Vegas Vacation Part Three

After gambling away all your money and going to shows featuring musicians that were popular in the Seventies (I wrote this song for you Susan Ford: "This one will never sell…”), you can never go wrong with a day trip to either the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam.

There are about a billion tours to the Grand Canyon. You can go by bus. You can go by plane. You can go by helicopter. You can go by bus which takes you to a plane that flies you to a helicopter that circles the Grand Canyon. The helicopter pilot then pushes you out (wearing a parachute) and you can visit the Canyon floor.

Coming from Georgia, you usually will pass over The Grand Canyon. As canyons go, it is Grand. In 2006, we flew over it and when we got to Vegas we decided to save the money for the Grand Canyon and spend it on a buffet. This year, we flew in from Houston. I thought we would fly over it again. For some reason we didn’t.

The Grand Canyon tours tend to be on the pricy side so we decided to tour Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam tours are less expensive and take up less time.

You catch a bus at your hotel which goes to other hotels and picks up other tourists and takes everyone to another hotel. From there, you get on another bus which takes you to Hoover Dam.

Your guide is your bus driver. If you ever wondered where Debbie Downer’s father worked, I think know. He was our bus driver/ tour guide.

As we leave the parking lot onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the bus driver proceeds to tell us that the economy is bad (“very weak”) and that fancy new hotel almost went bankrupt before it opened. He mentions most locals don’t go to the strip and he points out all of the foreclosure signs. He tells us, and I’m not making this up, that the town was a lot better when the Mafia was in charge. He sighed a lot. To top it off, he had something between his teeth and you would hear this awful noise in between him pointing how dry it has been.

He decided to let us see some of the dam from the Arizona side. I’ll say this about that part of Arizona and Nevada: it looks the same. I was able to use one of the fashionable outdoor toilets there. After that, I bought a Mountain Dew. That’s my Arizona experience.

One of the good things about going to Hoover Dam is that you get to say ‘dam’ a lot and it is not consider a curse word. I would tell my wife, “I want another dam picture of you” and we would laugh because as good Baptists we can’t use the other damn unless we make a lot of money or play sports.

There is a lot of neat history behind the Hoover Dam. The dam thing was started by Herbert Hoover. It dam near got shelved by the Depression, but that dam Roosevelt kept it going because working on the dam meant you made dam money. The only dam holidays were the Fourth of July and Christmas. The dam town was named Boulder and you could spend your dam money there.

We saw the turbines which create a lot of dam electricity for the Southwest United States. We bought a pretzel as our dam snack and ate it while sitting on the dam picnic table bench. Then we got on the dam bus and went back to Vegas.

On our way back, our bus driver/tour guide still had something in his teeth, but he was still able to show us about where he thought Celine Dion might possible live. He did show us Wayne Newton’s house. Of course, it was the house that is being foreclosed on.