Hoover Dam

If you follow the main road from the Grand Canyon to Hoover Dam, it's mostly dull interstate but there is the option of turning off and taking Route 66 instead, which we did, hoping to find our kicks. It's a longer road, but a bit more interesting in that you pass through the odd town, all of which look pretty desperate presumably having suffered the loss of their business since the building of the faster interstate. One highlight was spotting possibly the ugliest church in the world, quite literally a white, windowless cement bunker. This was located just outside the delightful little town of 'Chloride' which even in its heyday must have been fairly rough.

Once you get within a mile or so of the Hoover Dam, everyone gets pulled over by Homeland Security for a vehicle search, as the Dam is now considered a high risk potential terrorist target. In fact, construction of a colossal bridge right in front of the Dam is well underway, and when this (along with a new stretch of highway) is completed in 2010, the Dam will be closed to vehicle access altogether. The bridge will be the largest of it's kind in the western hemisphere, and even now looks just as impressive as the Dam itself.

We spent the night in an RV park just on the edge of Lake Mead. The park host, Tony, was a friendly ex-New Yorker who had spent a large part of his life working as a tour-bus guide in various parts of America. I got the impression he hadn't really snapped out of that mind-set yet, as he proceeded to bomabard Tracy and I with multiple facts and statistics for, without a word of a lie, two hours. Did you know that enough concrete was used in the consrtuction of the Hoover Dam to build a four-foot wide walkway around the earth's equator? Or that the first and last men to die during the construction of the Dam were father and son, killed exactly thirteen years apart to the day? I didn't, but I know that and many, many other things now!