I have been extremely fortunate to be able to work remotely for my current contract. It has allowed us to get out of Illinois during the cold months and get to warmer states so that Amanda can feel better. Along with that, working for a company that is on central time while I am on the west coast means that I need to get up earlier. Normally being a night owl, I have had to change my sleep schedule to wake up super early. At first this was not my favorite thing in the world... however finally we are seeing some benefit...

If it's 5 P.M. in Chicago, it's 3 P.M. here in Vegas. Yesterday that meant that as soon as work was over for the day, we hopped in the car and hauled ass over to Hoover Dam.

The tours are only open until 5 P.M. local time, so it didn't give a ton of time to wander about. We immediately got in line for our 'Dam Tour' hopeful to get an inside look at it.

It actually ended up being almost a perfect time for photographs while waiting in line, as the sun slowly started dipping to the horizon. Amanda made sure to make her presence known...

We stood in line for what seemed like forever, but finally we managed to inch our way to the elevators that would bring us down to the power plant.

It should be noted that there is currently renovation taking place, so you are somewhat limited in what you can actually see. In any case, we were happy when the elevator doors closed and our tour group was heading downwards.

The tour itself is really quite short. The guide has a short talk while waiting for the elevator, and while riding it down. Once inside you get about 10 minutes to stand on a balcony and look at the huge spinning turbines while the guide speaks over an intercom. Still, it's an impressive sight.. especially knowing how much water is on the other side of the concrete walls!

To try to give some scale to the picture above, I tried to zoom in on the golf cart riding next to the turbines:

These things are massive!

After the power plant tour we were told that they were about to close the visitor center, so we needed to hurry to be able to take advantage of the observation deck. We only had a few minutes there, but the overlook definitely gave a much better picture of the actual scale of the dam.

After seeing the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon just days earlier, it was impressive to see something so incredibly big that people were able to put together (in the 1930's no less!).

With the visitor center closing we wandered outside for a short while. These statues reminded me of something from the game Bioshock.

There was a speaker playing explaining everything we were seeing, but at that point it was definitely going in one ear and out the next. I will definitely need to investigate more about all of these things just as soon as we get a better internet connection (the one in our Vegas hotel room suuuuuuucks).

Hoover Dam - another two thumbs up.

So far we haven't been disappointed with anything we've seen. We drove down the strip and Freemont street on Sunday, but have yet to go visit it. Hopefully sometime this week we will take advantage of the free shuttle between our resort and the strip and get a chance to gamble a bit!