Viva Las Vegas.

I'm posting 2 updates at once tonight, so please keep reading when you get to the bottom of this post - there are some lovely ones in the previous post too!

After the Grand canyon from the air and dropping down out of the snow, it becomes clear that my final
destination is drawing closer.  However we have a night in Las Vegas to take care of first!

Arizona's skies are probably the most remarkable.  I wonder if they are like this every day?

The lighter coloured bit is a landfill site. 

The road to Boulder City -  Highway 93 I think.

We are in the desert.

Lake Mead was created when the Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s.

Which brings us on to the Hoover Dam.  I had an inkling it would be on my route and I think up untill quite recently the road used to take you across the top, creating a bit of a traffic jam.

Now you turn off the main road, drive down the old windy road untill you get to the dam.  They're terribly worried that Saddam Hussein is going to try and explode it, and empty Lake Mead on top of Las Vegas so all cars are subject to stopping and possible searching and the Dam has its own Police force, who between them drive about 6 police cars and 1 golf buggy back and forth across the Dam all day every day.

It's big. On a scale it's hard to comprehend.  I think the biggest impression it made on me however is that it is engineered foremost as a spectacle. 

This one's for Tim.

It's not the highest Dam around it's also certainly not the widest, however it is definitely the most accessible dam I have ever visited.  You can wander about and take pictures.  It has guided tours and a visitor centre.  I actually ended up driving across it because I saw a sign at the visitor centre asking for $7 to park at which I baulked.  I saw a sign to campervan and caravan parking (or the American equivelant) down the hill so I thought I would chance my arm and see if I could turn round there.

It turns out you can drive right across with impunity, although you have to give way to lots of giddy pedestrians.  You can park on the other side for free!  So I did.

And I spend the next hour or so wandering around.

The visitor centre and $7 car park could easily be the scene of an evil James Bond movie plot, or indeed the target of some emergency worthy of the deployment of International Rescue.

I love spotting stuff like this.  It's a datum point so they can tell things like how much the dam bends when they fill the lake up.

'C' is for Camry's big adventure!

After trudging up and down the Dam, I drove up the hill a bit to where they have built a relief road and a new fancy bridge to carry the traffic away from the road across the Dam.

In the car park there, Camry's sibling, who has clearly had an easier paper round parked next to me.  An enormous and smiley family of Asians got out of it.  I'm not sure what that man next to the cliff is doing - I didn't realise he was there till I uploaded this.

Downtown Las Vegas from the Interstate.

Las Vegas Boulevard.

View from my room.

Inside of my room - you can see the Montgolfier Brothers taking off on the other side of the Arc D'Triumphe which means we must be in Paris!

Signs we are not in Paris: firstly the telephone is inside the building and not out the street, and secondly it has a toilet next to it.

Paris, Las Vegas.  I see.  Nothing is quite as it seems.