Grand Canyon - April 2005

After visiting Las Vegas, we had about an eight hour drive to the Grand Canyon through the Nevada and Arizona countryside.

We went past Hoover Dam, which is an amazing place with an interesting history. It is bloody high too...I wasn't too keen to get close to the edge of the dam.

Passing about a thousand winnebago's (massive mobile homes that look like buses as they come towards you), we eventually got closer to the Grand Canyon.

We had discovered a 50's styled cafe at Williams that we stopped at and may I say, it was getting quite wet and rather cold.

Wondering what the Grand Canyon would be like, we ventured on to the National Park.

Turns out, it was wet. Very wet. Quite frankly, the Grand Canyon, as we couldn't see the other side or vastness (as we discovered later), was little better than the Blue Mountains in Sydney....it seemed.

We decided to take the bus along the canyon and we stopped at the first stop.

Please note the photo, this is what we saw of the Grand Canyon. This is not retouched or manipulated. Fog! Loads of it.

Was pretty cool but we were a tad disappointed but probably not as disappointed as the hordes of bus trip people who had made the long journey there and back to Las Vegas, but hey, luck of the draw really.

The most amazing thing for me was when we were waiting for the bus to come back to drop us at the lodge near our car...it started to rain, then it started to snow and sleet. Well, I always had visions of it being warm there, ignorantly perhaps, but who's have thought it would snow on us at the Grand Canyon.

So, we headed to our hotel at Flagstaff, in Arizona, a couple of hours away.

We ate some delicious thai food....maybe the best we have had. When we came out of the restaurant that night, it was snowing, massive snowflakes. Very impressive.

We decided to spend a second night in Flagstaff, taking a day away from Los Angeles and fortunately we did as we could then head back to the Grand Canyon.

The next day, we did head back to the canyon and let me say, it was amazing.

It is so vast and we had a great time wandering around the canyon, with perfect weather...bright sunshine, but cool and easy to walk around.

The Grand Canyon is a cool place and let's just hope the Americans don't spoil it....although, it remans reasonably pristine to date, so here's hoping it remains so.