Christmas in Las Vegas, Almost

The Hurricane Super 8 is a basic motel. It meets the needs, but only adequately. Still, for $35 at Christmas(2009), breakfast included, can you go wrong?

Rooms are nice sized, with a table and two chairs, TV, a coffee maker two beds, and separate bathroom and sink areas. The AC/Heat unit is on the quiet side. Lighting is good. The curtains are good. The included breakfast is minimal but OK, great if you like waffles, offering waffles, cereal, juice, toast, tea, and coffee. The strongest points of the Super 8 Hurricane are it's location and price. The location is a couple miles off I-15 in southern Utah in the center of the town of Hurricane, on a side street one block off Main St.(UT RT 9) only 22 scenic miles from Zion National Park. I'd call it 22 very scenic miles except that to Rt 9 through Zion raises the concept of scenic road to new heights. Bottom line: you will enjoy the commute between Hurricane and Zion a lot. The views are remarkable.

The easy to find side street location-- turn at the sign on Rt 9, Main St.-- is very quiet. This is one of the quietest hotels/motels we have ever stayed in, surpassed only by some of the game lodges in Kenya's national parks where the loudest sounds at night are zebras grazing in the back yard.

The room showed definite signs of wear, but wasn't shabby (nor was it anywhere close to luxurious). Cleanliness looked fine at first, but there was a ring of black mold around the bathtub where two rows of tiles of different thickness met. Not good.

The front desk staff was friendly and efficient after you ring the bell to summon them from the room behind the desk. There was a computer in the lobby.

JB's restaurant(see review) is across the parking lot on the Main St (Rt 9) side of the motel. We usually stay in Springdale when visiting Zion National Park in large part to eat dinner at the Spotted Dog, which is only open on the weekends in winter. All other restaurants in Springdale are grossly overpriced for the food quality, so, with the Spotted Dog unavailable, we opted to cut our room bill from $62 in Springdale to $35 by staying in Hurricane to eat at JBs. JBs is a restaurant chain reminiscent of Denny’s but with better food–a fine value for what you get.

We have also stayed at the Comfort Inn and Days Inn in Hurricane. The Comfort Inn is more luxurious than the the Super 8, more expensive, and has a more extensive breakfast, but it is noisier. Days Inn is much like the Super 8, but noisier.

Some may find the Super 8's cancellation policy attractive. Over the last few years, many motels around Zion have adopted a 48 hour cancellation policy, including the Hurricane Comfort Inn and both Quality Inns in Springdale. Super 8 held the room until 4:00pm the day of arrival with no deposit (we arrived at 3:30 pm). If your plans are definite enough that you are sure where you will be two days in the future, the 48 rule is no problem, but if you wander across the countryside at your own pace, it can cause trouble, which makes a hold till 4:00 with no deposit room attractive.

We’ve been to Zion during Christmas week in very different weather conditions. Once we spent the days hiking in tee shirts and shorts with temperatures in the 60s, once with a foot of snow on the ground and temperatures below freezing. At the end of the year, nice hiking temperatures are common but erratic. A foot of snow is very rare, and that is the crown jewel, for adding snow to the red, yellow, and white rocks of Zion, along with the dark green pine trees, makes for one of Mother Nature’s special gems.

Not entirely due to brilliant planning, but more or less intended, we arrived at Zion under optimal conditions, approaching the park from the west late in the afternoon on cloudless day. With the setting sun low in the sky behind us, the great red, white, and black rock mesas and cliffs bordering UT Rt 9 from I-15 to the park were spotlit by the setting sun, revealing views that are otherwise hidden in shadows during the day. About a half hour after we entered the park, the sun set, which was fine because that gave us an hour to explore Zion Canyon with constant lighting.

Zion Canyon is six miles long, more or less running north and south and about a half mile wide at the start, then narrowing down to less than 100 ft. wide a mile beyond the end of the road, at the Start of the Narrows (it gets down to 18 ft. wide at the Narrows), with shear colored rock cliffs shooting up 1,100-3,000 ft above both sides of the canyon. When this geography is coupled with the brilliant sunshine of the southwest desert, amazing lighting effects happen to the views from the canyon floor– one side of the canyon is bathed in brilliant light, the other side almost lost in murky shadows. Consequently, the scene looks very different in the morning, when the west wall is illuminated than in the afternoon when the east wall is lit. For 30-60 minunts before sunrise and after sunset, the scene has even lighting in all directions, the only time of the day you can see the details of the setting on all sides. These lighting changes actually turn Zion into three different parks: one with morning light, one with afternoon light, and one with equal lighting. The effects of the changes in lighting are dramatic enough to make it essential to see all three, which we did.

