After Monday's warm-up and the torture of staying home with the kids all day yesterday, I was ready for today's adventure, even though it was far more adventurous than I have ever in my life been with kids. I got up, got myself and everyone else dressed, grabbed ALL THE FOOD, and left without thinking too much about it. I'm actually pretty proud of myself.
We started the day off by heading west. Something you may or may not know about me is that I am a collector of states. I reached my goal of visiting all 50 states by the time I was 30, and now I'm working on collecting them for my children. (Jackson will have 31 when this is all over!) My boys don't usually have the latest and greatest, but traveling and showing them their world is important to us, so they can say they've been to a lot of different places. So California needed to be collected. It was right there, a mere hour away. How could we not? So we drove down I-40 and just across the border to Needles, CA. Funny thing about Needles is that it is the biggest place (only place?) for miles around. And yet there is NOTHING to do. You'd think the tourism people would try to capitalize on that. I went so far as to find the visitor's center for an idea of something to do with the kids, and they gave me a "beats me" kind of shrug and sent me to a playground in the local state park. But playgrounds are fun, and rivers are better, so we made do. 
Next, we headed north to Nevada. Hoover Dam or bust! The Nevada desert is beautiful, especially in the rain. Luckily, it was not raining at our destination. However, I desperately missed Mike. Beyond the normal missing of my husband, the Hoover Dam was a place I was not prepared for. I knew there would be tourists, but I was not prepared for the THRONGS of tourists invading one little dam. There were people EVERYWHERE, and driving was nearly impossible. On top of that, parking was a nightmare. Parallel parking is not my gift. I can teach other people to do it over the phone, but I have not successfully managed to do it myself since my driver's test more than half a lifetime ago. (I pretty much epitomize "Those you can't...") The lots were full, but parallel parking spots along the roadway were abundant. Unfortunately, I had to wait for one you could drive into and then just bitchily bully my way into it. It wasn't pretty. And trying to keep an eye on all three boys in all those crowds was also a feat unto itself. I'm already scarred from having lost Tucker at EPCOT. I wasn't about to do it again! In the end, it all worked out. The three of them held each other's hands and only took out a few passersby with their pulling and swinging antics. It could have been worse. The dam itself was very impressive. I wish I could tell you more about it, but there was no time to read informational signs. As you can see, the boys were not super-impressed, but we bought cacti and suckers in the gift shop, and someone offered them a Hoover Dam rock, whatever that is, so all was not lost, except of course, for us trying to get back to our car. That's the other thing Mike is usually in charge of: finding our car at the end of our adventures.After leaving the Hoover Dam, we stopped at Lake Mead National Recreational Area. I told the park ranger that we had about 90 minutes before we had to leave, and he suggested we just leave right then and there because there wasn't enough time to do anything, so that was super helpful (it was a day of super helpful tourism information). So, instead, we found a lovely little beach and completed our Junior Ranger booklets until it was time to go pick up NONA! You read that right! Nona is joining us on our epic Rock Tour! My poor mother. All she wants to do is go see LOVE, that Cirque du Soleil Beatles show in Vegas. She even asked the universe to get someone to invite her out there because my Dad is decidedly anti-Vegas. And it worked! We invited her to Arizona to help me drive this ship of fools home, and Las Vegas is the closest airport, but there is just no time for a Cirque du Soleil show in the schedule. Sorry, Nona! Had Mike been with us, we might have at least driven by it. But the airport was about all the city driving I could handle, so we didn't even do that. Jack wanted to drive down The Strip, but there were just too many cars and lights for me. We found some dinner at an Applebees along our route, and then headed back to Kingman in the dark. But first, we stopped at Walmart and bought a car top carrier, because there is just no other way to get all our stuff home otherwise. I'm not even sure how we made it out here.
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