Hoover Dam

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The weather in Vegas was much warmer than I was expecting, it was cool but not bitterly cold. In fact it was quite nice it being a bit cooler so walking the distances between the hotels was a bit easier.

Today we left Vegas on a 5 hour drive towards the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The route automatically goes through Hoover Dam - Hoover Dam is a big dam. I was surprised at the lack of barriers (being America!), it would have been fairly easy to hop over and slide right to the bottom. We were thinking that even though it was on a slight incline, it would still be steep enough for you to look a little beaten up at the bottom.

One awesome thing though was the huge overflow holes on each side of the dam (or the “giant toilet” as Amanda calls it). Hoover Dam is right on the border between Nevada and Arizona so crossing it meant winding our clocks forward an hour.

Our next stop on the way to the Canyon was a hick petrol station. Note to self: America measures octane ratings differently, 87 is equivalent to 91, and 91 is equivalent to our 96/98. We started noticing the accents were a bit more southern sounding. We overheard the gas attendant ask where someone was from who replied with “Hoover Dam”. She asked “wherre’s that?”.
Good thing she didn’t ask where we were from.

We started our climb up to the Grand Canyon with its elevation of 6500 feet. Our car has an inbuilt gauge that tells us the temperature outside the vehicle, and we watched it drop about a degree every 10 minutes or so from 15 degrees C to a “crisp” 0 degrees C once we got there.

If it was windy we would have probably died. Luckily however the weather was still the same as what we had the entire trip, cool but blue skies and no wind (apart from the first day in LA).
The cold however did pierce through our clothes pretty well so it didn’t take us long to get into some warmer gears.

The “town” our hotel was in was about 15 minutes south of the canyon, and doesn’t have much more than a few hotels and a McDonalds which was closed by the time we got there.

We ate dinner at a hotel down the road where we ate Enchilada’s. I learnt from Sunita that Spicy food isn’t necessarily hot - spices do not equal chilli.

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