There are 400 parking places in Zion Canyon. In high season, April-October, an average of 3,000 cars a day arrive at Zion. Consequently, cars are not allowed on the Canyon Road– everybody parks at the Visitor’s Center until it fills up, about 10:00am. Then you park in the town of Springdale and take the free shuttle bus to the Visitor’s Center to transfer to the shuttle bus that runs up and down Zion Canyon Road. At Christmas, we could drive right in, all the way to the end of the Canyon Road. Although the dead of winter, the parking lots were packed. At the end of the road parking lot, we had to circle the parking lot twice to wait for somebody leaving to get a space, and that was after sunset.

On entering the park, we were met by impressive views of the cliffs crowned with snow, but no snow on the ground. By the time we reached the Court of the Patriarchies, the first major scenic pullover on Canyon Drive, there was a fair amount of snow on the ground. By Zion Lodge, the ground was well covered, and at the end of the road, the snow on the ground was about a foot deep. Every flat spot and gradual slope on the cliff walls was snow covered, with the deep red rock cliffs for background. In a few places, the walls of the cliffs themselves were snow covered-- some of the vertical walls of the canyon were plastered with snow. This happens when the wind blows wet falling snow against the cold rock wall. It instantly freezes to the surface. If the plastered surface is protected from direct sunlight, it will stay snow covered until the ambient air temperature is warm enough to melt it, and five days after the storm, than had not yet happened.

We drove to the end of Canyon road with the east wall in full sun, and returned after sunset, with equal light all around. We stopped at all the pullovers. There were particularly good winter scenes at the Court of the Patriarchs, Big Bend, the end of the road, and just a little way up canyon from Zion Lodge, where there is a view of the Emerald Pools area. Besides snow, the other unusual sight in Zion that day was the waterfalls. Although the sun protected canyon was well covered with snow, up above on the sun bathed Zion Plateau, plenty of melting was underway which activated some of the intermittent waterfalls indulging the nearly 1,500 ft. high falls at the end of the road, and there was a big enough flow over Upper Emerald Falls to make it easily visible from the road.

On our return from the end of Canyon Drive, we came across several cars stopped out in the street to look at the deer graving on the nearby hill. We stopped at the first bunch of deer, skipped the next two. We regularly see deer in the snow in our yard from our widows at home, so no big deal, deer in snow.

We reached the entrance to the Canyon road just as it got dark, turned around and drove back to Zion Lodge to visit the gift shop. We wanted to get some postcards of Zion covered in snow like we had just seen. There are no such. Little skiffs of snow here and there, yes, but buried in snow, no. It does not happen, but this year it did.

Next day, we returned to Zion and drove up UT Rt. 9 to the Checkerboard Mesa parking lot, which is where the spectacular scenery of Zion park more or less ends. From the junction with Canyon Drive, Rt 9 climbs almost 1,000 ft. up the side of the canyon wall, goes through a tunnel, and emerges on the Zion Plateau, a wonderland of petrified sand dunes in shades of red and yellow and white rock offset by dark green pine trees and brilliant blue sky. This is an entirely different world than Zion Canyon, and both are must see sights when visiting Zion.

Again, we stopped at every view point and a few times in the middle of the road to look at the winter landscape. We returned to Zion Canyon and drove again to the end of the road and back to see the scene in morning/noon light. Thus, we saw Zion in snow under all three essential lightning conditions, afternoon, morning, and without direct sunshine (after sunset). We were most impressed with the after sunset lighting, without the glare of sun light on one side of the canyon while the opposite rock wall was hidden in the gloom of shadows, but we debated why this was. It might have been the lighting, or it might have been the novelty of our first visit to Zion Canyon covered in snow the day before. All in all on this trip, we drove the Canyon road four times, once up canyon in afternoon, light, once down canyon after sunset, and both ways the next morning/noon. This much is clear: seeing Zion Canyon covered in snow is a rare sight well worth seeking out.

