to the tC, headed to the drop off/registration location and … waited.

It was hot, but not bad for Vegas (low 90′s) so I spent some of the time waiting chatted with some other owners (one couple came all the way from Pitsburg, they left two days ago!). There is every kind of Scion represented, from the stock looking tC, to a bunch of crazy flamboyant xBs. You can check out all of the pictures from today in my flickr photostream.

After getting registered (and likely, sun burnt) I turned the car over to Scion (they are doing photo and video shoots with the cars while we enjoy the party) we headed to the hotel. Kerry and I are staying at the Lowes Las Vegas Lake Resort. This place is ridiculous, in every good way possible.

We did a little exploring of the hotel, and sat down for dinner at Ricks Cafe (its straight out of Casablanca). I had probably one of the best Beef Tenderloins I’ve had and Kerry had a new york steak. The bad part was that our bill came to about $100. So we’ve pretty much eaten through most of the food money that Scion gave us for the trip ($70 each in the from of a Visa gift card).

When we got back to the room, we found a nice little surprise waiting for us. Swag! The bags themselves are made from “recycled scion billboards” and filled with things like plush versions of their current model line (tC, xB, xD), an aluminum water bottle, sun screen and some other nick-knack items.

In all, its been a pretty good day. A lot of driving and standing around in the sun, but I quite enjoyed it. It doesn’t hurt that I’m sitting on our balcony, overlooking the lake listening to the quiet sounds of crickets and toads as I write this.

Las Vegas & Hoover Dam

[fa:p:a=6-13-las-vegas-hoover-dam,id=552219904,j=l,s=s,l=i]We are staying at Circus Circus, which probably wasn’t the best plan since its such a long walk to the South Strip from here, and so darned hot. We picked up a bus pass yesterday to help make our travels easier. Anyway we made it in plenty of time on Tuesday to get our show tickets at Treasure Island last night, and Kerry and I spent a little bit of time gambling before the show started. We ate dinner at Kahunaville, actually the only thing we ordered were a couple of beers and their monstrosity of an appetizer. I didn’t have my camera with me, so excuse the poor cell phone pictures. The show we watched was Mystère by Cirque du Soleil. It was pretty cool. However, if there was some kind of story … I didn’t follow it. Mostly it was awesome acrobatics intermixed with small segments of comedic acting.
 
[fa:p:a=6-13-las-vegas-hoover-dam,id=552457547,j=r,s=s,l=p]Kerry and I spent all of Wednesday making the rounds at all the casinos on the west side of the strip, all the way down to Mandalay Bay. We did some gambling along the way, but mostly we were there to see the sights and sounds of Vegas… and to sweat off about 30 pounds in the heat. We saw a couple of cool cars, including a Bentley Continental GT and a Custom Viper. We did make one last stop before going back to our room for the night, we stopped at a bar and I ordered an entire pitcher of Margarita for myself, and Kerry had 4 beers.
 
[fa:p:a=6-13-las-vegas-hoover-dam,id=552223626,j=l,s=s,l=p]This morning we headed out of Vegas, and went for a quick visit to Hoover Dam. The lake was really low (from the pictures I’ve seen before) so I thought that the dam wasn’t quite as impressive, but it was still very cool to see it in person. There is also quite a bit of construction going on for what looks like a high bridge over the river, just down from the dam that I’m assuming will be the main route, to get traffic off the dam. As we left the dam a cop had pulled over this custom car, it looks familiar, and I’m sure I’ve seen it before on TV or something but I just can’t quite place it. As we headed to San Diego, we also beat the previous high temperature record, and based on where we will be the rest of the trip, I have a feeling this will be the peak. 107 degrees, just outside of Death Valley in Baker, CA.

Zion & the Drive to Vegas

[fa:p:a=6-12-zion-and-i15,id=550195579,j=r,s=s,l=i]Kerry and I woke up this morning somewhat early (for vacation), packed up all our stuff, grabbed some of the continental breakfast that the hotel offered and headed into the park. We wanted to go do a couple of short hikes in the park before it got hot, and before we had to leave for Vegas. Charlie Linkhart had recommended to me to do the Narrows Hike, although we didn’t have the time to do the full hike (which requires using the river as part of the trail), we did at least go as far as we could up the canyon which provided some really awesome views of massive cliff sides. We also did the very short walk to Weeping Rock, which is a rock edge that leached water drips off of from the core of the rock.
 
[fa:p:a=6-12-zion-and-i15,id=550034436,j=l,s=s,l=i]After our short visit to Zion (a visit I would like to repeat someday, with cooler weather and more time). We headed to Vegas. We needed to get into Vegas before 5PM so we could pick up our show tickets. As most people know, any road to Vegas leads through a desert, and as with any desert there wasn’t much to see except the rising temperature gauge in the car. It peaked at 102 during our drive, and Vegas wasn’t much cooler, but I’ll leave posting about Vegas until tomorrow.