Maplessness

Nevada: Rand McNally State Folded Map

Day Two did not dawn bright and early, but we didn't start too late either. One thing I'd noticed is that it's incredibly hard to get a map of just Nevada there in the city. You can get California on its own, or with Nevada, but not a Californialess Nevada. They do exist, but they certainly weren't readily available. Of course you can get Las Vegas maps, but that's not much use when you're out womping in the desert now is it... Now, normally I'd tell this story chronologically, but the first task on today's list was to pick up tickets for Blue Man Group at the Luxor Hotel. I think that belongs in the Blue Man Group part of this tale, so let's pick up the trail heading South out of the city sometime in the early afternoon of May 7th, 2001.

North? No, South! South? No, North!

One thing we really noticed out there was that the roads are looked after and maintained. Here, in the Bay Area, for all its wealth, the roads are beaten up and messy.

Before long, Don lost his baseball cap to the winds. After all, the Pretty Car should only ever be driven with the lid down. We had to stop somewhere unknown and full of building sites (lots and lots of houses going up there in the desert) and buy another one. Some drug store somewhere. And we got hamburgers while we were at it.

The tiny maps in the guide books weren't much use to us, mostly because we should have been travelling in the opposite direction. Our goal was to reach the Hoover Dam today, and see Blue Man Group in the evening. It was only when we got down to Jean, pretty close to the California border, that I just knew we weren't headed the right way. At least Jean was on the map...

Jean, by the way, has nothing much to distinguish it other than two casinos either side of the road. One looks like an old fashioned Mark Twain steam boat. One doesn't. They're about the first casinos you bump into on the way into Nevada.

A word about the desert. I liked it, very much. The heat was very strong - again pushing a hundred fahrenheit - and yet bearable. It's not green - duh! - but it has a certain something that I liked, and it has interesting prickly plants that I'd like to know more about some time. Sort of like miniature palm trees, I don't know what the flora and fauna out there is called. Moving to California, I had to get used to new critters, including hummingbirds and black squirrels in my little garden. Moving to Nevada, I'd have to do that all over again. There was just, again, something. There was enough space to think or just to be. There never is where I live...

North Again

Eventually we did find the correct turn-off, after driving through some of the greener suburbs of Las Vegas and finding out where Las Vegasians got their groceries, planks, etc. (In other words we found Home Depot, Albertsons supermarket, drug stores... the useful stuff that isn't around The Strip.) It wasn't far to Boulder City, which was built to house the people who made Boulder Dam in the thirties. And which had a different, quieter atmosphere; it was pretty, and even had some old type buildings.

We found the road which wound down the hill to the dam. About halfway down you saw a magnificent view of Lake Mead. It was very blue, and awfully incongruous in all the baked yellows and browns we'd seen thus far. We stopped and took pictures, looked at the pretty real estate.

The road is a one-lane road, and winds down through rock, past farms of pylons and switches until finally, suddenly, you are on the dam. There must have been a car park at the Nevada end, but we missed it; however, after crossing the dam (along with a lot of buses and trucks; this seems to be a major trunk road) we parked on the Arizona side. By the way, there are two clock towers which read Nevada and Arizona times, since the centre of the dam is the marker between the Pacific and Mountain time zones. The funny thing is that Arizona doesn't bother with daylight savings, or summertime, so for six months of the year it's on the same time scale as California etc.

This was my first time in Arizona, too. But it doesn't count until I come riding here with a motorcycle.

The Dam

By the time I made it to the other side, I was dying of thirst. My one thought was to find a source of Coca Cola. (They very kindly provide drinking fountains halfway across!) There are a couple of angel statues and a star map with planets and stars mapped on it, and it's in the shade, so I waited there until Don got his photographing out of the way. I was impressed by it all, but I was thirsty.

Time was pressing on, so we backtracked. Our original plan had been to drive along Lake Mead and come back via a national park further north, but there wasn't time. We had some Blue Men to see. The most exciting thing on the way back was my losing my baseball cap :: sigh :: As I said, the roads around here are hard on hats if you drive with your car's lid down.

We got home just before six. This gave us exactly enough time to shower, change, and then get back into the car for the ostensible reason for this visit: Blue Man Group.