19 June –Vegas

Late sleep in.  Sam’s Town is on the Boulder Hwy and during the night there are often cop & fire engine sirens going past. We went to the Atomic Testing Museum in the morning, it was very interesting. The US atomic tests were moved to Nevada after Bikini Atoll and the museum documents the tests, from atmospheric testing, through underground testing and through to the modern simulated testing using a Z accelerator (?). There was a room where they simulated watching a test – the floor shook, and air blasted at you to feel like the shock wave.  During the real tests in the 50’s tourists used to watch the blasts from about 20 miles away, and the army observers from open trenches only 4 miles from the blast. Obviously back before they realised the long term impacts of radiation. 

We saw a display on the largest bomb ever detonated (and the last atmospheric test) – by the Russians in the Arctic. It was 100 megatons (Hiroshima was only 6 megatons) and blasted a hole in the earth’s atmosphere that took 3 days to cover back over. 

They also had an “expose of Area 51”that was very lame… It was in a blacked out series of rooms, with spooky introductions done by the man in black, but didn’t tell us anything. It more or less said “anything you have read about Area 51 is nonsense. If we had an alien spaceship all this time we would have been able to reverse engineer it. The fact that we are still flying normal aircraft is therefore direct proof that we don’t have any alien spacecraft”. We went from the museum to the Beverly Hills Rent a Car. We were interested in finding out how much it is to rent a Corvette for the day. Sadly, the Corvettes were all out, but there was a 2012 Lamborghini there (for a mere $1200 plus taxes for 6 hours rental). The guy encouraged Steve to sit in it and start it up. Zoom Zoom! 

We went back to the strip for dinner – at the Bellagio. The restaurant is called Yellowtail – Japanese – and was really yummy. The balcony overlooked the Bellagio fountains and was a lovely place to sit and watch the twilight over the strip.