We awoke earlier this morning, in southern Nevada on the shores of Lake Mead. Shay went for a snorkel in the lake, and then we headed 5 miles down the road to Hoover Dam. Hoover is enormous, of course, and very impressive. Nevertheless I also found it somewhat disturbing. Partly it’s that after having seen Las Vegas, I felt uneasy in the human ability to modify nature, rather than live within its limitations.

The river canyon that Hoover Dam flooded was probably spectacular, but it’s gone now and is slowly silting up. Meanwhile the water and power supplied by Hoover Dam allows us to build monstrosities like Las Vegas. After a half-hour-long tour of the innards of the dam, we continued south on Route 93 to Kingsman, and then turned east on Highway 40. The country around us changed from dry scrub to lush pine forest to dry scrub again.

We climbed up to the Kaibab plateau (the one cut by the Grand Canyon), and drove on past Petrified Forest and Meteor Crater national monuments. We had dinner at a truck stop operated by the Navajo Nation, and then drove on.

Tonight we’re in Thoreau, New Mexico, staying at the “St. Boniface Indian Mission RV Park.” A train goes by every half hour or so, and the scream of tires on the nearby I-40 is fairly loud, but it’s a place where we can shower in the morning. It’s currently 12:30 in the morning and Jeanne and Shay are completely reorganizing the contents of their bus. I’m sitting here writing this dispatch. After queuing this up, I’ll play a computer game for a short while, and then sleep. Tomorrow we continue to Amarillo.

Ron