Our 1st week in Las Vegas, done and dusted!

We are still getting used to the warm temperatures here …. OK I am! Colin seems to be fairing better than me! Anyways, apart from taking long hikes, we are really not too affected by the very hot days. I am not sweating myself skinny – which would have been a bonus … maybe the next four weeks will be in my favour.

We visited the Carroll Shelby Showroom / Workshop and enjoyed their commentary. While I appreciate the nice cars, I really enjoyed the history and knowledge of our guide.

There were so many funny little quirks, but I will only share a couple with you [he – Carroll Shelby]:

1. he made overalls cool !!
2. he was a WWII flight instructor
3. he was a chicken farmer
4. he invented the Cobra in his dream
5. he named GT350 because it was 350 feet from the office to the workshop
6. And the GT40 was 40 inches tall

We signed the famous graffiti wall, Colin bought a shirt and I bought a postcard or too! (Note: Wendy – couldn’t help myself! ). Colin took a picture outside the museum with his Petrolhead Magazine, and we sent it to them to consider for their next publication.

We signed this wall…

We have been on another bike ride exploring the neighbourhood – We only did 5km but at 32 degrees at 8am in the morning, that was enough for me!

We did a Sunday drive up into the hills and explored the dead posh houses from afar. While we are staying in a lovely community, this was pretty impressive with its gated entrances with waterfalls – hmmmmm, was there a drought here?!

Not sure about living in the hills though!

The Hoover Dam was on our to-do list so we headed over there on Monday – it was 43 degrees. What a fantastic tour it was. Loved walking down/out to the ventilation grills! Wow! [circled]

Such a cool piece of engineering history, which is still to this day ‘curing’ and providing untold information to engineers.

Fun facts:

1. it sits on the Nevada / Arizona border – we parked in Arizona and walked to Nevada
2. They (5,000 workers) worked 24hrs a day, 363 days a year on shifts and finished the project two years early!
3. A father and son died on on the project. The father was the first fatality and the son was the last!
4. The concrete of the dam was has no reinforcing in it!! (Dave Murray – this fun fact is for you)
5. Despite having a cooling system to speed up the curing of the concrete – it is still curing (they take test bores from time to time)
6. The level of Lake Mead has only dropped in the last twenty years, as there is not enough snow in Colorado – see the ‘tide line’ in my pics – 150 feet lower!
7. There is no-one buried in the dam, or the lake – 96 men died.
8. The highest paid workers were the digger operators (Daniel – this fun fact in for you)
9. And finally – it should last about 10,000 years – it will be among the longest standing human structures.

We have been to ‘The Mob’ museum – we figured that because we are here for 5 weeks, that made us locals! After a bit of sweet-talking and showing our 10 year US Visa, we got in for the locals price yahaaaaaay – $10 bucks cheaper! The building was refurbished from the Federal Court House and Post Office and was the tallest building in Las Vegas when it was built.

Like my prison shirt 🙂

It was a great museum to preserve the history of the prohibition, the Mob, and how the FBI was developed. It was a pretty brutal time … nothing has changed much with the underworld! Still good against bad!! We spent 3hrs here and finished with a taste of moonshine.

We decided that we would try and find our way back to Henderson, without the GPS! We did a pretty good job, but clearly aren’t local enough yet 🙂