We usually stay in Springdale when visiting Zion National Park in large part to eat dinner at the Spotted Dog, which is only open on the weekends in winter. All other restaurants in Springdale are grossly overpriced for the food quality, so, with the Spotted Dog unavailable, we opted to cut our room bill from $62 in Springdale down to $35 by staying scenic 22 miles away in Hurricane to eat at JBs. JBs is a restaurant chain reminiscent of Denny’s but with better food– great value for what you get.

The salad bar is center piece of the dinning area. While not on the scale of the salad bar at Sizzler, it is pretty decent, featuring two soups of the day (cream of potato and Florentine Beef, beef vegetable soup heavy on spinach. Both were excellent); a salad of mixed greens and choice of six dressings, par for the course in ordinary, everyday restaurants; vanilla and chocolate pudding, both are terrific; I don’t generally like tacos, but I liked the beef taco on the salad bar; the peach slices had a weird taste, but the Mandarin Oranges were fine. There was also a collection of typical standard salad bar stuff– chucjs of ham, baby ears of corn, carrot slices, red beets, mushrooms, coleslaw, peas, croutons.

I’d grade JB’s salad bar like this: better than average stuff: taco meat and coleslaw; much better than average: chocolate and vanilla pudding; cream of potato soup and beef Florentine soup; avoid the weird peach slices. Everything else was standard.

The salad bar can be ordered separately or as a cheap add on to meals and as part of half a sandwich with salad bar. She ordered the half sandwich, a "Ham Melt", or hot ham and cheese sandwich. The sandwich was excellent, with nice smoky flavored ham. The sandwich was accompanied by what is sometimes called steak fries, thick French fries that lack crunch. Neither of us much cared for those as we prefer fries as crisp at potato chips.

I ordered chicken fried steak, a classic Western comfort food, a breaded, deep friend hamburger drowned in white gravy. Disgusting, but yummy. You must try it somewhere on your visit to the West. JB’s version had its good and bad points. The crisp breading was outstanding, the "steak" was good, the gravy was OK but the accompanying mashed potatoes, the classic accompaniment for Chicken Fried Steak, were ruined with too much pepper in them.

Two very filling and overall pretty good dinners for $26 including tax and tip is hard to beat, which is why we head for here for dinner if the Spotted Dog, where dinner for one can easily run $26, is closed.

Lunch: Sandwiches: 8 Burgers, chicken, tuna, pot roast, turkey club, BLT; 6 salads; chicken tenders, shrimp, salad bar

Breakfast: waffles, pancakes, blintz, French toast, coned beef hash, country ham, steak, biscuits & gravy, eggs, cerial, fruit

dinner: chopped steak, country fried steak, liver & onions, meat loaf, pot roast, three types of chicken, shrimp, white fish, salmon, sirloin or NY steak, all the sandwiches under lunch.

There is small selection of Senior dinners from the main menu with smaller servings and lower prices.

The Mandalay Bay has long been one of our favorites in Las Vegas. Although the price was up a lot form our sat visit, the quality was about the same although much less a bargain at the current price, $27. The Mandalay Bay buffet features a collection of ethnic mini-buffets- Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and American. There are too many choice to try them all, but I tried. Especially out standing-- they would hold their own up against restaurant at any price-- were the sea scallops, Osso Bucco, and lamb chops. A little bit lower down in quality, but still very good dishes were the breaded shrimp, flank steak, and a passion fruit and kewee fruit no sugar dessert.

Lo mein Chinese noodles with shrimp and the rest of the dessert selection– overwhelmingly cakes– were decent enough. Chicken marsala, overcooked dry chicken, served with a starchy gravy with perhaps some marsala flavor is best avoided.

Although the buffet is heavy on protein, there was a decent selection of veggies and salads. I never made it to the salad bar, but the green beans and vegetarian egg rolls were nice. There were also several choices of potatoes, but think about it. Do you want to spend $27 on potatoes? Skip them. Go for the high priced stuff, like lamb, veal, and scallops.

The menu changes daily through some sort of cycle, so you can’t count on having what we had. The lesson you must learn, and this applies to all Las Vegas buffets, is to sample everything to find what is good and then go back for more of that. If you do this right, that is if you pig out, you won’t have to eat again until well into the next day. We didn't feel like eating again until 2:30 pm the next afternoon. If you look at the $27 buffet as covering dinner, breakfast, and most of lunch( a small burger at Wendy’s was plenty for lunch at 3:30 pm the next day), the Mandalay Bay buffet is a good deal, but places that cost less can be an even a better deal.

