After an enjoyable weekend in the Las Vegas area we began to turn back home. We had two 
Twisted semis!delicious breakfasts at the Blueberry Hill restaurant near our hotel in Henderson. Then we toured Las Vegas by driving north on city streets, appreciating the new casinos and hotels while being amused by seeing the old standbys, some of them sadly worn out. We did spot a remarkable work of art downtown constructed of semi trucks and enormous aluminum piping, rising over thirty feet in the air.
Las Vegas continues to sprawl across the desert. From the center city filled with mobile homes and RV parks, the residential clusters feature ever larger homes. There are more trees now, in neighborhoods which have money for landscaping. We expected to be dumped suddenly onto desert sand, but the places we remember as being on the border of the city now are simply part of urban life.
There is plenty of infrastructure work being done, with roads widened, pavements resurfaced, building facades cleaned and restored. Even the Joshua trees, which we thought were confined to California, can be seen along the road in many parts of the state which have the correct altitude.
Nevada seems to be less passionate about listing little towns and places of interest on maps than does California. For example, Creech Air Force Base has several good essays about the missions of this base but driving past it we saw no signs giving its name, and it wasn't listed on our state map. The same is true for Indian Springs and Cactus Springs.
One longstanding attraction is Rhyolite, a former mining town in which one miner built a house from bottles. Today we followed a tour bus to take another look and found around a couple dozen tourists, many of whom had driven up for a day's excursion.
Mining is still one of the primary industries of the state. We stopped in Beatty, one of the gold mining towns we saw when we first traveled around here. At that time we were awed by the immense machines managing the ores and the leaching ponds where gold processing uses cyanide to separate gold from minerals of lesser value. Today the Bullfrog 
Goldfield Hotel
Gold mine is closed, but there is talk of reopening it to take advantage of the price of gold, and at least three small mines are in discussions about combining forces as new techniques for processing are gaining popularity.
The Stagecoach hotel in Beatty has expanded and improved their collection of slot machines, adding a Denny's restaurant, a movie theater and new paint and decorations.
We spotted dune-like hills standing out from the desert floor, and then we saw the roadside signs: Big Dune. So it is a large sand dune in the middle of the desert.
We noticed that we failed to photograph the Goldfield Hotel last week, so we stopped in Goldfield to rectify our mistake.
We finished our tour by stopping for the night in Tonopah, where the Best Western hotel stands out from the other two hotels. When we checked in, the girl remarked, "You stop by here a lot."
While we love visiting the desert, we are becoming more and more sensitive to the 5,000-foot-plus altitude in much of the State. We easily become short of breath. It will be a while before we return!