Vegas, baby... VEGAS!!!

Trip 2: 4450 miles, 66.5 hours driving time

I got up early this morning- before sunrise- and got out to watch the sunrise over the Grand Canyon Rim. This is an easy picture to paint. You're at 7,000 feet elevation, next to a hole that's a mile deep. It's January 12th, before sunrise. It snowed several inches, melted, and iced the previous night. Winds were blowing about 30 mph. And there's about 50 people doing the same thing.

This can only mean one thing- we are thoroughly insane.


This picture does not do this sight justice.

I can't do the Grand Canyon justice by describing it here. Sure, we've all seen pictures of it. And it looks the same as the pictures. Except you're not standing at the edge of a 3,000 cliff on television. It's something that you should try to experience once in your life. If that's not your thing, well, I guess that's okay, but you're partly dead inside if you get nothing from it. Preachy, sure. But there's a reason people would go there in the dead of winter.


It's so friggin' huge... it really does boggle the imagination.

I started to hike the first part of the trail and gave up after half a mile because it was below freezing, there's not much oxygen at 7,000 feet, and I had to wrap things up and move on. My heart trying to jump out of my chest seemed like as good a time as any.

The roads were still disasterous in the morning, but melting quickly. I zipped out of there, and towards the next stop- Hoover Dam. For the first time in my trip, my path in this trip overlapped the path of the previous trip. That took nine days. Tomorrow's trip will mostly follow the same path of Trip 1 (oh yay, I-5 again).


Hoover Dam. Note the WWII pill box at the top. (Thanks to the idiot who pointed.)

Hoover Dam is also quite impressive, and there's of course alot of things you know (it's a dam that controls water flow and provides hydroelectric power) and alot of things you don't. Like there's still a WWII era pill box on top of one of the hills. The whole design was done art deco. The cables they used to lower the workers and cement to the canyon floor in 1935 is still in use. The carp in Lake Mead have been genetically matched to goldfish dumped in by the workers from the 1930s.

It's pronounced Nev-AAAH-da, not Nev-AH-da. Lengthen the A, you teutonic...

Mind you, I was still dressed for the Canyon, and it was in the mid 60s F. I had to get out of the son. So I got one last picture of me straddling Nevada and Arizona, the Mountain and Pacific time zones. So I crossed time. I existed in two eras of time. Strange. Then I left. Or did I? Maybe I got here an hour ago?

You know what's 30 miles from Hoover Dam? My last waypoint on the journey. And a fitting final act to this great road trip.