1475 pictures later...

The rest of my southwestern expedition was good. After sleeping like rocks, we woke up and drove west on I-40 through forests, mountains and fields, with our first stop at Dunkin Donuts in Kingman, AZ.There are not many Dunkin Donuts in Arizona, in fact, Dunkin Donuts and Google were both incredibly confused about this one existing at all. If we hadn't seen the sign on the highway, we wouldn't have known.

We drove back down through the mountains to the desert, passing by the occasional trailer or shack on our way to Hoover Dam. Fascinating landscape. So apparently there is this history of forestry and mining in the region, but I don't understand why someone would just build a tiny house in the middle of the desert with nothing and no one for many miles. I mean, I saw outhouses. Legit outhouses. And not all of these places were connected to the power lines. Very interesting.

Lots of cactus.

We arrived at Hoover Dam in the middle of the day, and were very disappointed at how much money we were fooled into spending just to see the thing up close. We paid for parking-- ok, reasonable. But then we were charged to enter the visitor center, with no real clue that you didn't have to go through there just to visit the dam. We just wanted to walk across the damn dam. It was impressive though, tons and tons and tons of concrete and so much water backed up behind it. I kind of hate the ecological impact of something like that, but it is kind of impressive. Lake Mead is mind blowingly large.

We drove to Vegas with a stop at Del Taco, which was very tasty. We stayed at Circus Circus-- really nice room for super cheap, probably because they expected us to throw all of our money into their machines. Free parking, too. We took a cab down to the main part of the strip, spending the evening being exhausted by over-stimulation, but it was cool to see the lights and fountains and madness.

I'm home in New Jersey now, and have survived the first day of classes at both William Paterson and Rutgers Brookdale. I'm excited about teaching again but I definitely have my work cut out for me. I have a few small outings planned but will pretty much be staying in New Jersey this semester-- at least, as best I can guess right now. After I left camp last fall, I didn't expect to do much traveling this summer, if any besides the Jr. High Mission trip. Lucky for me, my life is more exciting than that--


From June to August, I visited 16 states (NJ, CA, NV, PA, OH, MI, NY, DE, MD, VA, NC, CT, MA, NH, ME, AZ) and 4 provinces (Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island), took 4 flights (Philadelphia to San Francisco and back, Philadelphia to Las Vegas and back), drove/rode in a car for over 6500 miles. I took 1475 pictures and experienced an infinite number of beautiful and awesome things.

I am pretty fortunate.