Two Plus a Handful: Nomad UT/LV Trip, Day 5: St. George & Hoover Dam

Our last day in St. George started out with goodbyes to our friends.

{Sarah and I}

{Irene, Three, Two, Five, me, Four, One}

By the way, Irene looks *exactly* the same as she did 15 years ago.

Our plan for the day was to head straight out to the Hoover Dam, but then I remembered that I had intended to take the kids to the visitor's center at the St. George Temple. And then I realized that Brigham Young's winter home was there and we had just seen his house (The Beehive House) in Salt Lake City in June. So that fit in as something to see and I love helping the kids to make connections in learning.

And so we went to the temple.

{Three, One, Two, Four, Five}

At the temple doors. In the shade. Avoiding the glaring sun.

{Three, Two, Five, One, Four}

Silly face pictures always make smiling pictures easier.

{Two, Four, Three, One, Five}

Two struggles to keep her eyes open when facing the sun, so I've told her she can just keep them closed.

We toured the Winter Home and I got really excited about the pomegranate trees in the backyard.

Historians believe this massive tree to be original to the time period of the 1850s when the house was built.

The parlor. "Mom, what's a parlor?" "It's a fancy word for 'living room,' you know, like Fancy Nancy would say." The tour guide and other tourists were in awe that I came up with that explanation for my kids. It's no big deal when you understand their culture and can speak their language.

Fabulous fireplace, eh? It's pine painted to look like marble. Pine is the main building material they had in St. George back in the 1850s, but the settlers wanted to feel fancier. So they painted their "cheap" wood to look like more.

Check out this box grand piano!! This grand piano could fit in a wagon (legs removed) so that it could be transported from Salt Lake City three hundred miles south to St. George.

Crappy picture, but again, a pine fireplace mantle painted to look like marble.

A "microwave plate." Pour hot water in the spout to fill the well underneath and it keeps the food warm. I guess this was needed often in the St. George heat?

So we're in Brigham Young's bedroom and another tourist asked what in here was original to the home. The cane.

We had a little bit of a rough time with another tourist in our group. She was a five-year-old girl we met out on the porch and Three became friends with her. But then she was talking through everything, telling Three not to listen to the tour guide, getting in Five's face telling him not to look at anything, all while grabbing and clinging to my kids and pulling them around. I pulled her off them several times, asked her to stop talking because we were there to learn, and tried to keep my kids away from her, and her mother did nothing the whole time and then even disappeared! So then in the bedroom up above, I lost it. I grabbed her by the arm, pried her off Five, and got right in her face and told her evenly to never touch my kids again. Her aunt took her out right after that and they left the tour. I was just so pissed off, though.

Entry

{Three, One, Four, Two, Five}

The house, in original colors.

After the Winter Home, we hit a thrift store so I could buy a water bottle to replace the one I forgot at the Bryce Canyon visitor's center. You just don't go driving through the desert without a water bottle, ya know? We grabbed some lunch and hit the road. Two was so excited that we drove through Arizona, even if it was only about 20 miles.

It was a gorgeous canyon to drive through!

Lake Mead

Heading toward the Dam.

1930s font

This place is insanely hot and incredibly beautiful. The temperature was 109 when we were there on September 21, but had been 125 previous week.

Winged Figures of the Republic

"They died to make the desert bloom."

The Hoover Dam is an amazing engineering feat that required moving the Colorado River from its course, a step for construction that took longer than the construction itself. The Dam was built by crews of men working around the clock in shifts, taking only two days off a year (Christmas and Independence Day), in the scorching desert heat with no natural shade. The dam was completed in just one week shy of 2 years. It absolutely blows my mind. The official death toll is 112 men, but that only counts the men who actually died on site. That does not count the men who were injured or fell sick and were moved off-site and later died at home or in a hospital. They were not counted in the death toll and their families were not compensated by Six Companies, either.

The Pat Tillman-And Somebody Else Important To Nevada Memorial Bypass Bridge. Yeah, I was lazy on that one and decided not to look it up for you. Until this bridge was built, locals had to drive across the dam to get through to Arizona (or vice versa) which is insane because of the tourist traffic along with the security check points.

Loads of international tourists here, too. I asked someone to take our picture and they didn't understand me. Hooray for charades!

{Me, Four, Two, Five, One, Three}

Looking down at one of the intake towers.

Lake Mead. The white line shows where the water level used to be.

After roasting in the heat, we went inside for a tour. There are two tours: the Dam tour and the power plant tour. I honestly cannot remember which one we did. But there we were in line, waiting to enter the theater to watch the video, and I decided I'd better change Five's diaper. So I told the other kids, and I ran off with Five. Came back less than 2 minutes later and the tour guide was so impressed with how well-behaved my kids were in my absence. That they just hung out and acted like normal, responsible human beings and didn't turn to savage beasts. Yeah, I know. That's why I can leave them. Thanks for appreciating them and complimenting me, though.

We descended deep into the ground, ears popping on the way. This is a picture of what the dam infrastructure looks like. The brown pipelines on the top and bottom of the image are the pipes that diverted the river. They're now used as walkways, and we were standing in the top one when I took this picture.