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Day 29: Tue Aug 19, 1997

 Got up and ready and headed east on Flamingo Boulevard, away from The Strip. Topped off the gas tank and found Boulder Highway south to Boulder City. That's where Hoover Dam is located and Lake Meade. The area was very barren, very rugged hills, very little vegetation. It was hot and sunny. The lake came into view first, the road wound downward to the dam. Parking was $2 on the Nevada side so we continued across to Arizona and found a small parking area up above the dam. We walked down a long flight of stairs, and started across the dam, stopping at the men's room first, then the ladies room. On the lake side of the dam there were two pairs of intake towers. Each had a large clock, one said Nevada Time, the other Arizona Time. They were in different time zones, but the time was the same since Arizona does not have daylight time but stays on Mountain Standard Time.

The Arizona side intake towers at Hoover Dam.

View downstream from Hoover Dam.

One section of the visitors center.

The face of the dam as seen from near the visitors center.

There was no free visitor center, we didn't find one anyway. There is a very interesting looking visitor center but tickets are needed to get in but we only wanted a quick look. Didn't get much of a look at the dam. The road across it was fairly narrow and noisy with traffic making it hard to cross from one side to the other. A much nicer dam to tour is Grand Coulee in Washington state, plus it has free self guided tours. I wouldn't go out of my way again to see Hoover Dam. A snack shop on the Arizona side is at the edge of the water, lots of large fish, carp probably, swim just below, looking for handouts I would guess.

Large fish near the snack shop.

After our visit I found a really nice Hoover Dam web site, it's well worth browsing. Bruce Swanson, a tour guide there, has put together a very interesting collection of essays on the dam, he has some amazing stories.

Back at the car we headed toward Kingman, stopped at the visitor center briefly, then we caught I-40 east. Kingman has been in the news recently in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing. We drove till Flagstaff where we searched for food. Not much of interest to vegetarians, until I spotted a Soup and Salad place. It was ok, I'm not a big fan of vegetables. Business 40 through Flagstaff is not a pleasant road. Part of it has a railroad on one side, pretty useless for a business section. Whoever laid out the road should have allowed enough room between the road and tracks to put something useful. As it is, eastbound travelers must cross traffic, which was heavy. We found it too hard to continue eastbound after stopping and ended up driving back and forth on this road too many times, I'll avoid it in the future. From Flagstaff we continued east. Could see the rim of Meteor Crater off to the south. That's worth seeing, we saw it last trip so didn't stop this time. We continued into New Mexico and stopped for the night in Gallup. Found a very nice motel, Microtel, 3 days old. Slept well.

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