October 9: Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon West and Las Vegas Helicopter Tour

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Day 10: We took US 93 north from Kingman towards Vegas, and crossed back over the Colorado at Hoover Dam. Dawn and I had reservations for the hard hat tour, while Cheryl and Mary took the regular tour. They had said the hard hat tour was strenuous but compared to all the walking around we did at the Grand Canyon, it turned out to be one of the least strenuous things that we did.

Then we continued on to Vegas, drove down the strip. We checked into Circus Circus and had a quick look around, then caught our shuttle to the airport for our helicopter ride.

The helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon was definitely the highlight of the entire vacation. Our pilot, Lee Smith, was great. He was very entertaining and did a lot of fun maneuvers. Like he took aim at a 737 that was landing and made this machine gun noise as he followed it around. On the way back he did some sharp dives as we dropped over some ridges, and he did some low level flying while following this ground trail that made sharp turns back and forth.

We spent about 35 minutes on the ground. It was great to explore, and we found a place where we could get down to the river and I dipped my fingers in the Colorado. Our timing was perfect as we had taken the 4:30 flight. It was just starting to get dark as we took off from the Canyon, and we saw the lights of Vegas come on. Lee took us down over the strip at night.

After we landed and got back to the hotel we drove down the strip a little to see the sights. The winds were starting to pick up but we were lucky and they staged the pirate battle in front of Treasure Island. Then we took the monorail over to Mirage and saw the volcano erupt. That was about it for the day, though, as everyone was worn out from all the excitement, and my camera batteries had long since run out.