Day 2: Man-Made and Natural Wonders

We’ve now arrived in Hurricane, Utah, after a couple of big driving days. Once we picked up our Ford Taurus at the airport in Vegas (after narrowly avoiding getting stuck with a Grand Marquis), we headed to Boulder City, which was basically built to house workers constructing the Hoover Dam in the 30s. Luckily, our hotel wasn’t quite that old, but it certainly was tacky.

I didn’t have very high hopes for the Hacienda Hotel and Casino, after paying only $25 for our accommodation, but it was surprisingly good! Giant room, comfy bed, and really cheap food – I paid about $10 a salmon steak with chips and veges plus an entrée salad, bread and a drink. I couldn’t even finish it all!. The hotel was also only about 200m from the Hoover Dam turn-off, which gave us a head-start for day two of the trip.



Hoover Dam was great – we had an amusing tour guide who kept making dam jokes (ie. “take as many dam photos as you want”), and let me point out stuff on a powerplant schematic for the rest of the tour group. It was stinking hot outside though, with all the rock around for the heat to radiate from.


Note: 100 degrees Fahrenheit is 37.8 degrees Celsius

From Hoover Dam, we made the long trip out to the Grand Canyon. We stumbled across a lookout soon after entering the park, which was a pretty amazing surprise when glancing left to look out the window!



Unfortunately, by the time we got to the main touristy part, a combination of controlled burns and cloud had reduced visibility significantly. There were still some decent views, but I’ll definitely have to go back sometime when it’s clear.





View by the end of the day:


We got a pretty big dose of cuteness while at the canyon, with heaps of squirrels and the occasional chipmunk running around. We also saw elk!



Then came the painful part. Not only did we have another 2h drive to get to our accommodation in Tuba City – on a Navajo reservation – we also got stuck behind this ridiculous bus for miles, doing 30km/h less than the speed limit.



There would have been some pretty good views of more canyon-like country on the way to Tuba City, but it was getting dark by then. We did get an impressive lightning show for the last hour or so – the beauty of being able to see so far in the desert is that lightning really lights up the whole sky!