The day I drove down to Las Vegas, I decided to go see the Hoover Dam, because I really love concrete.
Actually, I decided to go because it seemed kind of interesting and I didn’t really have much else to do, since the other members of my party that were in town (Cleo and Nate) were off hiking with Nate’s aunt in Red Rock Canyon.
It’s actually pretty interesting, seeing how this massive feat of engineering was accomplished in the days before, well, safety. It’s a bit boring in the description, but the dam is really gorgeous when it’s all lit up at night and such.
It was kind of funny when I told my dad I wanted to visit it, because he kept calling it the Boulder Dam. Which is what it used to be called…until 1947. I got a real good laugh when I saw the date of the change.
The one thing that kind of sucked was that I got there right in time to get about half the tour before everything closed down. That felt like a bit of a ripoff, especially since you have to cough up 10 bucks to get the tour.
But it was pretty interesting, and occasionally hilarious when they tried to present ways to put the amount of concrete in the dam in perspective, in particular in the cheesy video they show at the beginning of the tour:
“With the amount of concrete in this dam, you could build a four foot wide sidewalk around the equator.”
Thankfully, I was not the only one who cracked up at it, although I think more people were cracking up at the choice of demonstrative concrete object than at the piss-poor quality of the narration.
I am such a goddamn nerd…