Heading Out

We keep picking up hours as we travel west so we were up pretty early. Arizona is actually in the Mountain Time Zone, but they don't have daylight savings time here, so we're actually synchronized with the Pacific Time Zone. These three extra hours we've gained has us getting up at 6 or 7 am everyday.

Liz and I at the hotel. Pretty chipper for 7am don't you think?

Meteor Crater

Meteor Crater is the site in Arizona where a meteor a 150 ft in diameter crashed into the Earth 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. The resulting crater is around 3/4 of a mile in diameter and around 700 feet deep.

On the road to the meteor crater, the rim can be seen from a few miles away.

This is a chunk of the original meteor that created the crater. This piece is only a few feet wide, but it weights over 1400 pounds. The original meteor was thought to be around 200,000 tons.

Here we're standing on the lip of the crater looking in. Normally we could have taken a tour around the rim, but today the wind was gusting at over 70 mph, so we had to stay behind the railing.

Liz and I by the crater.

Hoover Dam

By the time we were getting close to the Hoover Dam, it was getting close to 5pm. We figured it would be too late to take a tour so we just took some shots of the outsides of the dam.

On the way to the Hoover Dam we caught this beautiful picture of the sky.

We're only a few miles from the dam at this point. This is the Colorado river as it runs from Hoover Dam.

This is the Lake Mead side of the Hoover Dam. From this side, the dam does not look very big.

Liz and I took a second to take a quick snapshot of ourselves over the dam.

From the top of the dam, the crystal blue waters of Lake Mead can be seen.

Boulder City

We didn't want to go all the way into Vegas tonight, so we stopped in a town right inside the Nevada border so we could get up early and hit the Hoover Dam. Boulder City is a small town that is wealthy and looks pretty safe. Liz and I found a cheap hotel in the middle of the city to stay in and checked in for the night.

It turns out that just this morning here in Boulder City a body (or parts of a body) were found floating in a lake. They identified the woman as someone who works at a local hotel. We actually looked to stay in the hotel that the woman worked at, but ended up staying somewhere else. Apparently, the last time there was a murder in Boulder City was over 5 years ago. Somehow, they must have known we were coming. Boy, can we pick em.

It was too late to take a tour of the dam so we continued into Nevada to stay for the night.

Another shot of Lake Mead.

From the looks of it, an old turbine from the Hoover Dam was left in the park as a souvenir.