The first touristy thing we did while in Vegas was visit the Hoover Dam. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be so dam(n) impressive. Ha ha. The damn/dam jokes never get old. At least not to me. If you get annoyed by them that’s just too dam(n) bad. Ha! See what I mean?

Anyway, without further ado (since I’m already a day late with this post) here’s the Dam a la Hoover.

Did you know the dam crosses the Arizona/Nevada border? When it’s not daylight savings time you actually change time zones driving across the dam. Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time though, so when we were there both states were on the same time. We were in Arizona when that photo was taken.

This picture looks similar to the last one, but we’re in it – which automatically makes it better….or something. I have to include this though because the picture was so hard to get. I think Dave tried 4 or 5 different times. The first couple of times his head was blocking the dam. We did have no less than 4 friendly folks offer to take the picture for us. Each time we had to explain that we always do the self-portraits.

Then we did decide we’d like someone to actually take a photo of us and there was no one around. Okay, there were people around, but they were all busy or scary. So Dave took a picture of me, I took a picture of him, and then cheated and merged the two together in Photoshop. It’s a secret – no one will know. Okay, you know. But you probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t told you. And if you would have I don’t want to hear it.

We were able to go on a tour of the power plant as well. That’s where we saw these big huge hydroelectric generators. The baby was not a fan of the power plant tour. It was too loud and the vibrations annoyed the kid. He (or she) was kicking like crazy. Or maybe it wasn’t caused by annoyance and the baby is going to be ultra-nerdy like Dave and Kurt (sorry Kurt) and really likes this kind of stuff.

It really was an amazing place to visit. I’ll leave you with one last bit of dam trivia. There were 112 deaths associated with the construction of the dam. One story says that the first person to die in the construction of Hoover Dam (or Boulder Dam as it was originally known) was J. G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned while looking for the perfect spot for the dam. His son, Patrick, was the last man to die working on the dam, 13 years to the day later.

For the record, I meant “ultra-nerdy” as a compliment. I heart nerds.