Las Vegas Trip

Hoover Damn, Chocolate Factory & Cactus Garden

Although there's a lot of new stuff here on the Strip that we haven't seen yet, we took our first morning to go to Hoover Damn because Dom's never seen it before.

This side of the damn is where the Colorado river exits and goes downstream toward Mexico. I read somewhere that no water from the river reaches the Gulf of Mexico anymore, but I don't remember where I saw that and I haven't fact-checked it.

Dom was more interested in Lake Mead, where we can come with the boat. Maybe we'll come back next year. It would take a couple of extra hours driving with the boat in tow, so perhaps we'd make it a 2-day drive instead. I know we'll be here next January again, because I'm going to a knitting trade show (TNNA for those who care) in San Diego next January. I really really really miss San Diego. As soon as we drove into here and saw the palm trees and the nice, clean, well planned freeways, I started feeling homesick. I never wanted to go back to New York or Tennessee after I left. But for about a year now, I've been missing San Diego. I don't know how we could afford to live there, however, because we are not willing to go back to the rat race and get corporate jobs. So I'll have to write a best seller or win the lottery (hey, I'm in Vegas, maybe I'll try my hand at poker or black jack tonight!)

One of our favorite movies (don't laugh, it only got like 2 stars but we like it) is Fools Rush In with Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek. Hoover Damn and the Arizona Las Vegas border plays a big part in the movie's plot, so it was fun to stop here and stand with one foot in each state to take this photo.

On the way back into Las Vegas, we stopped at a chocolate factory. Not the one owned by Willy Wonka, but they did have a few Oompa Loopas. They were hard to find, just like mountain goats hiding in the rocks at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. How many Oompa Loompas can you find in this picture?

The last place we stopped was a cactus garden that is on the same property with the chocolate factory. They have cacti and succulents from around the world. It was quiet and peaceful compared to the noise of the casinos. There's so much more to Nevada than Las Vegas and Reno. I picked up a small book called Wild Nevada: Testimonies on Behalf of the Desert that is filled with short essays and poems about the beaut of the desert. I could live here if it wasn't over 100 degrees in the summer. That would just wipe me out. We were here once in August and you could just feel the heat rising up from the parking lot burning your shins as you walked. And the air conditioner never did cool off the car. It's just oppressive, even if as they say, "it's a dry heat."

Well, I guess I'm just homesick for Southern California. :-(

I'm suppposed to get together with a friend whom I haven't seen in 20 years, but I just phoned him at 1:30pm and he's asleep. That's the Vegas life, I guess!