To Boulder City!

Friday - July 26th -- Richfield, UT to Boulder City, NV

Our Hampton Inn in Richfield, UT was wonderful - great beds - nice breakfast - clean.  A refreshing stay.

Left about 9:30 am and finished time in Utah - more beautiful mountains.  Only green was close to water (like Green River).  Somehow I am thinking of Fievel Goes West here.

I-15 took us through southern Utah and about 25 miles of Arizona before we traveled through desolate Nevada.  I had thought Utah was desolate, but Nevada was really that way.

 First sight of real, live, wild cactus! And HOT!  102-108 the whole way through the state!

The Arizona segment was short, but what some white-knuckle driving.  Amazing rock formations as you are traveling on this tiny ribbon of highway through gigantic crags. Both Joyce and I agreed it was wonderful to see once, but we really don't need to do that section of highway again.

We are staying at the Boulder City Hotel -- it is the original hotel in this area and is nicely redone.  Tomorrow we hope to head by Hoover Dam and then off to LA at last.  The hotel includes a museum of the Hoover Dam and how it was built -- really amazing.  Check out the opening exhibit - a trashed newspaper from Milwaukee announcing the great Depression!

 Grandma Jeanne got a kick out of that display!

According to the records, it averaged 119 degrees a day on the summer they began the project. According to people who lived through it, the temp rose to 120 by 9 in the morning and didn't get below that until after 9 at night.  Don't know how you could survive that - but the dam is a testament to the thousands who did.

Speaking of surviving -- I liked this display about the invention of "hard hats" because of falling rock or dropped tools. The display said that even a pebble dropped from the top of the canyon could smash a worker's skull.

The "hard hat" at the bottom of this exhibit was invented by one of the workers on the dam project.  It was two baseball-style caps put front and back and then dipped in tar to harden!

Couple tidbits of information:  Don't eat raisins bought on clearance shelves and Boulder City has the world's largest Alpaca merchandise store.  : )

Blessings to all!  D