I’m a German teacher outside of Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia–a county that still offers German at all its high schools and just about all its middle schools. This is a good place to be. The famously wealthy Fairfax County, where I live and where my children graduated high school, is letting German die off slowly and quietly in its schools. That’s really shameful, if you think about it. Fairfax considers itself in many respects to be the “home of the Internet.” Network Solutions, which was the sole registrar for all .com, .net, and .org domains through the 1990s, has its headquarters in Herndon, on the northwestern edge of Fairfax County.

German is the second-most frequently used language on the Internet, after English. Fortunately, Loudoun County, home to AOL and Dulles International Airport, is not as parochial as Fairfax, and still offers German widely. This means I am sure to have a job here for a long time.

The downside of this, however, is that I have five, count ‘em, five course preparations this year. Because I am the sole German teacher at a new school, I teach every level of German that is offered by the county: levels one through five (fifth-year being an Advanced Placement course). I know very few other teachers who have this pleasure. Whenever a school has more than one teacher, invariably somebody is doing two or more sections of the same course–two sections of second-year Spanish, for example. That means any given teacher’s five-class teaching load is divided up between, or among, only two or three different courses. But I get one class of each and every level. That’s the situation for most German and Latin teachers around here.

If you’ve taught school before, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I have to do five completely different shows every two days. Teaching is like the most demanding performance anyone ever gave. A teacher on the block schedule has to hold an audience’s attention for 90 minutes. That’s the standard length of a Las Vegas show. The difference between me and a Las Vegas show, however, is that there’s only one of me, while even a “one-man” show in Vegas has a whole crew of people behind it.

Oh–one other difference between me and a Las Vegas show: I get paid a teacher’s salary. And I get three personal leave (i.e., vacation) days during each school year. True, I get the summers “off”–but that means I have free time to take courses, lead student tours to Europe, and write and plan the county curriculum.

I am exhausted right now. That’s why this post is so long. I don’t have the energy to stop typing.

Think I’m going to go home and drink wine and watch the baseball playoffs now. The whole thing starts up again Monday morning, bright and early.

The dam is on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. (We like to tell our friends that we walked to Arizona–across the dam.) It created Lake Mead, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, and it provides irrigation water and electric power to a good portion of the southwestern United States.

The dam is reached by one road and one road only: U.S. Highway 93, which runs through Boulder City, Nevada to the river.

Highway 93 is a two-lane road that goes right over the Hoover Dam. On the advice of the guide books, we got there rather early in the morning. Good thing, too: when we left shortly after noon, the backup on 93 was probably three to four miles long.

To alleviate congestion, a multi-lane bypass bridge is being built over the river, just downstream from the Hoover Dam. This bypass project was originally scheduled to open in 2008, but the collapse of some tower cranes caused the completion to be delayed until 2010.

The bridge infrastructure looks very impressive. The bridge will span the canyon high above the river, as opposed to the current Highway 93, which of course goes across the top of the dam. Here are some of the Nevada-side bridge supports for the Hoover Dam Highway.

We parked our car and walked down toward the dam. It is not that wide, but goes very deep into the canyon. It is a concrete arch-gravity structure.

Looking down into the canyon on the downstream side was rather scary for two people who are mildly afraid of heights. The power plant is at the bottom of the dam. It produces on average more than 4.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year–most of it sent to Southern California. That’s a lot of Hollywood Klieg lights!

On the lake side of the dam are four towers that look like Art Deco sculptures of some kind. They are the intake towers for the hydroelectric plant. They take water from Lake Mead and run it through the turbines at the bottom of the dam to create those 4.5 billion megawatts a year.

You can see from the lighter-colored layer of the canyon walls that the water level in Lake Mead is somewhat lower than its maximum. (This color-leaching reminded me of Red Rock Canyon, actually.) But there are rainy seasons sometimes, and the level of the lake can rise. What happens to extra water when that happens? Well then it goes around the dam to the downstream side via two spillways. These work along with the intake towers to divert excess water downstream. Here is the spillway on the Arizona side.

Several times during our Vegas week we remarked that the city felt like a beach town without the waterfront. So where do Las Vegans go to the beach? Well, they could drive four or five hours to the Pacific Ocean, or they could drive a half hour and get to Lake Mead. The Lake Mead Recreation Area is where Las Vegans go to swim, boat, and generally enjoy the water.

In the places where I grew up, these man-made recreation areas were fairly common. Lake Norman, on the Catawba River north of Charlotte, NC, is the one I know best. Lake Mead, however, is the mother of all man-made lakes. When we flew home from Vegas, Barbara gave me the window seat. I could see just how huge Lake Mead was, until the canyons and gorges of the Colorado River became the Grand Canyon, miles upstream from the Hoover Dam and the lake it created.

