The Grand Canyon

After leaving Flagstaff it's about an 80 mile drive up to the Grand Canyon, and let me tell you the anticipation was building the whole ride up. Everyone has seen countless photos and documentaries showing how big and wonderful the Grand Canyon is, and we heard from everyone we talked to that you can't understand how big this thing is until you've seen it. Well let me tell that they are right, photos, videos, I-max, none of these do this great canyon justice, and Tina doesn't think the Grand Canyon is even a good enough name for it, of course she couldn't come up with anything better even though she tried for two days. It actually makes you dizzy trying to take it all in, just standing there looking at something a mile deep and 3 miles wide is hard to grasp, and in most places you can't even see the river at the bottom. I'm not going to try and explain it anymore because its just a waste of time, I'll just post a few pictures and tell you that you need to go see it, its worth it.

Our first peek at the canyon

Proof that we made it

A really good picture that Tina took

We did manage to find a campsite in the park without a reservation, which is a miracle in itself, we just decided to ride through a campground that had "Full" signs posted everywhere and sure enough there was still a vacant site. Even though the sites in the park have no electricity or water hookups I convinced Tina that waking up 100 yards from the south rim of the Grand Canyon would be well worth the trade, so that's where we stayed for the next two nights. The way Grand Canyon National Park is set up it doesn't really take more than a day or so to see the whole park, unless you want to hike down into the canyon, but we weren't really set up for that so we opted not to hike it this trip. So we just toured pretty much every view point that is available on the south rim, well Tina toured the south rim from about twenty feet from the edge being she has a problem with heights.

an honorable mention

If you look close you can see two rafts

Another thing we noticed at the Grand Canyon were all the foreign tourists, they are everywhere! Not sure if this is normal or just maybe they are taking advantage of the low value of the dollar at this time, but either way I would estimate 70% or so were speaking some other language. And it seemed to lean heavy towards the Asians for some reason, so much so that I coined a new word, "Vacasians", you heard it first here!

The Colorado River just up from the Grand Canyon

A cool picture of Charlie

We have decided to pass up Las Vegas so that we can go visit Zion National Park instead, its a few hours north of the Grand Canyon and just inside of Utah, we heard its absolutely beautiful and can't be missed.