Over the years we've noticed an interesting phenomena about our road trips. No matter what, we always seem to get on the road around 10:00 am. Unless we make a concerted effort to leave earlier we just can't seem to get everything together before 10:00. This has been going on since before we had kids. It doesn't matter if we are staying in a house, hotel, cabin, or tent. We'll work steadily to get dressed, eat breakfast, clean up our stuff, and load up the jeep. We'll get in the car and, without fail, the clock displays some time within 15 minutes of ten o'clock. It's almost uncanny.
Monday was no exception. Brandon and I took showers. Then we got the kids dressed and took them to breakfast in the office/lobby building of the motel. The meal was kind of crazy. Veronica decided that it was a good time to get in her 15 minutes of inconsolable crying for the day. But aside from looking like we were way in over our heads child-wise we got through breakfast okay. Everyone was fed and that was the important thing.
Brandon had taken the car top carrier off of the Honda because, in his words, "I don't trust anyone in this city." So he had to put that back and put the two big suitcases and other stuff up there again. I had to feed Veronica so he put the other kids in the car to keep them entertained. Lydia cut her finger on something and I had to take care of that at the last minute. Then I turned in the keys and got in the car. The clock said it was a few minutes to 10:00.
Our hotel was right next to the General Aviation side of the Las Vegas Airport.. We were able to see some cool airplanes parked on the tarmac.
We drove about 30 minutes to Boulder City. We stopped at a tourist info center to try to find a map of Arizona (I'd left our other copy in Texas.) They did't have one, but they did have one of Nevada which we also needed - though we were about to leave the state. We also got info about Hoover Dam. We would see Lake Mead in the distance. The blue of the water looked really pretty next to all the desert scenery.
And then we drove a few more minutes to the highway exit for the dam. Every vehicle that visits the dam has to go through a security check point. Most cars just get waved through, but we had to stop and have some people check the contents of our car top carrier - just to make sure we didn't have any explosives or anything. We made it through the inspection just fine of course.
There are two options for parking at the dam. You can park in the covered parking on the Nevada side for $10. Or you can park in the free parking on the Arizona side. Can you guess which one we picked? I'll give you a hint, I named my travel blog
51 cent adventures for a reason.
After we parked we had to walk down some stairs to get back to the dam. We had a good view of the Lake. We could see the lake line from when there was more water in the lake.
We also had a good view of the Hoover Dam. I've always wanted to see this dam. We thought about stopping here when we went to Southern California 4 1/2 years ago, but it was too out of the way for that trip. This time it was right on our route to Mesa, Arizona.
We also had a good view of the highway bridge. We could have walked on the bridge, but we decided to wait until we were done with the dam and then see how our kids were doing.
The kids had fun looking at everything.
They were especially interested in the spill way that we had to walk past. I couldn't believe the giant tunnel that was carved right out of the rock.
We walked down to the top of the dam and were able to look at how big it is. Brandon and I were kind of in awe that something this big was built in the 30's.
It was a steep drop down to the bottom of the dam so we kept a close eye on all the kids.
I'd been looking forward to going on the powerplant tour. It would be $9 for Brandon and me with our military IDs (it's $12 regular price.) However, the kids were all in weird moods. I didn't want to deal with them in the confined space of a tour. So we decided to save that for another time. Maybe by that time we'll decide that paying $30 for the tour of the actual dam will be worth it. Instead we just contented ourselves with saying, "dam tour" as much as possible and giggling.
The Nevada side has a visitors center (that we didn't go into) and some statues (that we didn't even go near - I took these pictures from the car.)
The dam was pretty cool, but it also made us nervous. We had a road on one side of the sidewalk, and a sheer drop off on the other. Most of the time we just clung tightly to the kids hands. I honestly felt like they were in more danger on the dam then they were in Vegas.
We made our way back up the steps to our car. It was lunch time. (I'm not sure what time it was really because were were straddling the time zone line.) So we had a quick lunch of sandwiches and then started driving. We would have liked to drive to where we could get out and walk on the bridge, but we'd had our share of taking our kids to high places.
Then we drove back the way we came. There was a looooooong line of cars waiting to go through the security check point. The line was probably a mile long and stretched all the way back to the highway. A word of advise, the dam isn't worth that long of a wait.
We didn't get to walk on the bridge, but we did get to drive on it. It has high guard rails so we couldn't see the dam from where we were.
And then we just drove and drove and drove through the Arizona dessert. We passed the Black Canyon area of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. It looked pretty cool.
But that was the last thing of note. Nothing very interesting happened the rest of our 6 hour drive. The kids slept most of the time. We did stop at a rest stop and let them stretch their legs. A lady noticed all our kids and asked us, "Are you LDS?" To which we replied, "yep!"
We made it into Mesa and drove to my brother in laws. They had dinner waiting for us. We were so happy to see them. And so happy to be done with long boring drives for the next couple days.
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