One final note: the name of the Hoover Dam was actually a point of some controversy in the mid-20th century. The project was undertaken during the administration of President Herbert Hoover, and was completed under Franklin Roosevelt.

When the U.S. Congress authorized the project, it was originally called the Boulder Canyon Project. The dam was first planned to be built in Boulder Canyon, but as the design developed, it moved to Black Canyon because it was easier to block the river there. The dam, however, kept the name Boulder Dam as the project got underway.

Hoover’s Secretary of the Interior changed the name of the dam to Hoover Dam in September 1930, as Hoover was preparing his re-election campaign. After Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the 1932 election, Harold Ickes, the new Secretary of the Interior, issued a memorandum in 1933 asking the Bureau of Reclamation (the office responsible for the dam) to refer to it as the Boulder Dam. In legislation signed by President Harry S Truman, Congress restored the name Hoover Dam in 1947.

The town closest to the dam is Boulder City, Nevada. I had the impression that many locals still tend sometimes to refer to it as the Boulder Dam. Since we flew to Las Vegas out of Washington National Airport (and not Reagan National Airport, the name imposed on it by a Republican Congress), I can understand why locals might want to use the dam’s original name!

Red Rock Canyon is just on the western edge of Las Vegas. It is reached by driving straight out Charleston Boulevard to the west, until there is no more Charleston Boulevard. As the road continues into the hills, one enters the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. Just a few minutes after the straight road began to curve, we realized that we were in real, live desert.

The first thing we saw on the 13-mile loop road was the Calico Hills trail. The reason for the name is obvious: the contrast between red and beige rock. This is really a canyon. It was hard to believe how small people looked from above when they walked down the canyon trail. This picture shows only the top portion of the trail, but it really went quite deep into the rocks.

These boulders are formed from ancient sand dunes. The lighter-colored layers show where water leached out all the color (copper?) from the rocks. The effect is very striking, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We are fans of the sci-fi spoof movie Galaxy Quest. At one point on the road, we became convinced that the makers of that movie must have gotten the idea for their rock-monster from these boulders at Red Rock Canyon.

It was a bit hard for us to wrap our minds around the untouched beauty of this desert in such close proximity to the city of Las Vegas. Then we looked at a map and realized it is 17 miles away from town. Here are some of the mountains that rim the Las Vegas valley. (Incidentally, the name of the town means “the meadows,” and refers to the verdant valley early travelers found on their way to the Pacific.)

After having visited the canyon on our second day in town, we became much more aware of the sunset over the western hills each afternoon. This was our first view of that sun settling behind the hills, from close up.

These ancient sand dunes, these calico boulders, were our introduction to the overwhelming force of nature in the desert southwest. Later in the week we would see how humans in the 20th century absolutely conquered a portion of the natural landscape.

We’ll continue our pilgrimage of endangered hotels by going down Las Vegas Boulevard South. The one hotel that seems in most imminent danger of implosion is the Saraha, on the north end of what’s considered the Strip.

This hotel is a weird combination of themes. Obviously, the basic concept is a faux-Egyptian motif. But inside, the area off the main casino floor is devoted to a NASCAR theme, with real racing stock cars on the floor and a kiddie-midway of racecar simulations. The Amazing Jonathan performs there, as do a couple of musical acts.

The loop in the picture is the final flip of the roller coaster that begins inside the hotel. On the Thursday of our trip, this coaster got stuck right after coming out of the loop. This snafu made the local TV news, as well as some national TV coverage.

Another old standby on the north Strip is the Riviera. This is located between the construction site for a fabulous new hotel-resort and a rather low-end shopping strip. We found the casino somewhat average and unimpressive, but the Riviera remains a major feature of the north Strip, directly across from Circus Circus.

In mid-strip, next to Harrah’s, is the Imperial Palace. This hotel has a faux-Chinese theme, and looks a bit like a Chinese restaurant, at least at its main entrance.

This hotel is rather hard to get into, at least from the Strip. It has a monorail stop in back, but on the Las Vegas Boulevard side the entrance is nearly invisible. The most distinctive feature we noticed–which may or may not be an actual part of the hotel–is the disco-bar in front that advertises itself as the place where it is easiest to get laid in Vegas. So I guess you would say it’s a pickup bar.

On the south end of the Strip is the 50-year-old Tropicana. It has the longest-running production show in Vegas, the Folies Bergere. We saw the show and were unimpressed with the performances, although the technical spectacle was quite imposing, and the featured comedy juggler, Michael Holly, was fantastic.

