Onwards to the Coast

The Grand Canyon was awesome, but it got tiring after a while.

I can sit and watch the waves at the beach go in and out all day long without getting bored. But after watching a rock for more than a few minutes it gets old.

As my friend Peter Manry in Houston told me, "The Grand Canyon takes your breath away. But when you get it back after five minutes, it's time to move on."

And that is exactly what we did. The day after we toured the Grand Canyon, we traveled straight to LA, going over the Hoover Dam, and through Las Vegas.

Here is a picture of the Hoover Dam. I tried hard to get a better one, so you could see the whole thing but from the ground there was just no way.


The day before we witnessed the power of nature. And this day we saw firsthand the power of man. The Hoover Dam stops the Colorado River from flowing freely. If you saw the picture of the river in my earlier post, you might have wondered how such a small river created the Canyon. But before the Dam was built the river was much wilder with a lot more power.

With the Dam blocking the river, man can now control the river as well as create energy from it. Amazing huh?




The thing I liked about the Dam was that it is completely self-funded. It makes enough money to pay for itself so no tax payer money was spent on it. I think we need more projects like that.

Here's an interesting marketing lesson. You have a dam which is nothing more than a large amount of concrete storing water. There is not too much to see here. You walk along the dam, take a few pictures and you are off.

But some marketing genius turned the dam into a huge tourist attraction. This picture to the left is one of the multiple restaurants, gift shops, and parking garages that make money off of tourists. There is also a tour you can take, or you can take a helicopter tour of the thing.

Think about it for a second, a huge piece of concrete as a tourist attraction? A tour of a dam?

This just goes to show you that you can take anything and make it into a money making proposition if you have some creativity.

On our way to LA we passed through Vegas. And along the busiest freeway in town I spotted the following billboard so I just had to pull over and snap a picture. It helped that we were sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, but that's another story.

You know that when real estate schools start renting out billboards along the busiest freeways in major cities that the end of the real estate bubble is coming. This thing has 3-D figures and a neon sign at the top that changes. It must cost them a fortune!

The only way they can afford this sign is if people are signing up in droves to become loan officers, real estate agents, and appraisers. So it is only a matter of time, that things will turn around. Be careful.

I heard today, that at least 5 condo complexes in Las Vegas have been canceled recently because they could not sell enough units to start building. Along the highways from Arizona to LA we must have seen over 200 billboards for builders and new communities. That's a ton of real estate on sale. Add the fact that rates are going up and foreclosures are at an all time high, and we have a serious market correction coming. Hang on for the ride!