Travels in a Tin Can

route we took was about 280 miles and meant driving all day because the
roads were bad. The tourist trips from Las Vegas are able to take a more
direct route - they go by plane!
We made the journey with very few stops, mainly because we knew we
had a lot of ground to cover, but also because we were travelling through a
whole lot of nothing. Plains stretched out around us for most of the day and
we always seemed to be driving towards mountains - a feature of many of our
drives. Beautiful in its starkness, but with such straight and quiet roads we
seldom had to stop for a chance to admire the view. So we only stopped for
the essentials, petrol, restrooms, oh, and the police.
Not long after leaving Vegas I looked ahead on the map and realized
we were going to be driving across the Hoover Dam. This proved to be the
viewing highlight of our day, involving driving through mountains and seeing
the massive feat of engineering that is the dam itself. The prospect of seeing
this did not overly excite us, but we were pleased-by-proxy at the thought we
would get so close to it. Emma's father is an engineer and would probably
have gone out of his way to see Hoover's biggest legacy. In fact during a
plane trip over the Grand Canyon when Emma and her parents visited when
she was little he was more excited by the dam than by the canyon. We
therefore vowed to take lots of photos as we drove towards and over the dam.
As it turned out the experience was more interesting than we expected.
First, it is an impressive sight. Second, in the middle of crossing the dam we
moved into a different state, Arizona, and also a different time zone -
Mountain Time. Unfortunately this meant losing an hour, not good seeing as
we still had hundreds of miles to drive and it was already mid afternoon. The