Ivy & Joey’s Birthday Blowout Week

What do you do when two people in the family have birthday’s in the same week? You have twice us much fun, of course!

Originally, I wanted to rent a car and drive out west to LA and stop in Phoenix to visit Ray & Becky Canatella, as well as do plenty of fun stuff along the way (Carslbad Caverns, for instance). Then, of course, fly back to Houston. But, honestly, even the one-way drive would’ve been a bit much for Ivy to tolerate,…me too, really, I don’t particularly enjoy long drives anymore although I can certainly still do it. Plus, one-way car rentals are SUPER expensive. So I decided to just fly to Vegas and rent a car from there instead.

I found a great deal on Frontier Airlines (just $55 one way from Houston to Las Vegas), so I snapped that up and reserved a cheap economy car while I was at it. When the day came to pick up the car, the guy said, “You can just take any car you want, actually. No extra charge. Do you want that flip-top Camero?”

Uh, heck yes.

So Ivy and I got to drive around in the desert and cruise the Vegas strip in this really nice car. We looked so cool! lol

We spent only about 1 1/2 days total in Vegas, just enough to drive around and gawk at some of the sights, as well as spend about 3 hours in the Adventuredome at Circus Circus Hotel. Ivy really liked Las Vegas! I was a bit surprised. She agreed that we should come back again someday.

On we went toward Phoenix, with a stop at the Hoover Dam. Then rolled into Ray & Becky’s house around 6 pm.

The next morning, I had a big surprise for Ivy for her birthday (23rd/July)…. a balloon ride with Rainbow Ryders! What a treat! I think I enjoyed it more than she did.

Immediately afterward, we picked up Ray and drove about 45 minutes west of Phoenix to Canyon Lake and went to ride on the ‘Dolly Steamboat‘. That, too, was really nice. We also stopped at a ghost town in Apache Junction, AZ called Goldfield and walked around looking for ghosts (didn’t see any).

Then, later, Ivy met some cousins! She met Bazinga the goat, and horses Abu and DramaQueen. She also met their humans, Megan, Addyson, and Allyssa.

It was a long, busy day, but it was awesome. Soon we had to pack up our bags and head back to Vegas to catch a plane (and return this sweet car). We had a final breakfast with Ray at ‘US Egg’ and then headed back. We had a nice treat of GREAT weather (for the desert)… a cold front moved through and the temperatures in the desert dropped to 78 degrees. Nice!! We tried driving with the top down for awhile, but it started to rain. So top went back up.

We also took a break from driving (it is 4 1/2 hours between Phoenix and Vegas) and stopped at a nifty little Museum on Route 66. It was really cheap, too! Just $4 for an adult, and Ivy was free. It was well-worth the money to walk around and look at the displays and watch their movie on the history of Kingman, Arizona (and surrounding area) as well as all of route 66.

We finally make it back home to Houston just in time to have Ivy’s official birthday party on the 27th (my birthday) at the Roller Skating Rink.

Here’s a 7 minute video of the whole trip…. enjoy!