Saturday April 11, 2015

We didn’t manage to get up for the sunrise, something else came up instead.

How do you describe a day like to day? We arrived at the Grand Canyon National Park at about 9:30, we parked at the Geology Museum car parking area and wandered over to the museum, then we saw it!!

The Canyon, you have to see it to believe it, it is every adjective you can think of – awesome, amazing, OMG, incredible, beautiful, stunning etc.  This is the guy we have to thank for this – Stephen Mather.

We noticed different shapes in the rocks, this one we could see a head and face.

This one we could see a turtle head, looking over the Colorado River.

You can see the layers of the earth, ranging from red to grey, formed 270 million years ago to 1,840-1680 million years ago.

There are well signed walking routes so that you can see the best of the canyon. Or you can hop on and off the shuttle buses as often as you like. We walked the orange route from the Geology museum to the South Kaibab Trail-head, (5 kms). The South Kaibab trailhead is a walk that will take you down the canyon. They recommend you not walking down and back in one day.

There are signs along the walking path warning you of the danger of going too near the edge.

On the orange route we met a couple from Portugal, they are working in Las Vegas and we chatted about Portugal, cycling and their work which is to do with a show called Rock in Rio. At one point on the trail Joja (sp) sorry if I spelt your name wrong, decided to climb out on a rock.

Ralf, of course went down and climbed out to the same rock. My heart was pounding, Ralf admitted his heart was pounding as well when he came back. My Crazy Canadian is still crazy.

Sometimes we had to drag our eyes away from the canyon and look at the flowers.

The trees were stunted, but the twists and bends on the trunks were beautiful.

We had lunch and then headed out on the red route to Hermits Rest. We took the shuttle bus route to the Hermits Rest, hopping on and off at all the lookout points.

We watched the sunset at Pima Point and then waited for the bus to take us back to the blue route, so that we could pick up the orange route bus back to the geology museum and the car.

As the Red route bus arrived at the transfer point the blue route bus pulled out, before we had the chance to get on it. Fortunately we only had to wait about five minutes before the next bus arrived, we asked the driver if we could get the connecting orange bus. Yes she assured us there was a bus that we could connect to. When we arrived at that transfer point there was no bus – I asked the driver to make sure a bus would be on its way (these were the last buses of the day). She contacted the dispatcher who contacted the driver to make sure he came into the visitor centre. The service of the shuttle buses was excellent and we managed to get back to our car – it was the last one in the parking lot.

As soon as the sun went down the temperature dropped quite dramatically. Fortunately we had our puffy jackets and our long trousers, we weren’t too cold.

As we waited for the buses, the stars started to appear in the sky. You could almost touch them there was so many of them. Without any light pollution the stars were incredible, as soon as we got back to Tusayan we really noticed the difference even a minimal amount of street lights made.

It was 9:00 by the time we got back to Tusayan, we managed to find a restaurant open and had pizza and beer. It was a long day.