Wednesday was our last day of vacation. For breakfast we headed to visit with Elisabeth’s friends George and Rita, who we hadn’t been able to see earlier.
Elisabeth with George and Rita.
Fortunately, since our flight didn’t leave until 8:30 pm MDT we had quite a bit of the day to do some last minute touring before heading to the airport. It’s about two hours from St. George down to Las Vegas along I-15. Along the way the highway gets pretty lonely. There are plenty of places where you can see for miles in every direction without any buildings in sight.
The Virgin River Gorge is only a few minutes south of St. George along I-15. The interstate winds through the gorge following the river. It’s a pretty impressive view.
Heading down into the Gorge.
Inside the Gorge we could see what was left of one of the wildfires from the storm Monday night.
After heading through the desert we drove through Las Vegas and headed to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam to the south. I had never been to Hoover Dam before, but unfortunately we didn’t have time to see a whole lot of it, but we did take some pictures. The water in Lake Mead and next to the dam was beautiful.
Lake Mead is a beautiful blue heading down the mountain to the dam.
The water on the “upriver” side of the dam is an incredible deep blue.
The best view we could get of the “downriver” side of the dam was actually from the bluff high above.
We left Hoover Dam and headed back to airport to drop off our car. We made it through security pretty quickly, so we had quite a while to wait until our flight left. We finally took off about 9 pm local, and headed for Denver. Unfortunately our layover in Denver in the middle of the night, was pretty dead. We were both starving, but there were no restaurants open in our terminal. Our flight from Denver to Indianapolis was pretty eventful. A strong storm front was blowing across central Indiana, and our plane plowed straight through it. Needless to say, it was a hair-raising ride. After we finally cleared the storm our flight officer came over the intercom and apologized. Apparently he wasn’t expecting quite as much turbulence.
After we landed it didn’t take long to get our luggage and have breakfast. We were both exhausted; we obviously didn’t get much sleep on the flight back. My sister Stephanie came to pick us up, and we headed back to Anderson through the storm we had just flown through. We arrived back home by 8 am. Fortunately neither of us had to work that day so we ended up sleeping most of the day and getting up late in the afternoon.
It was a great vacation! It seems like yesterday that we were there, and we’re both going to miss it. We are definitely refreshed, and ready to get back to our life here in Indiana.