Summer Odyssey - The Grand Canyon

I'm happy to report that we did get our car back. We were out the door at 6:30a this morning for a 'Day Trip' to the Grand Canyon. In hindsight it was a fairly long ways to go just for the day. Kerry compared it to going from Vancouver to Oliver for lunch and back in the same day. We got to the village around 11:30a and suddenly realized how incredibly unprepared we were. We only planned on seeing the canyon and doing one of the easy hikes however we were only prepared to do that in sunny weather. The canyon had other ideas as there was a giant thunderstorm with a couple inches of rain in a short period of time and it was only 15 degrees.

As we sat in our car wondering what we were going to do, I remembered I have an emergency poncho in my back pack and Kerry remembered she had one in the car. We also had several garbage bags in the emergency kit. Several minutes later we were all prepared to brave the storm. We weren't about to travel 5 hours only to turn around without seeing something. It was still raining as we walked to the look-out and there was no one around. Thankfully the weather turned sunny and warm fairly quickly. The canyon was still a bit smokey/foggy but it was still spectacular. I would even call it grand.

We spent a few hours hiking the canyon rim and checking out the geology center. There were several nice places for pictures. Plenty of them were safe but there were still dozens of people taking selfies only a few feet from some steep drop offs. I wonder how many tourists they lose each year?

We headed for home in the afternoon with plans to stop in Flagstaff which is apparently one of the former Route 66 cities and we had visions of it looking like Radiator Springs from the Disney Cars franchise. It is actually a large bustling town with a university. We stopped off at the visitors center for souvenirs and some pictures before heading back to Las Vegas along a portion of Route 66. The route between the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas goes from desert, to shrubs to sparse forest with a ton of neat rock formations. I would highly recommend it as a drive if you are in the area. Tomorrow we take a rest day with just a short jaunt to the Hoover dam.