After a great nights sleep in this amazing campground, (Willow Springs) we took advantage of the amazing shower facilities (9/10) before prepping for the road.
Our first stop was of course Hoover Dam. It was just 20 minutes from the campground and we arrived at about 10:30am. It was relatively quiet but I’d still recommend getting there earlier than we did in order to see everything you want.
We took the shorter Power Plant tour as we still had a fair drive ahead of us. The tour was very good and we got to see the inside of one of the turbine rooms at the bottom of the dam.
There are tonnes of statistics about this dam that I won’t try to bore you with as others elsewhere online can share those better than I can. I will just say that the entire site is quite an engineering marvel given that it was built in the 1930’s and has been updated consistently since, including the construction of a new roadway bridge over the canyon which avoids having all highway traffic drive across the dam. We highly recommend visiting the Hoover Dam if you’re ever in this area, we’ll be back to take the longer Dam Tour the next time.
We left Hoover Dam at about 12:45pm and headed towards Las Vegas, NV. The drive was only about 45min and we headed to the ‘strip’.
We had no intentions of staying (at one point in our planning we had thought of camping near the strip but dropped that idea). Instead we were just going to drive down ‘the strip’ and take in the sights, sounds and aromas of Sin City. Barb took pictures and I concentrated on traffic and traffic signals. It took over half an hour to drive to the North end and back onto the interstate where we headed South on I-15 towards California.
The following are a few pictures from Las Vegas captured on our drive-through. We have plans to fly back to LV in the future and take in the city and the entertainment without worrying about our van and belongings.
We stopped in Primm, NV to fill up with non-California priced fuel, or so we thought. Yours truly pulled the boneheaded move of the day by accidentally pressing the ‘Supreme’ button on the gas pump and paid $6.029/US gallon. Until today we’d been paying less than $4/US gallon. Ouch.
Crossing into California we drive along I-15 to Barstow where we exited and head South for about 20 miles to a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) campground. Sawtooth Canyon has no services and so you need to be self-sufficient while staying there. This includes packing out all garbage. Camping is free but there are only 13 sites available on a first-come first-served basis. We were lucky and got a fairly level site next to a large rock outcropping in the middle of the campground. So far it is VERY QUIET and relaxing. We might even stay here for a couple of nights.
Looking forward to watching the stars tonight.
