Hoover Dam

Current Location: Oasis Las Vegas RV Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada

Today we took our time getting up and had a light breakfast in the trailer. We loaded up the camera and other stuff and headed to visit Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. One nice thing about visiting the Dam and the lake is that we got to pre-run the route we’ll be taking as we head out tomorrow.

We stopped by the Lake Mead visitor center to stamp our National Park Service Passport book. Then, we headed on to the dam. As soon as we got there, we headed to buy tickets for the full dam tour. We bought tickets at 11:00 am and had to wait until 2:00 pm for the tour (our guide later indicated that they are understaffed with guides due to the sequestration, otherwise, we probably would have had our tour almost immediately).

With our tour hours away, we walked over the dam, took pictures and headed to the cafe for lunch. After lunch, we bought some souvenirs and ran all our extra stuff up to the truck (on the parking deck) so we would be lean for our tour. Malcolm took his camera, but we left most everything else locked up on the truck.

The tour was interesting. We learned a lot of fascinating details on how the dam was built (they took two years to build tunnels for the river to bypass the construction site before the dam construction started, for example). After our tour, we hopped back in the truck and headed back to the trailer.

We put on our bathing suits and checked out the pools here at the resort. The adult pool and hot tub were both very nice. The pool almost felt like salt water (it didn’t have any chlorine in it as far as we could tell).

After swimming, we cleaned up and headed over to the Silverton Hotel and Casino across I-15 from where we are camped. We enjoyed a nice buffet meal there, wandered through the casino (Malcolm lost $15 pretty quickly) and then headed back to the trailer where we plopped down to relax for the evening.

Pictures (cell phone pics – Malcolm hasn’t unloaded camera pics yet):