Went to Natchitoches for Homecoming Game

Cecile, Nan, and I went to Natchitoches to help Nan with cleaning up her house that she purchased on Williams Ave (2 houses down from Dr. Kruz's house and real close to front street). Ran into a number of my old friends from high school (Buddy Wood, David Stamey, Clark Boydston) and college (Tony Hernandez, Lynn Kees, Mike Brown and others). The cool thing was that after the game we went to the home of one of the football coaches and had a few drinks. The coaches are very young and came from LSU so we hope that they will make NSU better.

Hoover Dam Bypass is Civil Engineering Wonder

Crossed the Hoover Dam on our trip back to Austin from San Jose, so I wanted to share just how cool this bridge is and just how massive it really is.

Creeping closer inch by inch, 900 feet above the mighty Colorado River, the two side of a
$160 million bridge at the Hoover Dam slowly takes shape. The bridge will carry a new section of US Route 93 past the bottleneck of the old road which can be twisting and winding around and across the dam itself.

When complete, it will provide a new link between the states of Nevada and Arizona . In an incredible feat of engineering, the road will be supported on the two massive concrete arches which jut out of the rock face.

The arches are made up of 53 individual sections each 24 feet long which have been cast on-site and are being lifted into place using an improvised high-wire crane strung between temporary steel pylons. The arches will eventually measure more than 1,000 feet across. At the moment, the structure looks like a traditional suspension bridge. But once the arches are complete, the suspending cables on each side will be removed. Extra vertical columns will then be installed on the arches to carry the road.

The bridge has become known as the Hoover Dam bypass, although it is officially called the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, after a former governor of Nevada and an American Football player from Arizona who joined the US Army and was killed in Afghanistan. Work on the bridge started in 2005 and should finish next year. An estimated 17,000 cars and trucks will cross it every day.

The dam was started in 1931 and used enough concrete to build a road from New York to San Francisco. The stretch of water it created, Lake Mead , is 110 miles long and took six years to fill. The original road was opened at the same time as the famous dam in 1936.

An extra note: The top of the white band of rock in Lake Mead is the old waterline prior to the drought and development in the Las Vegas area. It is over 100 feet above the current water level.