Offsetting the relatively high price of the Mandalay Bay buffet is the charm of the dinning room. We have eaten in 8-10 Las Vegas buffets, and hands down, the Mandalay Bay’s dining room is the most attractive. It has the appearance of a restaurant in Rangoon’s Raffles Hotel in a Humphrey Bogart movie, only in color. I was especially struck by the faux Ivory filigree decorating the pillars holding up the ceiling. Tap them, and you know they are plastic or plaster, butt they sure look carved Ivory.

The dining room is divided into several separate spaces so the diner has no sense of just how big a room is actually eating in. Every table seems to be in a relatively intimate setting. I especially like the tables in the back, along the widows overlooking the Mandalay Bay's spectacular pool area. However, these rooms have the disadvantage of being the furthest away from the serving tables.

We were beginning to worry about service being without drinks when we started to eat, but the friendly sever soon appeared and produced our drink order. After that delay, she kept on top of things and our drink glasses were never empty.

Tipping at a buffet is a puzzle. I go by one the Las Vegas guides that says $1 per person except that they also said that 12 years ago, so I up it to $4-5 for two. You will find other advice saying 10 or 15%. Keep in mind that Las Vegas is designed to separate your from your money at every turn, and always opt for the lowest recommended tip, or lower.

There is no doubt. Las Vegas casinos took advantage of the Clinton economic boom to transform buffets from a loss leader designed to get you into the place to a profit center, all of which means Las Vegas buffets are no where near the bargain they were up until 10 years ago. Still, some are better buys than others. I don't think the Mandalay Bay’s buffet represents as good a food value for your money as god the Orleans or Palms, but their dinning rooms are not as attractive as Mandalay Bay. If you want the most food bang for your buck, head for them, but all around, Mandalay Bay is fairly priced for a more than decent, sometimes superb, pleasant meal.

There was a big blizzard on Christmas Day which delayed our Christmas trip to Dec. 29. Still, the Mandalay Bay offered rooms at $79 and Zion National Park had a rare foot of snow on the valley floor. This demanded a road trip. I’m sure everyone knows about Las Vegas, but you may not know about Zion, so let me put it like this: the best reason to visit Vegas is that it is less than a three hour drive to Zion.

You can fly to Las Vegas, but you will have to drive to Zion, so you need to know some basics of the drive. First, we live 432 miles from the Mandalay Bay, a seven hour drive. Yes, you read it right. We average 60+ mph(rest room, gas, and lunch stops included) on the road and do not exceed the speed limit by more than 4mph. Driving in the inter-mountain west is not like what you are used to. We set the cruise control at 78mph and let ‘er rip(to be fair, you probably won’t get pulled over for 84 mph).

Although here was a big snow on Dec. 25. On Dec. 29, the roads were dry and snow free.

First we drove to Las Vegas. For the most part, what there is to do in Vegas at Christmas is much the same as what there is to do in Vegas the rest of tee year, except that Christmas decorations make the interior of the casinos even more garish than usual (New Year’s Eve is the one deviant day of the year in Las Vegas). The two out standing seasonal sights are the Bellagio Conservatory and the Ethel M. Chocolate Factory Cactus Garden, where the cactus are decorated with Christmas lights.

Thanks to the perpetual, endless road construction on I-15, it took over an hour to get from the edge of Las Vegas to the hotel. We settled in and then went down to the buffet($27) for dinner.

We have visited Las Vegas a round a dozen times and learned from experience than the #1 thing to do in Las Vegas is to travel between the Venetian and Tropicana, mostly by foot and at night. We took the tram(free) from Mandalay Bay to Tropicana Ave. and Las Vegas Blvd., one of the two greatest Las Vegas night time vistas. The four hotels at the intersection of Las Vegas Blvd. and Tropicana– Excaliber, New York New York, Tropicana, and MGM Grand– combined have more rooms than the entire city of San Francisco, but what makes the scene is the architecture and night lighting of the casinos. Here the rumble and the screams? Look up at New York New York to see the rolly coaster whizzing by.

