The plan for today was to get up and drive to Death Valley but due to the storm last night there was a land slide and many floods and the US 95 (the main road out of Vegas) was closed. Sunbathing was out of the question as it was still pretty grey so we decided to head out to the Hoover Dam which Alan being a frustrated engineer has always wanted to inspect closer than the drive past we'd done in 1999.
On the way though we discovered Boulder (I was starving so dropped into a BK for a cheeky cheeseburger - or was it a whooper :)) What a lovely green, quiet place this is. Some of the houses that overlook Lake Mead are spectacular. This is the city that grew up because of the Hoover Dam. Its where all the workers came in the middle of the depression looking for work. It was then a tented, it's now a quiet, small city that overlooks the tranquil Lake Mead.
They are in the middle of creating a by-pass for the dam as the road being the main route from Phoenix to Vegas has now become antiquated and inadequate for the amount of traffic it now has to support from these two growing cities. The plan is to build a bridge across the actual gorge!! That's engineering!
We did the trip down to the generators and around inside the dam which was quite claustrophobic but incredibly interesting and to think this was built in 1932 is amazing, what foresight, what engineering, what a pioneer spirit - you dont see that in the UK anymore but it's still abundent in the still very young and ever growing US.
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