Leaving Las Vegas — Williams, AZ
"I’m leaving Las Vegas
Lights so bright
Palm sweat, Blackjack
On a Saturday night
Leaving Las Vegas..."
(Sheryl Crow)
For cheese-and-meat-loving vegans (like Greg), the best quick breakfast bite in the world can be found at the Palio cafe (inside the Bellagio); the now legendary ham-and-cheese breakfast brioche. Just do it.
After a quick walk and romantic dance near the Bellagio's pools it was time to pack up and hit the road – driving east, towards the Grand Canyon.
First stop was the Hoover Dam, built in the the 1930's, in the depth of America's Great Depression and the largest federally funded project of its time. Today it's pretty spectacular and surrounded by hundreds of power lines ferrying its hydro power back to cities like Vegas.
Our first desert driving experience, with a stop at the first of many the ‘world famous’ places we’ve found in America that we’d never previously heard of. This one was Rosie’s Roadside Diner in the Arizona outback; the kind of ‘rustic’ diner you’d imagine straight out of a movie set, replete with militant hard-right voters (you can tell by their TEA party t-shirts which scream ‘Taxed Enough Already!’).
All was good with the world for a while, with mile after mile of sparse, beautiful landscape and a perfectly timed radio-delivered dose of perhaps the best driving song ever; Tom Petty’s Freefallin’. Then the weather started changing. A bit of pretty snow on the ground was fine. But then it started, shall we say... freefalling? Cue a freak blizzard.
Soon enough, the road was invisible except for a couple of vague car width tyre tracks. Then our windscreen began icing up (or down, actually). We had slowed to a crawl of about 25mph when a truck came roaring up behind us. After sitting too close for comfort on our back bumper for a few minutes, he overtook us. We were so lucky he did...
Less than a minute later, a nightmare began to unfold. Four or five trucks had jack-knifed on the road and a few more were off the side of the highway (including the one that had just overtaken us).
We hit the brakes and our car began to skid across the ice toward the mess. Somehow we managed to slide-navigate through the outer rim of the accident, right into the centre of the pile-up; skating past a smaller car which had spun around and squashed itself under one of the trucks – as we went past, we saw a cat leap out of one of the broken windows and tear off into the snowy wilderness on the side of the highway.
It was a surreal experience. While we’d managed to avoid a collision, the whole scene was still fraught with danger, with several trucks having gaping holes in their sides. One more big truck sliding into the back of the mess at speed would concertina the vehicles involved and we were in prime potential-squashing position between a couple of trucks. A truck did plough in from behind a minute later but managed to miss us at the last minute and hit another truck.
After a few anxious minutes ensuring that no-one was seriously injured (they weren’t – but the driver of the written-off car was in a serious state of shock), we managed to sneak between a couple of truck trailers and out of harm's way. We figured there were plenty of people at the scene and that we’d only be making things worse and potentially more dangerous by clogging it up if we stayed put. It was a matter of inches but thankfully things we were able to squeeze through. As we inched forward on the other side of the carnage, we thankfully saw emergency vehicles headed toward the scene.
We pulled up short of our original destination after driving at 5km and booked into the Holiday Inn at the very next town; Williams, Arizona, a quirky and charming place which became our base for the next few days....