One other south Strip hotel of note, whose demise is actually immediately visible, is the Aladdin. While it has not been demolished, it really is no longer the Aladdin, since it is undergoing a transition to a Planet Hollywood. When we were there, the signage on the front of the hotel actually made the whimsical-feature section of the local TV news. For a couple of days, this hotel was known as the “Planet Ho.”

We also delved into the downtown Las Vegas area of Fremont Street known as Glitter Gulch. Before there was a Strip, there were hotel-casinos downtown. According to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch site, a couple of these hotels are in danger of being sold and then possibly “converted” or destroyed.

Possibly the most familiar of these would be Binion’s, whose official name is “Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel.” Before it was sold to MTR Gaming in 2004, it was known as Binion’s Horseshoe. Binion’s is a casino for serious gamblers. Its poker room is most directly accessible through a rear door, open to the public but hidden from the pedestrian walkway on Glitter Gulch. You might know the name Binion’s because the World Series of Poker, seen on TV, used to be staged there.

The hotel whose demolition would be most disquieting is the Golden Gate. This is located at the corner of Fremont and Main Streets, and is the oldest hotel in Vegas. It was established in 1906.

When we walked into its casino we got an immediate feeling of being in the old West. The ceiling is low, with ceiling fans; there are no frills; there is a lot of dark wood. On the wall of the casino is a replica of the first telephone in Las Vegas, whose number was 1. It was the telephone of the Golden Gate Hotel.

I apologize for the lousy photograph. All the pictures of the downtown hotels were taken with my cell phone’s camera. I stupidly left my Canon PowerShot in the hotel room when we went downtown.

We were glad to have seen all these “heritage” hotels. I think the demise of the downtown hotels would be the most distressing, since they carry so much of the history of Las Vegas.

I have just accomplished more in 10 minutes of frantic blogging in the airport than I could in a whole week of trying to use the frustratingly slow and bandwidth-limited hotel WiFi.

Thanks, McCarran Airport!

According to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch, re-development will probably doom most of these hotels at some point in the near future. I already mentioned the recent demise of the Stardust, whose rubble I can see directly from my hotel window while typing this.

Here is the defunct sign of the Stardust, still standing behind the barrier that separates the curious public from the continuing work of hauling away debris.

The pile of debris from the demolition was the thing most visible from the window of our hotel room. Here it is looking through the fence, just past the sign depicted above.

As we walked down the Strip toward the defunct Stardust, we passed a very impressive sign. This is the sign from the old Westward Ho–which apparently was not all that impressive a hotel. The sign sure is cool, though.

Down the Strip from these two ruins is the Frontier (currently called the New Frontier). This has, as you can tell, a Western theme. Gilley’s nightclub offers mud wrestling every evening. It looked somewhat cheesy and sleazy from the outside, but inside it was rather charming. (Barbara was not waiting for the mud wrestling, but rather for me to snap the picture and move on up the Strip.)

We experienced our first Las Vegas buffet here, a breakfast buffet. As we were standing in line for the buffet, I noticed this interesting sign, which tells you a lot about the Las Vegas economy. They use U.S. money, but they also seem to have their own.

There are more “heritage” hotels to be reported on, but I’ll do that when I get home. This is being typed and posted in McCarran Airport, which has better WiFi than the hotel did.

We’ve been overwhelmed in our first 18 hours here. Too much to see and experience. We are staying in a Hilton Grand Vacation resort hotel on the Strip, which is really a resort hotel and not a casino place. There’s a lovely pool with a bar downstairs, similar to the place we stayed in Aruba 10 years ago, but there’s no restaurant nor casino.

We have tickets for three shows (Mac King, Lance Burton, and Crazy Horse Paris), but otherwise no specific plans. We reached a point of Strip-fatigue, and our trip had no focus until this morning. Curious about that ugly pile of rubble three lots over from our hotel, we did some investigating and discovered that it is the ruin of the legendary Stardust hotel and casino, one of the first hotels on the Strip.

The Stardust was demolished on March 13 to make way for something called the Echelon. (Thanks to The Strip Podcast for this, plus fantastic video of the demolition.) I am very sorry to have missed seeing that place. It closed last year and is now gone forever.

Further googling and digging led to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch page, which has a list of hotels in Vegas that are in danger of being converted to huge non-kitschy modern highrises. Now our trip has a focus.

We just agreed that we should be looking at as many of these classic hotels as we can, both on the Strip and downtown. After we see Mac King’s show today, we will take a closer look at Harrah’s, as well as the Riviera and the Sahara.

Pictures will follow. The hotel’s WiFi connection is not fast, but it does seem to work just fine.