Boulder City

Going back a week or so....

left Zion to meet up with Paul Romero and Karen Lundgren in Boulder City Nevada
Tom and Lori had a shoe show in Vegas to attend, so i looked after the kids for a few days
Lake mead (where we camped) was formed by the building of Hoover Dam
and is currently about 20 feet lower than peak levels.

the place is desert and feels barren and so very foreign
hot and dry
The air conditioner actually worked so hard it froze up
and had to be defrosted
Took the kids to the pool,
Went to Bonnie Springs
a re-enactment of an old western town
complete with hangings and gunfights.
Mackenzie was in fine form
taunting the gunslingers to shoot him and then running
behind either myself or his siblings
I took some footage of the gunfight.
Also there was a petting zoo
where we were able to feed birds and turtles

Hoover dam was amazing
the amount of work required to create it
the massive scale
and amount of water it holds back
I crossed several of the aqueducts which stem from it
while heading North through the Californian deserts
water so important
and our next political test
they will be coming for our water
for this dry and thirsty land

every day we would go swimming
either in the pool at Boulder City or in Lake mead
the water levels are so much lower
that the sand dumped in to form a beach
is now 1/2 mile up from the waterline
the bottom is mud and rock

Mackenzie had found an aerobie frisbee on the bottom of the lake
and was quite proud of himself
only to loose his grip on it while swimming and had it disappear again
Some time after that Mackenzie and Jackson
in usual form were alternately fighting/playing and confusing the two
When Max starts screaming
"I lost my shorts, I lost my shorts"
seems Jackson had pulled them off of him
and now they too like the aerobie were gone.
Max was alternately laughing/distressing over this situation
though several butt revealing surface dives documented the level of his concern
we wrapped him in a towel and made it back to the van without incident
Quite a funny time

The next day after a long tour of Hoover
we rolled back in for another swimming session
Emma, having become quite fond of collecting clamshells
was divng again and again for them
the boys were some distance off doing their own diving,
though not for shells, but
for mud with which to assault each other
After many dives
Emma surfaces with a big grin on her face
"I found Mackenzie's shorts" she exclaims
Stunned i stare at the red and white trunks in her hand
and break out laughing
Max hears this and comes to see
before he can get there
we stuff the pockets full of clamshells
and when he arrives tell him that while the shorts were underwater
the clams moved into them
His mouth gapes in astonished wonder at this news
His siblings help him figure it out.

God is so amazing at helping us find things we've lost
Like our childhoods and innocence again

After giving over the shorts Emma dove again
and came up with a dollar bill from the bottom
Truely amazing!

The rewards of persistence