Homer Vs. Kidd

We arrived in Vegas very early (2 am) wednesday morning, got a few hours of sleep and made our way across the desert to the Hoover Dam.

This enormous structure provides most of the power and water to Las Vegas and much of Southern California. It is just freakin huge. The place is crawling with security and tourists, and the walls are adorned with little plaques that have fun little hoover dam facts. Every stat that I could see was handily converted into some sort of football field based number (for example, water volume at the dam is measured in acre-feet, which is the amount of water is takes to fill the area of one football field with one foot of water, approx). Because as an American, clearly if my units are not in terms of football fields or space shuttles they just make no sense to me. Still trying to convert coulombs and dynes into football fields with little success.

The dam from the Lake Mead side. The lake is apparently suffering from a number of years of drought, and is down like 7/30ths of the length of a football field. We left the dam early, not anticipating the relentless desert sun. A quick drive back to vegas and we were at the pool (a pleasant 387.25 football field-sized drive).