The Golden Years: Hoover Dam and Bridge

Boy they must be having nasty weather at home in Indiana. How do I know? Because the darn phone kept going off all night with weather alerts! DROID!! DROID!! – Need to shut the alerts down if we want any sleep.

Funny thing happened yesterday – well a couple of things actually but this one was unexpected. After I posted the blog about the Welcome to Las Vegas Sign I got a Tweet from "the SIGN" – it thanked me for the pictures but didn’t sound pleased about the mention of the BandAid! Weird.

We went out to breakfast yesterday a.m. then headed down Boulder Highway to visit Hoover Dam – actually more to see the Bridge from the Dam. And had an interesting interaction with the Police. As it turned out it was a good thing we did. But first – why did they stop us? Well one of the things we do when we go to Mexico is take our current years license plate off the car and put an old expired one on it. They tend to disappear in Mexico – though we’ve never lost one there. [Don’t ask why it was already on the car - point of contention.] Anyway. Unfortunately the expired plate on Willie was from Nevada – and wouldn’t you know a police car ended up in the lane behind us. Whoops! Red flashing lights. Bill pulled over. When the officer came up to the car Bill tried to explain why we had the expired plate on the car and told him we had our current Indiana plate in the back. “Should I get it and show it to you?” “NO – Don’t get out of the car.” Okay. Then another police car pulled up and stopped. Lovely. We were informed it was a $400 fine to have an illegal plate on the car. Eventually they let Bill out to get the Indiana plate and they wanted to see the current Indiana registration too. No problem – gave it to them. OH OH PROBLEM! The registration we had in the Jeep was the 2015 registration for the Mustang (at home in the garage) Both cars registrations come due and are paid at the same time and when “someone” put the papers in the cars they were switched. OH BOY. By now the police and Bill were friends…admiring the Jeep and talking about Mexico. They checked the registration on their computer and made Bill change the plate and wished us a good day. No ticket. Thank Goodness.

BUT now we really had a problem – to get into Mexico we need the original current registration for the Jeep. And a copy of it for them. We have a copy of the correct one but not the original. Good thing we found out now. Got a hold of our house sitter and she will send it to us.

So off we went to the dam. First took a detour to a lookout over Lake Meade. This is one of my favorite desert plants. The Ocotillo.

And the lake and one of its marinas. Look how low the water is. The marina has been moved a couple of times. The old water line is the area where the light and dark rock/dirt meet.

Continuing on – The new road over the bridge is so nice, we forgot how narrow and twisty the old road over the dam was. And there is still a check point before you can drive out onto the Dam. Guess our names must not be on their computers as they let us through.

Stopped at the information about the bridge. From here people can walk up the mountain and walk on the bridge. We didn’t do that. Just read some of the information about it. Also lots of info about it on the net.

Looking at the bridge from the road leading to the dam. It is amazing. We watched it being built over the years. Now we just drive over it so I wanted to see it from below.

Looking the other way towards the Dam.

Driving across the Dam – lots of people walking around, The two parking lots right next to the dam cost $10 to park – I’m glad we’ve parked there in the past and toured the Dam years ago. So wasn’t interested in parking.

On the Arizona side at a free parking lot. Looking down on the dam. The bridge in view on the left is the bridge before THE bridge.

A look at the low lake from the Dam area.

The walkway leading down to the dam and visitor center. The black square shows the size of bag you can take with you. My purse was bigger than the square – so guess if we’d gone down I couldn’t take it.