BY SCOTT -- I’ve been to Las Vegas more than a few times since my first visit in 1996. I sometimes joke that, after 20 years, I’ve probably visited Hoover Dam more times than Herbert Hoover himself because almost every time I return to Sin City, I’m traveling with someone who’s never leaned over and seen for themselves that steeply sloping, 700-foot drop down to the Colorado River. So I go to the dam, again. And see it all, again.

The dam was first attached to Republican President Herbert Hoover’s name in a speech in 1930, before construction even began (1931). In the mid-1930s, overly-political members of the Franklin Roosevelt administration ordered the official name be designated as “Boulder Dam”. It wasn’t until 1947 that Congress officially named the dam after our nation’s 31st president.

This time, however, even I got to see Hoover Dam from a new angle. This time, we were approaching that massive, 80-year-old pile of concrete from the southeast in Kerry’s car. So this visit was new and special for everyone. We didn’t get to trek over to the dead-center of the bridge on foot, but only because we were tired from a long day on the road and didn’t feel like making the quarter-mile walk from the parking lot. (If we had, we could have posed for a selfie on the sidewalk with one foot in Arizona and the other in Nevada.)

The three-day road trip from our home in northeast Alabama came about because Kerry had accepted a three-month gig as a travel nurse at a hospital in western Washington. It was her first foray into the travel nurse lifestyle, and she didn’t want to make the 2,200-mile drive alone. So I worked out a short hiatus from work, and she and I packed her Honda to the top and pointed the headlights westward one early morning in late January of 2016.

DAY 1 - RAIN, FOG AND A DAY-LONG SLOG

On the way, we dropped off my car at the Birmingham International Airport. I didn’t have enough time to make the weeklong drive all the way to Washington, so we scheduled a one-day stop in Vegas after three days on the road. This way, we’d have a break from being cooped up in the car, and it would give us a chance to introduce Kerry’s 16-year-old daughter to the over-the-top decadence of one of our favorite U.S. travel destinations. After a day to relax, I’d fly back home to my waiting auto while the girls continued on to Washington state.

To save some cash, instead of leaving my car at the airport and paying as much as $12 a day for parking, I made a reservation at the Ramada Inn on Messer Airport Highway less than a mile from the main terminal at BHM. We paid only $6 a day to park there. (I’ve since seen daily rates on their website for as little as $3.25.) My car was parked uncovered but in a secure, well-lit area adjacent to the hotel, with shuttle service to and from the airport.

Day 1 of our drive consisted mainly of an incessant, driving rain. In fact, when we crossed the Mississippi River at Vickburg around 1 p.m., we couldn’t see 50 feet past the bridge on either side for the wind-whipped, howling rain and soup-thick fog.

Two hours prior to crossing the Mississippi, we had stopped Mama Jean’s in Lake, Miss. (Exit No. 100 on I-20 westbound) for lunch. The truck stop/convenience store wasn’t much to look at -- think “Clerks” meets Mel’s Diner-- but was crowded with locals, and the handmade cheeseburgers were almost -- almost -- as good as the ones I make at home.

Louisiana didn’t leave much of an impression either, I’m sad to report. The stretch of the state that borders I-20 on both sides is flat and mostly blank. But don’t let the Interstate-induced monotony fool you, there’s plenty of fun to be had in Louisiana. One of our favorite travel bloggers, Nomadic Matt, has a well-researched column that details the best way to spend four days in New Orleans. We definitely recommend reading it before heading to the Big Easy.

We drove on into Texas, and all the way through the Dallas metropolitan area. When we finally stopped for the night a few miles past downtown Fort Worth it was at a Radisson Hotel with a nice restaurant and bar, but the worst lobby design in the history of the service industry.

After I signed for the room, I asked the front desk clerk for directions to the elevator. “One hundred and nine steps that way,” he said smartly and precisely, as he pointed to a hallway in the corner of the hotel’s expansive lobby. He and I must share the same gait; it was 109 steps exactly.

DAY 2 - ENJOYING THE SCENERY

One feature of the western United States that is impossible to miss, even while slipping past at 80 miles per hour, is how the landscape changes so abruptly. Seemingly instantaneous shifts -- from rolling hills to scrub brush to massive mesas to towering buttes -- keep you constantly guessing about which new feature of terrain will pop out at you over the next rise as you drive through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

In west Texas, you’ll see wind turbine farms 30 miles in the distance, and tiny roadside towns every two dozen miles that typically include little more than a rusting water tower, one family-owned convenience store, a Depression-era courthouse and an immaculate high school football field. As the last of those images sweeps past, the landscape changes to scrub brush scattered about on rolling hills. But before you have time to count the tumbleweeds caught in the security cable along the median, you’re in the desert.

But before we learned that lesson, we stopped for lunch at the Big Texan Steak Ranch near Amarillo. Billed as a “landmark legend,” the two-story showhouse of a restaurant and motel has been an stop on Route 66 since it opened in 1960. When I-40 replaced the original route in the early 1970s, owner Bob Lee bought a piece of property adjacent to the new highway and had the entire restaurant relocated via helicopter. If you can eat every bit of their signature, 72-ounce sirloin dinner -- which includes a baked potato, shrimp cocktail, salad, baked potato and bread -- it won’t cost you a cent. (We didn’t try; we were hungry, but not that hungry.)

