Las Vegas diary - part three

Monday started a little gingerly, on account of our hangovers, but it didn't dent our spirits. The main part of the day was spent at Hoover Dam. It's less than an hour away from Vegas, but for some reason is way hotter. It was 110 degrees when we went there, which will get you in the end. It's an amazing structure, absolutely huge, and behind the dam is stored up a lot of water in the world's largest man-made reservoir.

We actually went on the organised tour, which was pretty interesting, and went inside the workings of the Dam, to see the generator farm. The Dam cost the US taxpayer nothing, because since its construction finished in 1935, the electricity generated has been sold on to recoup the costs.

The story of the construction is amazing; they had to redirect the Colorado river to build it - no small feat in itself; this was done by boring 4 tunnels into the solid rock, each 3/4 mile long, and encased in 3-feet thick solid concrete. In fact, there's enough concrete in the dam to cover 18.5 million acres of land a foot thick. Now that's a lot of concrete.

We left there to go over the Arizona border, just to get a couple of pictures, then drove back to Vegas. There we picked up Tori (pictured), and went looking for some childish fun. We settled on the arcade at the New York New York casino, and played all sorts of games. I managed to win a Bart Simpson toy for Tori, and we managed to get a few things out of those claw games. You know, the ones where you position a really weak claw over a collection of fairly undesirable toys, and when you press the button, the claw drops to pick up the toy, and then invariably drops the toy itself. It became a bit of a challenge to our manhood, so we wouldn't leave a machine until we'd won a toy. It meant Tori left with quite a few in the end.

After we'd dropped Tori off, we went to Road Runner, and stayed there, playing mini bowling and drinking till 3am.