Day 3: Hoover Dam

Everyone slept great our second night in Las Vegas.  Whew!  As an aside, going to Vegas with kids, was fine, maybe a little awkward, but at no time did I think I would actually gamble.  Turns out, Mark intended to gamble.  He stayed in the casinos and the rest of us East Coasters went to bed.

As another aside, I just so happened to travel to the West Coast a couple of times in the past year.  The first night you are there you are so tired and jet lagged, you go to bed at 8:30.  Annnnnndddd, sleep until 6:30 local time.  Seriously, I feel like a million bucks after that.  That's 10 hours of sleep.  Its awesome!  Now, coming back to the East Coast is significantly less awesome, but you get what I'm saying.  Day 3 I woke up and felt great!

We had a pretty big breakfast...packed up and headed out of town.  In hindsight, Mark was trying to tell me we should leave earlier, but I didn't get it. On to the rest of our trip!



This is when the real trip began!  We got to the Hoover Dam about 11, which was too late to do any sort of tour.  The kids have to be a certain age to do one tour and we would have had to wait hours.  I hear it is cool, but it just didn't work out for us.  But the Hoover Dam was so cool!  I don't know if it was the scenery or the size of it, but I loved it!



Really, by this time, Andy started breaking down.



He didn't want to be there, he didn't care, he just wanted to go home.  Oh well.



There was a small museum that told about how and why they built the dam.  Turns out politics was just a terrible as it is now!  Woohoo!!  We took a group shot.



Andy wasn't into it.  For lunch we drove back up the road a little bit more to an overlook of Lake Mead.  I was in awe of this, which is funny considering where we were going!!  But again, loved it.  We ate lunch in our rental car



And then took another group shot



It was really bright.  Really bright.  It was about an hour from Vegas to the Hoover Dam, then about 3.5 hours to the Grand Canyon.  I'm not STEM coordinator, but James immediately started building a Hoover Dam in mine craft.  #winning



We got to the Grand Canyon about 4pm local time I think.  We stayed in the Bright Angel Lodge and had to get two rooms.  We were right by the top though.  Another group picture and again, Andy wasn't into it...



James is my 1950s boy and loved it!



Here is a not too awful picture of Andy (finally)