Two Hams on the Road

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

We are at Willow Beach, a campground/boating area on the Colorado River about 10 miles down river from the Hoover Dam (which was originally called Boulder Dam). It’s in Arizona, but very near the Nevada border.

And this is the view out our back window:

This area is called the Black Canyon and is very scenic. It’s also very isolated but only about half an hour from Las Vegas. We’re in the Lake Mead National Recreational Area, which is enormous. The north end of the Black Canyon is where the dam is.

We drove up to Boulder City today to check out the museum and have lunch. We stopped at an overlook on our way and took a picture of the Colorado River. (It's in the center of the picture!)

Urban Spoon came through again! We had a great lunch at Evan’s Old Town Grille. The museum is housed in the Boulder City Hotel, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum is not large but does a great job of telling the story of Hoover Dam. Herbert Hoover started campaigning for the dam in 1922 when he was secretary of commerce. (He served as president from 1929 – 1933). The dam was built between 1931 and 1936. Workers worked 24/7 for 5 years to build the dam. It was an unparalleled engineering feat and considered one of the wonders of the world at the time.

The dam was built to control the flow of the Colorado River, whose raging floods would wipe out farms all along the river. It also produces electricity, most of which was initially destined for Los Angeles. Boulder City was created to house the workers and gambling and alcohol were banned. Alcohol and dynamite don’t mix. The ban may explain why Las Vegas developed as it did!

Boulder City has a lot of public art and several caught my eye. This one could have been named after our dog, Scrappy, who loved to chase tennis balls:

Across the street was a dentist who obviously loves African animals. He had a hippo (this is for Bob):

There was also a small elephant and then this mural with a cheetah in front.

After lunch we stopped at the Lake Mead Recreation Area Visitor center. It had a great view of Lake Mead.

and a great 3d map of the area.

The scenery out here is breath taking. And while it’s all desert, it varies tremendously. On our way back to the campground, we were driving through soft hills of light tan sand with green dots of plants, with a back ground of dark mountains. We rounded a curve and the tan changed to pale green, as young plants covered the ground. As we drove down into the canyon, we stopped to take some pictures of wild flowers. The first one is a beaver tail cactus; I don’t know what the others are.

My apologies for my lack of posts. We’ve been having lots of fun. I’ve started several posts to catch up and I’ll attach some of those to this and future posts.

Monday we left Phoenix, where we had been staying. We spent the weekend with my college roommate, Robin, and her husband Mike. They had a new house and Steve was able to help them get their house wide speaker system working. It’s always great to see old friends. We drove up to Congress, AZ, which is very close to where Steve’s cousin, Jane, and her husband, Martin, live. They joined us for lunch. They’re thinking about rving, so you know what most of the conversation was about. We got back on the road after lunch and found out that we were traveling on the Joshua tree highway. I’d never seen a Joshua tree, so here are some pictures: