“Run With the Flow of Traffic!”

The last time I went to Vegas was the last night of my epic cross-country roadtrip. We stayed at the awesomely kitschy Excalibur, dined at the restaurants at the Venetian, and then I treated everyone to table service at the outdoor nightclub Pure at Caesar’s Palace (joke’s on me – I thought I was being paid for these tough weeks of teacher boot camp. But I’m not – womp, womp). The night ended filled with drama and misery, so when I drove from Vegas to Phoenix, I certainly left Sin City with bittersweet memories.

And then I got my infamous speeding ticket in Yarnell, Arizona – really wasn’t a good 24 hours for me.

So now I’m headed back to Vegas with some of my TFAvorites for the 4th of July weekend, and we headed back over the same roads that I took to come to Phoenix about a month ago, passing by mile marker 191 (I think that’s what it was) where I had my encounter with Mr. Teacher-Cop.

But maybe the ride to Vegas can never be perfect, because we are stuck in hours of traffic on the Arizona side of the Hoover Dam. An aside: the Hoover Dam is amazing. It’s massive, a real engineering masterpiece, and the waters of Lake Mead behind it are so perfectly blue you think you’re upside down and staring into the sky as you peer down into the depths of the canyon gorged millions of years ago by the mighty Colorado River. I’m kind of glad, actually, that the traffic is so bad, because we’ve got a great look at the Dam and I got to take a picture of it this time, which I didn’t last time.

The traffic also made the “Be Prepared to Stop” sign along US 93 seem somewhat ironic; we had been stopped for about fifty minutes before that point, so that gave us a all a big laugh.

But the downside of this traffic is that a) we’ll get to Vegas WAY behind schedule and b) if the car is stalled because of the traffic in 104 degree weather (it’s kind of a chilly day here), the air conditioning fails. I’ve got this computer on my lap, and I’m wearing a swimsuit, and there is a nice laptop-sized sweat stain on my thighs. It’s that hot.

peace and love from lake mead,

pb