After dinner, we took the express tram to Excaliber and walked out on the bridge over "The Strip" for the grand view of Las Vegas at night. Then we crossed over to New York New York, went down to street level to see the fountain and fireboat, all of which were not working. We walked up The Strip to the Bellagio where we watched the dancing fountain show and then went inside to see the Chihuly lobby chandelier and the Christmas display in the conservatory.

Dale Chihuly is one of America’s premier artists. He works with blown glass, and the Bellagio chandelier, a collection of huge flower blossoms, is in our book his best work. It is a not to be missed sight in Las Vegas.

The Bellagio conservatory is another of Las Vegas’ top sights at anytime of the year, but at Christmas. They go all out. There is a Chihuly store at the back end of the conservatory if you have a couple thousand to drop on piece of glass.

The Bellagio’s final must see sight are the dancing fountains in the lake in front of the hotel. There is a 4 minute show every 15 minutes. Four different shows are done every hour, then repeated.

Another fine view of The Strip at night is from the pedestrian bridge connecting Bellagio and Bally’s.

Las Vegas’s last top sight during the Christmas season is a night time visit to the Ethel M Chocolate Factory & Cactus Garden where the cactus are decked out Christmas lights. Unless you live in the dessert southwest, lighted cactus are weird.

After visiting the sights of the Bellagio, we crossed Las Vegas Blvd. so we could see the other side of the street on our walk back to Mandalay Bay. From this vantage point, we saw what has to be one of the oddest sights to every grace Las Vegas. The largest construction project in Nevada history is under way between Bellagio and the Monte Carlo, a vast new community of casinos, condos, and hotels. Perched about four stories above the street on one of the many buildings under construction was a small Christmas tree.

Next morning, we skipped breakfast because we were still full from our dinner buffet the night before. We checked out and drove up The Strip to the Venetian to see the Art Museum, which we discovered had closed a few months before but the Venetian had not updated their web site, so we expected to see some Van Gough’s from the Hermitage. All was not lost, for the walk through the Canal Shops is always fun. Since our last visit, the Venetian had added a new wing with more shops and an over the top courtyard just beyond the far end of the canal shops. After looking at this new extravagance, we reversed direction and proceed to the second story main entrance to the Venetian to take in the view of the front of the hotel from outside– a replica of the Doge’s Palace in Venice that looks better than the original.

Then we were off up I-15 to Zion National Park. after checking into our motel in Hurricane, UT, about 22 miles west of Zion, we got to Zion about 4:00 pm, perfect timing for the spectacularly scenic west to east approach road to Zion. With the sun behind us and low in the sky, the lighting on the great red rock cliffs ahead of us along the road was perfect. Zion was hit by an unusually big snow storm on Christmas Day, and, when we arrived on Dec. 30, there was still a foot of snow on the upper canyon floor. For an idea of how rare this is, we usually pack shorts and tee shirts for a Christmas visit to Zion. Not this year!

Zion Canyon starts about a half wile wide and, about six miles up the road, is down to 18ft. wide. The canyon has shear red rock walls 1,000-1,800 ft. high, with white rock mountain peaks on top of the red cliffs. To see every horizontal surface capped with snow was a rare grand sight. The snow storm was wet snow, so there were places where straight up and down red rock cliffs were white with snow that the wind plastered onto the rock. The warmish temperatures after the storm fired up several of Zion’s impressive intermittent water falls. We stayed in the Park until dark. The next morning, we returned to Zion and took UT Rt. 9 1,000 ft. up the canyon wall as far as the Checkerboard Mesa view point (Zion’s spectacular natural features peter out quickly beyond this point). Spectacular winter scenery abounded– sparkling white snow, red and cream colored rock, dark green pine trees, and deep blue sky. It was noon when we got back to the canyon floor, and we again drove to the end of the canyon road, for the lighting at noon makes for an entirely different experience than we had at sunset the night before. About 1:30pm, we headed for home, more than 300 miles away— five hours driving time in the wide open west.

I want to stress that Zion, not Las Vegas, was the high point of this trip. We have visited a lot of National Parks, from Maine to Hawaii and from Alaska to Florida. Hands down, Zion is the greatest scenery in North America. It is a 2-3 hour drive from Zion to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, but we rarely go on the Grand Canyon. Why go see second rate scenery when you are already at the best?

Zion is a Biblical name meaning ‘God’s perfect place.’ God made the Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Yosemite for practice. When he got it right, he made Zion. God really got it right at Christmas, 2009.