Just a few miles down the road from the Big Texan is a public art sculpture known as Cadillac Ranch. You’ll have to drop off the interstate onto an adjacent access road to get to the gate that serves as the entrance to the Cadillac Ranch. Then, you’ll walk a couple hundred yards through a cattle field to get to the monument, but there’s no cost and it’s a really nice piece of Americana if you’re into that sort of thing. Created in 1974 by a group of young hippie artists, the lifesize exhibit is made from junked Cadillacs representing various evolutions of the luxury car line from 1949-1963. The ten cars are half-buried, nose-first in the ground at an angle that corresponds to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, says Wikipedia. They are also covered in four decades of graffiti and spray paint (empty spray cans littered the area around the exhibit), so pack a Sharpie and add your signature to the thousands who came before you.

Kerry and Mads at Cadillac Ranch, a psychedelic piece of art constructed in 1974 and consisting of ten Cadillacs buried nose-first into a cattle field near Amarillo and spray painted over and over and over. And over.

We spent the evening of Day 2 at the Hotel Santa Fe Hacienda and Spa in downtown Santa Fe, N.M. Billed as a “sophisticated, Native American hotel” the girls and I found the place to be charming, the people extremely friendly, and the decor impressive. There was a dining area inside the lobby area, along with a well-stocked bar. The pool area included a hot tub that several guests used that evening, despite the temperature dipping into the teens.

As I stood in the lobby waiting my turn to check in, I noticed an older man waiting at the other end of the desk. When one of the clerks spotted the diminutive fellow, he rushed around the desk to offer assistance. Turns out, the man was a regular guest, state senator John Pinto. The Democrat has served in the Legislature since 1977, representing the portion of the state that includes the Four Corners area and the Navajo Nation. According to the desk clerk, Pinto is one of the last surviving Navajo code talkers from World War II.

DAY 3 - KNOW YOUR BUTTES FROM A HOLE IN THE GROUND

A “mesa” is “an elevated area of land with a flat top.” This is different from a “butte” which is a smaller, stand-alone version of the same thing. Simply put, mesas look like tables, buttes look like top hats. We saw plenty of both as we drove through Texas on Day 2 and New Mexico on Day 3. We were making good time, too; in fact, we passed through Albuquerque so quickly that Kerry didn’t even notice until a half-hour later. I barely noticed, and I was driving.

We were both pretty wrapped up in the last few chapters of the audio version of Steve Martin’s memoir “Born Standing Up,” read by the author. Consequently,  for most of the third morning we were mainly focused on catching our breaths between guffaws.

Along I-40 near the Texas/New Mexico border, you’ll find plenty of roadside turnouts. Generally, “turnouts” are rest areas with limited amenities, often nothing more than a place to pull over and enjoy the scenery. We stopped at one of these turnouts just before we left Texas, and saw a line of 1960s-era picnic areas, a vast landscape of stacked mesas with their exposed layers shimmering in the sunlight, and very little else. It was eerily captivating.

This turnout on I-40 near the Texas/New Mexico border had little in the way of amenities, but there was still plenty to see.

We had covered a lot of ground on Days 1 and 2, so we meandered a bit on Day 3 and enjoyed ourselves. An hour after we pulled away from that isolated turnout, we veered off I-40 and into the town of Tucumcari, N.M. The detour was among the first of many opportunities we had for the rest of our drive to motor down the original Route 66 for a few miles.

Route 66 was paved all the way from Chicago to Los Angeles by 1938, and runs alongside I-40 for many of the miles we traveled on our trip. In the 1950s, the route became the main thoroughfare for vacationers headed to California, giving rise to a burgeoning tourism trade that saw the construction of dozens of teepee-shaped hotels and shops, Indian curio stands, and reptile farms.

Back in the car, we covered a few hundred miles before stopping again at Petrified Forest National Park near Holbrook, N.M., where we saw 225 million-year-old trees found in a geological wonderland where paleontologists have also uncovered fossils of late Triassic ferns, giant reptiles called phytosaurs, and early dinosaurs.

Next, we pulled off the highway to have our picture made standing on a corner. Eagles founder Glenn Frey had passed away three days before we started our trip, so plenty of the radio stations we found along we already a few days into their weeklong Eagles tributes. We must’ve heard “Take It Easy” two dozen times in three days. Hell, we absolutely HAD to stop and stand on that corner in Winslow, Ariz.

I’ve been mesmerized by Meteor Crater (Barringer Crater) in Arizona since I saw the Jeff Bridges film “Starman” as a teenager in 1984. On a couple of my previous flights to Vegas, I was able to catch a glimpse of that massive hole in the ground from my window seat.

I never figured I’d get to see Meteor Crater up close, so I was thrilled at the prospect of being able to spend an hour there on the afternoon of Day 3. At 3,900 feet across and nearly 600 feet deep, my visit was every bit as impressive as I thought it would be. The visitor’s center ($18 admission for adults) features interactive exhibits and displays about meteorites, in particular the 150-foot-wide object that created the 50,000-year-old crater outside. There are also monuments to American astronauts, a gift shop and movie theater, and a wisely placed (we were starving!) but poorly promoted Subway sandwich shop. Guided tours of the crater rim are available daily.

Check out Kerry’s “What Happened in Vegas” blog from our previous trip and get our take on a few dos and don’ts in Sin City. And check back soon for my new blog entry (“Elvis Slept Here”) about our two-night stay at the Westgate Resort and Casino.