Dam, Bridge & Boat (5/23/14)

The early sunrises in the desert are playing havoc with my attempts to sleep in! This morning, I was up and out of bed at 5 AM again. Rather than lay there tossing and turning, I got up, threw on my bathing suit and moved outdoors to spend 30 minutes of yoga. We took off from the campground around 9 to check out the Hoover Dam. When you stop at the overlooks and share them with a bus load of tourists from Japan, you realize how popular our National Parks are to tourists who travel great distances to see them. We moved from the Lake Mead overlook to the actual dam property. Due to Homeland Security, you actually go through check points before you get close to the dam. I guess that we didn’t look suspicious as they let us right in. We hiked up towards the new bridge, but before we stepped out to it, Barbara had hit her “altitude limit” and I left her. I walked across the bridge to the midpoint so that I could say that I was in Arizona. The views down on the dam were incredible! After leaving the dam, we went down to Las Vegas Marina on the lake so that we could take the 1-1/2 hour boat tour. It seemed like we were going to be the only ones on the boat until the buses started arriving from Vegas. The tour was fun and informative. We got back to the campground and decided to take it easy. Around midafternoon, the winds picked up and started really whipping the awning. We quickly took the awning down, along with our tarp. The winds finally died down, but we were glad we didn’t take a chance on losing our awning.