Boulder City, Nevada

I spent the night in Bakersfield after driving down hwy1. I was sad to realize I still had another 3 hours to drive to get to my hotel (and maintain my schedule!), but I drove on and finally arrived around 8:30pm, but I was exhausted and worn out. As I was driving through the desert, it was clear as day, but all of a sudden there was a rainbow. And then as I drove on, there was a double rainbow.

I arrived in historic Boulder City, where I was staying with facebook and Artfest friend, Carlanda. Her home is one of the original houses built for men working on the Hoover dam. The cute little town is chalked full of history. We spent some nice quality time in her backyard, which is very comfortable and sweetly decorated. It reminded me a lot of my grandmother's backyard in California. Welcoming vistor's to Carlanda's house is a HUGE heart shaped rock. It's just cool. Her home is decorated with beautiful antiques. I especially loved her kitchen and dining area filled with beautiful Fiesta ware and all sorts of wonderful vintage kitchen ware. We did some painting on the back deck which was really fun. I was painting on a used canvas that I picked up at a flea market for $3 somewhere along the way. While we were painting, I noticed a little hummingbird who sat on a branch, watching us, the entire time we were out there.

Carlanda and her darling husband, Lee, have two sweet little, adopted fur babies. Rudy and Tootie. Rudy took a shine to me and would snuggle in deep under the comforter and stay with me all night. such a great sleeping companion!

One day we ventured into Las Vegas so that I could go to Gold and Silver Pawn, the pawn shop featured in Pawn Stars, my husbands favorite show, next to American Pickers. We didn't get to see any of the stars and I suspect that they don't actually film the show there. The staff was a bit on the "could care less side", so that was a bummer. I'm sure they tire of all the questions of excitable tourists, but still...........Afterwards we went to Fremont Street for a bite to eat and I got some fun pictures of some of their awesome vintage signery (I call it Doo Wop)

On our way home, Lee decided to drive over to an area where the big horn sheep are known to come down from the mountains to graze. Boy were we in for a surprise! there was a huge flock there and not only that, there was the sweetest little baby big horn. how exciting!

One night we decided to head over to what is called a Pioneer dump. Basically, it's in the desert where after some rain, a bunch of dumped items were uncovered. It was near an old tent city (from the days of building the dam), so we thought it'd be fun to take some shovels over there and see if we could uncover anything fun. We found a bunch of old glass in blues, greens, pinks and purples. Some of the glass was fused to one another. very cool. I'm going to put my treasure out on the back porch in an old metal collander.