Las Vegas: day one

Nicole woke up at 7 am. On one hand, I was glad we did not need to wake her up. On the other hand, she slept around 7-8 hours, which is way insufficient as she normally sleeps 2 hours per night. Anyway, my hope was that she would get a very nice and long nap in the daycare.

After breakfast at a café in the hotel, we drove to the Kids Quest day care. I will write more on the subject of day care in a separate post.

Kids Quest has five locations in Las Vegas. The closes one to Red Rocks National Park is in Red Rocks Hotel and Casino. It is a huge hotel. Looked nice. The daycare is also big open space with a separate room for infants and toddlers. The remaining space is loosely divided into sections. There are two table called iPad Station. That is all I could see as parents are not allowed in the actual day care center.

I ordered food for the baby, and while reading the forms before I signed them, we noticed a nasty surprise – you can only leave the child at Kids Quest for 5 hours or less! The time limitation has something to do with Nevada laws. No way we will be back in 5  hours from our rock climbing trip!

Well, it was quite clear that the route we were going to climb was not going to work out. My husband chose a different one. He said “approach will take 30 minutes, it is a two pitch route, we will be back at the day care by 3:25 pm within 5 hours.” Two pitches route is short, but five hours is just too small time frame.

 

Red Rock were packed!

 

It took at about 30 minutes to get to Red Rocks, park the car, and start hiking to the head of the route. The hiking was ok first 5 minutes as it was a nice trail.

 

 

Then it quickly turned nasty – we had to scramble boulders and follow barely visible path. I had to take off my backpack (was carrying our rope, my climbing shoes, harness, and some other gear) several times in fear it would tip me over. At some point it became clear that I could not continue in my running shoes, had to switch to climbing shoes. I was definitely not looking forward to the way back.

The route looked good. First pitch was 5.8, second 5.9 climb. Or 5.7, 5.8. Both pitches had layback moves. The second one had several traverses. It was fun! When we got on the top of the rock we were climbing, it became clear that our way to get down will be longer than expected – there was nothing we could rappel from.

We went left. It was a long way down without any path whatsoever. At some point we got to an place where we found an anchor with slings for a short rappel down. After a bit more scrambling along the rock, we found ourselves in a dead end – no way to hike down. Fortunately, there was a nice tree, which we use for rappelling. I was afraid it would crack under our weight, but it was stronger that I expected.

Once we got to the route head, picked up our backpacks, we started scrambling down to the parking lot.  Of course, as there was no visible path, we got lost couple of times. Finally we got to a place I sort of recognized. When we safely got into a car, it was 3:30 pm. Nice!

At day care we paid $50 in daycare hourly rate (5 hours for $10 per hour) and $75 in late fees. And we lost a cam while climbing (another $50 in gear). Lovely! The climbing trip turned out to be quite expensive.

Nicole had lots of fun at the day care. When they brought her back to me, she was smiling and looked happy as usual. Their notes stated that she played with every toy they had and ate well. She did not sleep though.

After short trip to REI, where we bought that cam that we lost and additional one because it was there and we definitely needed it, we got back to the hotel. It was Friday of Thanksgiving holiday. We did not have a reservation for a restaurant. As a result by 7 pm we were still walking on Fremont Street looking for a place to eat.

As a reminder, we had breakfast at around 8 am and did not have anything else to eat since that time. After an hour of walking without any success, my husband reserved us a table through OpenTable at a pizza place that turned out to be a very nice restaurant.

Unfortunately, Nicole was tired and hungry. It was past her bed time, and she did not have enough sleep the previous night and she did not have a nap during the day. She was fussy as hell! Eating and getting her milk did help but still …. I would say it was the only night when she was that fussy and difficult to deal with. Next evening went a lot better and we did not have any problems on subsequent days.

Getting Nicole to sleep was easy though. I turned off the lights and viola, she is asleep.

The important question is did I have fun? Yes! I loved the climbing, and spending time with my baby afterward. I actually missed her a lot during the climb. Granted she was difficult at the restaurant, but she could be difficult at home too. Her fussiness did not stop us from enjoying the restaurant and our dinner.