Get your kicks

It winds from Chicago to LA . . . and one of the towns it passes through is Williams, Arizona, which is where we are now.

Today was a travel day but we ended up the way we finished yesterday with FT leaning against a lamp post, this time on the corner of a street in a classic Route 66 small town.

We traveled south and east from Las Vegas which pretty much instantly on the outskirts of town required a passage across the top of what is, according to the interpretive materials, one of the top 10 civil engineering achievements of the 20th century, big old,  gigantic old, off the scale of comprehension huge old Hoover Dam.

We have all seen it on TV and in film numerous times.  This picture shares the shortcomings of all of those other times I have seen images of the dam.  It does not even begin to do justice to how massive this thing is.  I hadn't ever seen it before, anyone else still in that category should come and see it.

Big, really big.

Even most of those who have seen the dam haven't seen this, the new highway bypass bridge over the gorge just below the dam.  It opened in 2011.

Visible in the upper right corner of the photo is the original construction crane used in construction of the dam from 1932 to 1935.  Apparently it was too big and too firmly anchored to ever bother to try to remove it.  And quite probably it is still occasionally useful.  It is after all a functioning crane capable of lifting massive loads, in case that should ever be necessary.

We passed over the highway on the top of the dam and then circled around and went back and also crossed over the new bridge.

Checking off all of the boxes.

Here's the FT standing on top of the dam with the Lake Meade reservoir in the background.  The top waterline is apparently an all time record flood stage.  Careful examination will reveal a bathtub ring lower down in the white layer which is more of the ordinary high water mark.

As pointed out to us by another citizen who was on top of the dam at the same time we were, several feet of water down on a reservoir of this size is a striking measure of the severity of drought conditions in the Southwest.

I got a book from Wireless for Christmas about under appreciated attractions in each of the states.  One of those attractions for Arizona was only a short detour off our travel route so we waited patiently for there at last to be a turn in that direction and headed off towards Dolan Springs.  The book said that there was a significant concentration of what is usually a fairly rare plant, Joshua trees.

They are not actually trees, actually a species of Yucca.  But they are to a midwestern flatlander a way exotic looking plant and when found in clusters as we saw along the road they provide an extravagant visual display.

By now it was about lunch time and we weren't sure about where to have lunch out there in the middle of nowhere until we saw this imperative statement in front of an establishment with additional puffery on the facade declaring that it has been voted the #1 restaurant in town.

And it WAS pretty good.  I can personally recommend the veggie wrap.

So we are hunkered down for the night in Williams, probably most of you can figure out what comes next.

One last Las Vegas bit, the FT and I left the room in the Paris again after I posted yesterday and headed down to the casino.  She was intrigued enough by my small  accomplishment at roulette from earlier in the day to want to investigate further for herself.  We found a small stakes table and the croupier and I walked her through the basics of betting on pure blind luck, which is after all what roulette is.

She had lots of fun and learned to play the game.  As for myself I bought myself back in with house money, the chips that I had won earlier in the day.  Once again I had a very nice run and ended up more than doubling my initial outlay.

After a few small successes FT busted  out and it occurred to both of us that I am unlikely to ever have possession of one of these again so I took another photo of my Paris casino chips.

That one on the far left has a nice look to it, don't you think?

Even with the nice run at roulette we can not and will not declare that we won money in Las Vegas.  That little success at the end means only that we ended up down less than we were earlier in the day and that we had fun.  We consider our losses to be well within the reasonable expense of entertainment for the entertainment the gambling provided.  That means we are satisfied that we got good value for what we paid for.  You can't really expect to do much better than that.