Our time in Lake Havasu has come to a close, and it's time for a mad dash home. It's about 1300 miles, and around 24 hours of driving time through some miserable, desolate areas, but we're ready. The last 5 and a half weeks have prepared us for this. We've got this! Only California, Nevada, and Orgeon are left to go.
Our first stop was the Hoover Dam, and our GPS routed us through Kingman. Luckily, I noticed before we got very far or we would have missed California. We rerouted, drove over the river, and into California! 46 down, 2 to go. We drove up to the inspection station, and I was prepared for a number of questions, a "Where are you coming from?" at a minimum, but we got nothing - just waved on through. We drove through the outskirts of Needles, through Searchlight, and on to Hoover Dam.
We opted for the guided tour through some of the tunnels, saw the generators on the Nevada side, and then went to the observation deck. There was a small museum as well, talking about all the men (21,000!) who helped build the dam, some of the technological innovations that helped pave the way for it, and more. It was pretty interesting, and there was a little hand-crank generator that the kids liked using to light up a small LED. However, the amount of "dam" jokes was a bit excessive.
Up next, we drove through Vegas (stopping for one last In-N-Out stop, of course) and about 20 minutes outside the city to the site of 7 Magic Mountains. This is something that's been on "K"'s must-see list for a few years, so she was happy we were able to make it! There were some thunderstorms looming quite close to the monument, with sprinkles, blowing dust, and lots of lightning. It was hard not to get covered in dirt. The monument itself is a set of 7 stacks of brightly painted rocks. According to the artist, it "the meeting of artificial and natural, the passing highway traffic, and the surrounding mountains and lakes" but honestly I don't see it. I often don't "understand" art, though, so I just viewed it as another of the weird curiosities we've encountered over the last week or so.
The rest of the day, we were just in full-on driving mode. With the length of our remaining mileage being split across 3 days, so we still had several hundred miles to go today. One of the things that I think has saved our bacon on this trip was a little in-car entertainment center that I worked on setting up off and on over the last year. I got a small "micro computer" and a wireless router, and one of the guys from work helped come up with a plan for powering it (thanks Andy!), and I loaded it with some kids movies that I pulled from our collection and digitized. This essentially put together a little in-car Netflix with nothing but kids movies. That, paired with an iPad and a removable iPad holder that mounts on the back of a headrest, we had the perfect thing to keep the kids quiet and happy for about an hour and a half when we decided we needed a change. We only watched probably around 15 movies, but it was exactly what we needed. Was it overkill? Yes. Could I have just put the movies on the iPad and removed the extra complications? Also yes. Am I glad I did it the way I did? Yes!
Our final destination for today was Ely (pronounced e-lee), Nevada. We were about 20 minutes away from our hotel when we passed out some gogurts for the kids to eat. Apparently "T" had an issue tearing his open and he asked "B" for help. Her response was simply "no". Rather than trying to get help from someone more willing (like his parents), he tried a different approach and simply squeezed the tube, trying to get it open. The end result was a little "pop" and some loud yelling from the back row who were now all covered in yogurt. It was on the roof of the car, in people, in hair, all over car seats. Just exactly what we wanted, right before we made it to the hotel for the night!