Zion/ Vegas Trip Day 10: Hoover Dam, Pinball Hall of Fame and HOME

Sunday, June 28, 2026

Well, we got home a few days ago and it’s been the usual chaos 🤪, so sorry for delay in my final post. (I am sure you all needed a break from me in your feed, anyway.)

Our flight home Sunday night was LATE. Like, 11:45 p.m. late! Ugh. For whatever reason, the flight options were crappy on that date, and the earlier flights bumped the prices by several hundred or more dollars per ticket (x6…), so…. we sucked it up and took the red eye.

The perk= a nice slow morning. We had one last pool morning, then packing before our late 11 am check out.

I mentioned before that we had shifted our Hoover Dam plans to Sunday. This made SO much sense, and I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of it sooner!

Drove out of Vegas and headed toward Hoover Dam (only about ~45 minutes from Vegas). We stopped at another In-N-Out Burger for lunch. 😉

Arriving to Lake Mead area. It was such a pretty drive!!

Upon arrival, first stop was a walk way (uphill, in the sun…) to the Memorial Bridge. It gives AMAZING views of Hoover Dam!

The Hoover Dam is significant for various reasons, among those that it’s an engineering marvel (built from 1931-1936), it played an extremely important role in providing much needed water and electricity to the Southwest, it transformed the region economically, it was a symbol of resilience during the Great Depression, and it helped tame the Colorado River.

Up close view. For the 4th of July holiday, they had hung a HUGE flag that was almost the entire height of the dam, but due to some very high winds this past week, they had to remove it. They placed smaller flags around instead.

Pic from the internet- this is what they had going on! Would have been cool/ unique to see (but, we wouldn’t have been there at night, anyway).

After viewing from the bridge, parked in the ramp and walked onto the dam itself.

Now looking back at the bridge!

Asher started a little movement when he tried something he saw on TikTok about Hoover Dam. Due to the airflow up the dam, if you pour a bottle of water over the edge, instead of the water falling down, the water droplets fly back up in the air, as if it were raining like, in reverse! It’s the weirdest thing!! Multiple groups saw him doing it and then all these people started trying it themselves and taking pictures and videos. Haha.

Lake Mead, looking to the opposite side from top of the dam:

It was HOT so eventually we moved into the gift shop, and then made our way to the visitor center. We opted to do the Power Plant tour, which is the shorter and more general of the two tours they offer. (The other one apparently is more detailed and more suited for people with an engineering background, which is not most of us.)

I think the boys would have been okay just looking at the dam from outside and calling it a day, but no one asked them their opinion. 😜

There was a nice 10 minute video, well done, that explained the history.

Then, a small group guided tour for 30 minutes. Short and sweet! The length felt just right to me, though the guide was a little abrupt and talked really fast.

Underground scenes:

Turbine room:

Another viewing deck from on the tour:

At the end we toured their recently refurbished visitor center which was GREAT. I have been in a lot of Visitor Centers in my day, and this was one of the best. Beautiful, new, interactive, engaging, and the info snippets were all short and readable.

My mom took this picture at the end, and it just made me laugh. 😆 We look funny! (I was looking up how long it would take to get to Boulder City from Hoover Dam- pretty sure the others were just looking at nonsense, and my dad was clearly questioning why on earth my mom was taking this rando picture in the first place. 😅)

It was like 4 p.m. at this point. Hmm, still almost 8 hours until our flight. lol.

We drove the ~15 minutes to Boulder City to see what that looked like. This was the town that was essentially established to house all the thousands of workers that built the dam way back in the 1930s!

It was a nice town, very cute, clean. We spotted a brewery and decided to stop off for a cool treat/ drink/ snack. We were still pretty full from our In-N-Out.

Some of us had a beer, boys had lemonade, I think Ethan got some pretzel bites, my parents had chips and salsa with beer cheese, and Ivan and I split this yummy caramel apple cake with ice cream.

It was a nice way to pass some time and relax (and COOL OFF).

Then we drove the ~35-40 minutes back to Las Vegas. I had one more stop planned, that I’d intentionally saved for Sunday.

The Pinball Hall of Fame!! Haha. My dad’s step-cousin had recommended this to us and it’s super close to the airport, so it worked out perfectly.

Basically it’s a warehouse type building FULL of pinball machines. Some are very old and retro- there’s a museum area (the “hall of fame”). There are also many, many new, modern games, too.

Admission is free and you only pay for the games you play, in coins. The older ones can be as low as 25 cents and the newer ones range from 50 cents to $1 per game.

Some of the retro/ older ones that we could play:

These are some REALLY old ones that were on display only:

This was a really fun stop! Kind of the perfect activity for this evening. Low key, not crowded, no walking required (lol- we were walked out by this point).

We all joined in, even my mom and dad. (My mom said she used to play pinball all the time at the bowling alley in the 1950s.).

One of the newer fancy ones:

There were a handful of other games, too- this old fashioned “bike racing” game was a riot. I did it too- so fun. You actually pedal. I’d never seen one like this before.

We stayed there until ~8:15, when it was finally time that we could head toward the airport. Dropped the rental car, etc. and took the shuttle to the airport.

And with that, our trip came to an end!! It was a long night with the 11:45 flight and then a 3 hour layover in Dallas (at like 4:15 am…). We didn’t get back to Madison until ~10:30 a.m. on Monday morning. Oof. Not the most fun end to the trip, but we all survived and it really wasn’t that bad. (Everyone slept a bunch, miraculously.)

The worst part was that Ivan and I both showered and then he headed off to work and I headed down to my office by noon or so! 😩 Fortunately I had slept quite a bit on the planes so I didn’t feel terrible. AND I didn’t have any meetings Monday afternoon, so I was able to mostly have a catch up day.

As might be expected, this week has felt a little wonky with no buffer of any kind, but I was running low on vacation days, so…. 🤷‍♀️ It’s been fine though.

We have one more trip coming up (Panama City Beach, Florida, in August with my sister + fam!!), and then we have nothing else on the books for the foreseeable future!! So my PTO (and travel fund) should have a long time to reaccumulate. lol.

In closing, this Zion/ Vegas combo trip was a total blast. Seriously, I loved it!! It was a breath of fresh air, too, after a bunch of international trips lately, to just have such an EASY trip, logistically. Easy to navigate, everything in English and dollars, driving on the right side (ha), nothing too complicated.

If you’ve never been to Utah or the Southwest, put it high on your list of places to go!! It’s a fabulous destination.

As always, thanks for following along! 😊😊😊😊