LAS VEGAS - By the time Karen Williams finally stops to catch her breath most Monday mornings, she already has been going full steam for seven hours and traveled nearly 500 miles.
''Mondays are hard. You get up around 3:30 and I doubt if I sit down until about 10:30 a.m. It's a long day,'' Williams said of her weekly commute to Redwood City, Calif., in high technology's mecca, Silicon Valley.
She is one of a number of technically skilled Las Vegans who regularly fly out of Las Vegas - primarily to the San Francisco Bay area - to work. They choose to disrupt their personal lives, often leaving spouses and children behind, to work in the Bay area because housing is too expensive there, and there aren't enough high-tech jobs in Las Vegas.
A self-employed consultant designing a warehouse management system for DHL International, Williams works 12-hour days Mondays through Thursdays at DHL's U.S. headquarters in Redwood City. Late Thursday she flies back to Las Vegas and works from home on Fridays.
Her nights in California are spent in a spare room at a friend's home in Stockton, Calif., a commute to her job of 90 minutes to three hours depending on traffic.
''It's not bad. I just need a place to crash. I work long hours, I make the drive and I eat and I crash,'' she said. ''During the week you don't really have a life, you just work.''
She leaves her husband and three children behind every week to fight traffic and work in Silicon Valley because she thinks she has to keep up with the constantly changing field.
''I don't want to lose the technology, and the Bay (area) has the technology,'' Williams said. ''I always want to stay in the loop.''
While some commuters have employers who cover their commuting costs - accommodations, car rental and food - most, including Williams, pay their own expenses. She spends from $2,000 to $2,500 monthly.
Boosters from Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman to Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt to Somer Hollingsworth, chief executive of the Nevada Development Authority, say Nevada's low cost of living, business-friendly tax structure, proximity to California and extensive network of fiber optic lines needed for high-speed Internet access, make southern Nevada an ideal locale for high-tech companies and workers.
Based on a dearth of new technology companies, some think they are mistaken. For now, Hollingsworth concedes the Las Vegas Valley is ''at the bottom of the (technology) food chain.'' But if they are wrong about the companies, they might not be far off about the workers. For most of the commuters, the draw to live in Las Vegas was housing.
''It's cheap. Housing's cheap,'' Williams said, summing up the feelings of the more than 20 Las Vegan residents who commute elsewhere.
The median-price home in Silicon Valley, a region south of San Francisco that includes parts of four counties, is $617,000. That's more than four times the median-price home in southern Nevada ($142,344).
For the past five months Dave Kapono, a retired military man, has left Las Vegas for a month at a time. He spends only one weekend each month at home with his wife and 17-year-old daughter. He plans to commute for another year until he has enough experience to get more than an entry-level job in Las Vegas.
''I just hate being away all this time, but you got to do what you got to do,'' said the telecom worker, whose company picks up his commuting tab. ''I can't afford to live in San Jose or the Bay area.''
Home prices in Silicon Valley have increased 87 percent in the past five years. That coincides with a 41 percent boost in air traffic between San Jose International Airport and McCarran International Airport over the same period, according to U.S. Transportation Department statistics.
''There used to be only a few people on this flight. Now it's hard to get on,'' said Bill Ihde, a computer consultant at Stanford University Hospital who has been making the commute since 1989. ''The last year or two it's gotten crazy with everyone else doing it too.''
''You can't make any money here,'' added Ihde, who pays his own commuting expenses. ''Originally, I thought I could find work here, but it never panned out. I can make four or five times as much (in the Bay area) as I can make here.''
Low pay for southern Nevada's high-tech jobs was a recurring theme among commuters. The median family income for all workers in Santa Clara County, of which San Jose is the county seat, is $55,767, 33 percent higher than Clark County's.
John Robles, a computer network engineer who consults on IBM products, has been commuting from Las Vegas to Silicon Valley and elsewhere for three years.
Robles said he has tried to get jobs in Las Vegas, to be home with his wife and three children ages 18, 12 and 6 months, but they don't pay enough.
Ihde said the quality of life in southern Nevada and the Silicon Valley pay scale offset the inconvenience of being away from his family Monday through Thursday.
''It's pretty tough staying away from the family as much as we are,'' said Doug Mead, a self-employed trainer who has lived in Las Vegas but worked elsewhere for more than six years. ''The lifestyle is pretty much hell sometimes.''
He moved to Las Vegas because he didn't want to be a ''long-distance dad'' to his now-15-year-old daughter, who lives with his ex-wife.
Mead rents a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in Santa Clara, Calif., for $1,265 that he shares with two other Las Vegans.
Because he and his roommates travel so often, usually only one or two people are there, but at times three of them are crammed into the tiny apartment.
The irony, he said, is he owns a 2,700-square-foot house with a pool in a nice northwest Las Vegas neighborhood that he rents out for the same price he pays for the apartment.
The apartment has two twin beds in the bedroom, plus a pull-out futon in the living room and an air mattress leaning against the wall in the dining room. There are three desks with computers in the living and dining room.
The apartment replaces a 30-year-old house with no air conditioning he had rented for $3,500 per month with about 18 others, seven from Las Vegas.
''The place was completely run down,'' Mead said.
Mead and his part-time roommates all have cars they leave at the apartment.
So far he has been unwilling to take a pay cut from the $250,000 to $300,000 he makes annually teaching others to use computer software and hardware. Mead estimates if he worked at a training center in Las Vegas he would earn less than $70,000 annually.
''Being in Silicon Valley is where everything is happening,'' Mead said.
One of his partners just paid $725,000 for a 2,600-square-foot house in Redwood City, Mead said.
''I've got twice the house he has for literally half the money,'' said Mead, who paid $325,000, about $400,000 after upgrades, for a 5,100-square-foot house in northwest Las Vegas.
But the years of spending up to 44 weeks traveling are taking a toll.
''I'm starting to get burned out on it. I've been missing my family,'' Mead said.
He hopes to open a technology training center in Las Vegas early next year that would serve people from around the country. The center wouldn't eliminate his travel or the need for the apartment in Santa Clara, Mead said, because in an industry in which technology evolves monthly he still needs to spend several months a year there learning himself.
''Travel gives me the ability to stay current.''