Today was spent in and around Boulder City.
We visited the Hoover Dam, stocked up on groceries, and drove down The Strip after the sun set.
I woke up at 6:00, got out of bed and went out on the balcony to read my Bible. There was a light rain, so no beautiful sunrise pictures today.
We had breakfast in the lobby. The staff was very friendly, and the food was good. We were chatting with the receptionist, detected what was left of her Maine accent and found that she was originally from Bangor.
We drove around Boulder City, found a couple of geocaches at an art park (it’s things like these art parks that we would probably not have known about if not for geocaching), then headed toward the Hoover Dam.
We stopped at the Lake Mead Visitor’s Center before proceeding to the Hoover Dam. At the Visitor’s Center, we were able to get some stamps for our National Parks Passport.
Once through the security check, we proceeded over the dam to park on the Arizona side. The last time that I was here, the road over the top of Hoover Dam was the main road between Las Vegas and Kingman. It was really nice to not have to contend with all of that traffic while walking around with the kids.
Since we had to pick up our groceries early in the afternoon, we opted not to go in to the visitor center or take the tour (Glen Canyon Dam tours are a fraction of the price, so we will try to take one of those tours when we pass by it later this week). Most of our time at Hoover Dam was spent walking around, taking in the views, watching the mountain goats, reading the historical markers, and looking for a few geocaches.
As part of our trip preparations, we ordered our groceries online and and scheduled them to be picked up at 2:00 today. We headed toward Henderson and received a text message right at 2:00 (just as we were driving into the parking lot) to let us know our order was ready. This was our first experience with curbside grocery pickup, and it was a huge blessing! We were there less than 10 minutes as an associate brought our order out to the car, marked each item off of the list as it was unloaded from her cart (some items that were not available had substitute items, nothing that we objected to). This trip would have easily taken us 2 hours trying to locate all of those items in an unfamiliar store (it’s hard enough to find things on regular trips to our own grocery store sometimes!).
Once we had our groceries, we headed back to the hotel to unload and repack them. We had a collapsible cooler in which we kept what we would need each day. Everything else that needed to keep cool was in the room refrigerator. We had a daily routine of making our meals for the day and packing them in the cooler. If it was a day that we were to be checking out of the hotel, we packed extra ice, and everything came out of the fridge and got loaded into the cooler.
For the rest of the evening, we decided to go back across the bridge by Hoover Dam and go after some Arizona geocaches until it got dark. We walked along an abandoned stretch of the highway, and across an old highway bridge near a trailhead to some hot springs.
After the sun went down, we drove in to Las Vegas to see The Strip and all of the lights. It was about 7:30 when we got there, and we were happy just to drive the length of it and back once. We may do some walking around here next week when we return, but for now we want to get back to the hotel and get a good night’s rest.