Las Vegas, Monday - Tuesday 24th - 25th August

I tried to go for a walk in the afternoon after arriving in town but it was just too hot so it was just a few hundred metres down the road and back to the comfort of the air conditioning in the hotel - casino.

I tried the pool in the hotel which boasts an 8,000 foot river slide but the whole pool area was noisy and crowded with masses of people so I went back to the room. It was after 6pm that I ventured out again but it was still too hot so it was a short walk.

Tuesday morning I was up early for a tour of local sights but first had to get out of town down the strip.

 My tour bus had a video presentation to tell us punters about the Hoover Dam, how it was conceived, built and of course loads of facts about the amount of concrete poured.

 I missed out on a tour of the Glen Canyon Dam at Page as we wanted to set up camp and go swimming in Lake Powell before seeing Antelope Slot Canyon but this dam is on a grander scale making the largest man made lake on the continent. The depth of the reservoir is over 500 feet and the dam base sits over 130 feet below that on bed rock.

 The main road used to cross the dam itself until 9/11 when security was tightened and a new bridge was built to take traffic to bypass the dam.

 The visitor centre plus the inevitable gift shops and cafes seen from the top of the dam.

 A view up Lake Mead being the reservoir created by the dam which stretches a hundred miles up river flooding Boulder Canyon,

 A monument to the 98 people killed on site during the construction of the dam. Actually 112 people were killed but those that died of their injuries in hospital were recorded as having died in Boulder City and not on site.

 The tour took us inside the dam structures to see some of the tunnels inside the canyon rock and the concrete dam.

 Next it was a short drive from the dam to the port and embarkation onto a stern wheeler for a cruise including lunch on the lake itself.

It had been advertised as a trip on a stern wheeler. Having seen restored sternwheelers such as the SS Klondike and SS Keno in Yukon, plus the derelict Norcom at Hootalinqua I was hoping for something similar. However this was a modern ship built to look like a sternwheeler. Most importantly it had twin propellers for propulsion and the big paddle at the back was just for show.

It made a journey across the lake to the upstream side of the dam and back to port with an informative running commentary on the history of the river, the dam and how it affected development of the area.

On the way back to Vegas we stopped at a chocolate factory. The M is for Mars and it was set up after Forrest Mars had already made a billion dollars from his chocolate bars as a gourmet chocolate factory. He planned to live above the factory as a tax dodge but his wife insisted on having a garden and hence the strange mix of a chocolate factory and a botanical garden of cacti (that is the correct plural of cactus as it stems from Latin...dictionaries also quote cactuses but these tend to be American versions of 'English' but they don't know any better).

 It also had a shop selling every possible colour of Smarties or M&Ms as they are called now after a rebranding to become a global brand. The M stands for Forrest Mars who invented the Smartie and his business partner R Bruce Murrie son of the president of the Hershey company.