That’s one giant hole in the ground!

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself… Our final day of driving to Vegas started out by hunting down a gas station in Uptown Albuquerque, and then on our way west.

The landscape in Albuquerque is pretty desolate overall, with small shrubs dotting the landscape amidst a few spindly trees. I had heard that the sky in New Mexico is really amazing, and that turned out to be true.

A few hours into the trip and we were in Arizona, which remarkably looked pretty much like New Mexico for about 30 minutes. Then it got even drier. You can see mountains in the distance, and eventually, you get pretty high up again as you get closer to Nevada.

Our first stop in Arizona was just outside Sky City. It was a quick bathroom break (and postcard buying opportunity), but it was cool for me because this is the area primarily home to Acoma, an American Indian nation that I taught about in my World Religions course when I was still teaching (one of their creation stories was pretty cool).

Then we wound up at a Denny’s in Holbrook, another area that was historically significant for me. When I was a senior in high school, I was first introduced to Philip Glass’ music in the film Koyaanisqatsi. Ms. Huba used it as a writing exercise, and I’ve listened to his music ever since. In any case, the title of the film comes from a Hopi word meaning life out of balance. This is what I thought of in the Denny’s as we were sitting next to a Hopi family (24% of the town are Hopi, Navajo, or Apache).

But what Joanna was especially excited to get to see was the Meteor Crater, which is the giant hole in the ground I was talking about. It’s near Winslow, Arizona about 30 minutes from Holbrook.

As the name implies, a giant meteorite crashed into the Earth a few years back, and the result is pretty impressive (you can see it in Google Maps when you turn the satellite on – look for Winslow Arizona).

It’s $15/person to get in, which includes a small museum, film, etc. Definitely get your money’s worth by bringing along your camera and shoot a video or two (I’ll be showing you those soon).

The Meteor Crater center and adjoining RV Park/gas station have an integration marketing campaign going on. The ticket to see the crater includes a coupon for gas discounts, so we of course had to take them up on this excellent marketing strategy. The reality was a 5 cent per gallon discount, so I let them keep their 50 cents. But I did shoot a video about what they were doing (I’ll upload that soon as well).

So back in the car we made the rest of the way to Vegas without stopping. The mountains on the way up to the Hoover Dam were amazing, and the dam itself was pretty… dam impressive. Since the parking areas are right on the road, I made a quick pull off to snap some photos (and yes, shoot a couple more videos, including this one about which web video camera to get).

Coming down off the mountains, you get to see Lake Mead from the rear view mirror. It’s extraordinary and must give the people of Boulder City a great way to wake up in the morning.

Through our descent, I realized that the temperature on the dashboard was soaring to over 100 degrees outside. The A/C of the Rav4 we rented kept us from noticing it too much. As we came in sight of Vegas we could see the many hotels of the Strip, and the sprawling expanse of the rest of the city.

But since we were going to the M Resort, we didn’t get to drive into the city too much. This is because the M is practically at the end of the universe. Seriously, if you go 100 yards further, there’s nothing but sand again on the way to California.

Check in was held up a bit because we had requested a higher room viewing the mountains, and they still needed to clean it (at 7 p.m., which I thought was a bit late). So we took the advice of the bellman and went to dinner on the 16th floor, and we were thankful of his suggestion.

Once in the room, it was crash time. I did manage to upload a couple of videos and photos to Facebook, but it felt great to unpack and know that we’ll be staying here for a few days. And hopefully stay out of the car for as long as possible before the return!

We’ll likely hit the casino sometime this weekend, but I keep forgetting that people can smoke while they gamble (kind of like double jeopardy, really). So we’ll try to go when it’s not too crowded. And we haven’t hit the buffet yet; instead we opted for room service this morning – definitely a must do.

As I can, I’ll add some more updates from the weekend. But you know what they say… What happens in Vegas… :)

I’ll also be busy teaching during the Butterfly Marketing Conference that starts on Sunday. That of course is the whole reason for the trip (wink, wink) – all this driving and sightseeing is just something to endure along the way.

Enjoy your weekend!

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Here are some more pictures I’ve been sending to Twitpic along the way.

p.p.s. By the way, if you couldn’t make it out to the BFM conference, but you want to learn Butterfly Marketing better, I have great news for you. My 8-part training course is now part of the IM Success Library, so you can jump right to parts of the software you don’t understand how to use or monetize just yet.