Grand Canyon
After a week of packing up everything in our house, our apartment and our storage unit so we can temporarily relocate (don't say move!) to Belize and Miami for business, we set off on our cross-country adventure from Los Angeles. We were going to fly back and ship the truck to Miami (and then to Belize) but thanks to a suggestion by our ever-practical and lovely Ukrainian neighbor Olga, we decided to drive instead since it was something we had always wanted to do and it seemed a shame to leave LA without my having seen the Grand Canyon. (Marina had been twice before -- once on the drive over from Miami and another time riding her horse on the North Rim). Of course, I haven't seen Hawaii either but that's in the opposite direction and not exactly driving distance, so that trip will have to wait.
We didn't have anything we would ordinarily bring on a trip like this (our shorts, our Nikon binoculars, my digital hybrid almost-DSLR camera with zoom lens, a rented RV), but we did have 3 boxes of files, four suitcases, a table saw, a work table with vise, Marina's horse trimming tools, and some other stuff that wouldn't fit in our shipping container. We were reluctant to leave LA and already planning the return. Maybe that's why on the day of our scheduled departure, we couldn't leave till 3 in the afternoon.
The scenery from LA to the Grand Canyon was spectacular. Vast expanses of desert wilderness, ringed by mountains and dotted with yucca trees, sage brush, and a smattering of plastic bottles and bags. This part of the West is truly wild and you can see the ghosts of dead cowboys forever wandering the mountain passes in search of fortune and revenge.
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| About 3 hours out of LA |
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| Over the border and into Arizona |
Eventually we crossed the border into Arizona and after a few hours more of night-time driving, we got to the town of Williams around 10 o'clock at night. This adorable old West town has great architecture and lots of hotels catering to tourists visiting the Grand Canyon (see pics below, which aren't mine). Too bad we got there at night when the streets were silent and the tourists were all in bed resting up for an early morning start.
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| Williams, Arizona |
We pressed on in the dark on the long lone highway for an additional 60 miles to the Grand Canyon. I was grateful that we were on this road alone and not early in the morning with thousands of other vehicles in a big long traffic jam. The night sky was lit up with stars that you can't see in cities, and we were rewarded with a view of two enormous elk grazing by the roadside as we neared the entrance to the Canyon, and a grey fox scurrying across the road. Thank goodness for google maps and mobile internet because there were no signs directing us to the Grand Canyon Village or the hotel we had booked just 4 hours earlier. (In keeping with the spontaneity of this trip, we're doing very little advance planning.)
We must have got the last room in the hotel because it's smaller than the room in a Parisian bordello and with a view of the parking lot, but all was forgotten the next morning when we stepped out of the hotel and into this view:
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| Our first glimpse of the Grand Canyon |
I won't bore you with 800 pictures of the Grand Canyon but if you haven't been and you appreciate nature, it's really spectacular and worth a visit. You cannot appreciate the vastness of it until you have seen it in person. We walked along the rim, and took the shuttle to various viewpoints. Then we hiked down into the Canyon just enough to get a sense of what it feels like to stand small against these giant walls of rock and get away from all the people. Soon the weather changed abruptly, as it often does here, and we hiked back up in a cold windy drizzle. The sound of the wind rushing through the canyon is a beautiful and haunting sound. Next time I visit, I want to hike all the way down to the Colorado River, stay a night or two and hike all the back up. Tomorrow, we're off to Sedona, Arizona.
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| Below the rim |
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