Celebrating at Hoover Dam

Since Allconnect let Burke come home yesterday and with the new job starting today, we decided to celebrate and take an impromptu trip to Las Vegas.  We have had a gift card for a movie theater in Vegas for over a year now and decided it was time to use it.  We left in the afternoon and first drove to Hoover Dam as I have never been there before and Burke hadn't been since they started construction on the memorial sky bridge.  We were both awed when we saw this engineering marvel. 

No, silly, not my hottie husband, the overpass bridge!  I went to this website (http://scienceray.com/technology/engineering/the-incredible-hoover-dam-bypass-bridge-under-construction/3/) for the following pictures to try and show you how incredible this bridge really is.  Here are some photos of the construction process and a lovely aerial view of the entire dam. 

We walked a nice distance from the car to check it out and despite the overcast sky and strong wind, my preggo hands and feet were swelling from the heat!  It was a very cool sight, although being on top of the dam made Burke and I nervous as we're both incredibly afraid of heights.  Here is the Colorado Riving flowing in from Lake Mead, the wall of the dam and the river on the opposite side of the dam.

I had to laugh at all the people cracking themselves up with dam jokes: "Look at the dam wall! Do you think there are dam fish down there?  I think this dam thing is pretty impressive."  Very clever.

At this point I was pretty ravenous, so we drove back towards the city where we had a fancy Las Vegas lunch at Panda Express before driving to the movie theater.  The theater happened to be in a casino, which I didn't like one bit with all the second-hand smoke and loud games.  I was disgusted by the huge amounts of people glued to their gambling at 5 o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon - most of them still there when we got out of our movie two hours later.  What a waste of a life!  We ended up seeing "The Adjustment Bureau" after reading about it in my Dad's letter this week.  It started out really good and let's admit it - I just love both Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.  However, the last 20-30 minutes got pretty lame and as we discussed the movie on the way home I was annoyed with all the plot details that were left hanging.  Regardless of my critiquing, it presented an interesting point of view on free will and the importance of agency.  

We thought about driving through the strip after the film, but decided we could live without all the raunchy images and instead had a pleasant drive home visiting and listening to music.  I also started going through a name book, reading out loud the weirdest names or the ones that I thought had potential.  Burke found something to not like about just about every last one of them!  However, we both paused on the name Daphnee and just might add it to the list.  Overall, a very pleasant and spur of the moment day spent with my best friend!