We chose the Red Rock Canyon tour, a four-hour nature-lovers' extravaganza that includes pick-up and drop-off at your hotel.
Guide Jerry Seeler proved a knowledgeable and personable guide to the surprisingly gorgeous and austere desert country just moments away from the Las Vegas sprawl.
The Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area is nearly 200,000 acres of landscape so varied and rugged, it functions as a geology lesson and is a mecca for hiking and rock climbing.
The area was also home to as many as six prehistoric Native cultures, the major remaining signs of which are roasting pits and petroglyphs on the rock.
Red Rock remains a jewel in the crown of the U.S. parks system and a great way to see it is in the air-conditioned comfort of a Pink Jeep Tours custom-built Tour Trekker featuring all leather chairs and huge windows.
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Most of us know the story of the Titanic, the hubris of the Victorian Age undone by a collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic, the horrific loss of life, the dignity of those going to certain death as the few lifeboats pulled away. And how Leonardo diCaprio dies so Kate Winslet can live ... oops. Sorry. That's the movie.
But history buffs won't want to miss Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the Luxor -- a 25,000-sq.-ft. exhibit featuring numerous items recovered from the Titanic, 21/2 miles beneath the ocean's surface.
When entering, visitors are handed a boarding pass with the name and brief bio of a real Titanic passenger.
Only when you come to the end of the exhibit do you discover if your character lived.
Mine perished. Most did.
There is a terrible poignancy in ordinary items recovered from the deep. Spectacles, letters, shoes, tools, an unopened bottle of champagne, floor tiles, crockery.
These objects bring to life the events of the terrible night of April 15, 1912.
The highlight is a 13 by 30-ft. chunk of Titanic's actual hull, containing six portholes.
It looms over visitors, giving just a hint of the behemoth this vessel was.
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Also located in the Luxor is Bodies: The Exhibition. This is not for the faint of heart.
Preserved by replacing flesh with plastic, 13 whole flayed and skinned bodies are on display, revealing the inner workings of the human body -- in an in-your-face experience that stops just short of a field trip to the morgue.
More than 250 organs and partial body specimens are also on display.
Once you get over the shock of standing in a room with real corpses, it actually does become educational.
And Jake had a number of eureka moments, able to relate what he'd learned in school to actual physiology.
And next to a pair of tobacco-blackened lungs, there's a bin full of cigarette packages recently discarded by horrified smokers.
It's an eye-opener.
