We made it to North of San Francisco and pulled over to find a hotel in Weed, CA to make a reservation for tonight. I’ll have more later .. until then here is Day 5 in pictures:
I’m trying to catch up a bit here. On Day 5, we traveled from Kingman, AZ to Las Vegas. There really wasn’t any breakfast place that served anything for Sarah that we could find so i took the opportunity to try out a Route 66 diner type place. I found just a place .. Mr D’s Route 66 Diner where i had the Denver Omelet.
It was quite tasty and with my protein fix i head back to get Sarah and our things. We stayed at the Best Western Kings Inn and they were nice enough to show us the temperature at 9am:
Kingman AZ is has a pretty strong Route 66 heritage and they play it up quite a bit. I noticed more Route 66 stuff in Kingman than anywhere else, tho references to Route 66 were all over the place along our route:
and
Once we got out of the Grand Canyon area, we hit the real desert. Since we made the Grand Canyon to Kingman journey at night, the day 5 morning was our first real look at the southwest desert:
This is our first sighting of the Colorado river since the Grand Canyon. This is below the Hoover Dam which were were approaching:
The blue really stands out in contrast to the grey and browns of the desert.
Here is our first sighting of the Hoover Dam. We stopped at an oversee at the top before you started weaving your way down to it:
At this point we notice it was rather hot so we’d thought it was time to bring out a visual aid:
This was taken at around 10:30 in the morning. Its turning into a hot day!
From this you can see how low the Lake Mead is compared to where it traditionally is (where the water has marked the canyon walls with white). To emphasize the point, its that low and the lake spans 150 miles at its farthest points. Thats alot of water!
They are building a road to bypass the Hoover Dam because of the security concerns of a vehicle damaging it in a fatal way while driving across it. They don’t allow truck traffic over it any more. Tho there were a few trucks that crossed. My guess is they were associated with the bridge construction (or submitted to heavy inspection).
One of the things that surprised me was you get a much stronger feeling of vertigo looking over the side of this thing than we did at the Grand Canyon. Not sure why, maybe because of the straight drop factor but it was a very weird vertigo-ish feeling looking over the edge.
I stuck the camera over the edge and pushed the button while looking straight down:
We take the tour which leads us way down into the guts of the dam. The first half of it takes us to a room that is above one of the intake pipes that brings water to the power generation turbines. I didn’t think to put a person in the picture to give an indication of size so let me just say .. this was a big pipe!
Next stop was to one of the power generation rooms. As you can see there are 8 turbines being turned by the water (on this side … another 9 on the other side). An interesting tidbit was that the power generation was added as an after thought. The dam was conceived of and built for flood control purposes. It was after they were building the thing that they decided to harness the power of the water that would be flowing through it. You could feel a low level vibration from the sheer power of the water flowing through the system.
Here’s another couple of shots before we leave:
Now off to Vegas. We got there a little early to check in so we had lunch. I don’t remember what Sarah had but here’s a picture:
I had sweet & sour chicken:
This is this place doesn’t serve any meat so the chicken was out a meat substitute. It actually was pretty good. The key to sweet and sour is the crust on the meat and they did that correctly. A crisp shell with a meaty, soft interior. It worked and i really didn’t notice that it wasn’t real chicken. Lunch didn’t take long enough so we thought we’d cheat and go ahead and sample the real reason we came on this trip. Getting Sarah real donuts, vegan donuts. See, there’s this guy named Ronald that makes vegan donuts, and they are supposed to be identical to milk and egg laced donuts that are normally available.
So we take a look:
They look normal enough .. but how do they taste? Sarah volunteers to answer that question. Here’s Sarah eating, for the first time in 7 years, a real donut:
This was a creme filled one and it passes the test. I try out a glazed donut … perfect. This man is a donut genius:
Once last set of photos to share. We were lucky enough that the hotel ran out of the suite (the A suites, the cheap ones) that we reserved so they upgraded us to the B suites for the same cost. It was a ton cooler .. it was as big as some peoples apartments. It had 2 rooms, a stand-up shower, whirlpool bath, a bar (not stocked!) and a big screen TV.
And an extra piece of hardware in the water closet (I’ll let you guys figure it out):
That was day 5 in review!
