The Grand Canyon

Well, here are the Grand Canyon pictures, finally. Sorry for the wait, but I have been in the land without fast internet. Ben and I enjoyed the Grand Canyon and were, as all people seem to be, awed by the vastness of the canyon. We hung around to see the sunset, and of course I had to pull over to glass out any large raptors I saw, so it was slow going around the canyon on the scenic highway. I have a great picture of a family of vultures, but I had a technical problem uploading so I will have to add that in later. The pictures are chronological, starting with our first view and ending with the sunset on the Colorado River on the eastern side of the canyon. I decided, along with about 100,000 other tourists, to try to go to the northeastern side of the canyon and stay in one of the motels in a little town near the Navajo Nation. Every motel/hotel was booked for miles, so we drove for four hours before finding a tiny motel that was about to close, and both of us collapsed, exhausted, into bed. We awoke to find we were at the head of the Colorado, right where it enters the Grand Canyon, and it was beautiful. I couldn’t have chosen a better place to stay. It was called Marble Canyon, and we enjoyed a giant breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy (although it should have been called gravy sausage, as it consisted of giant chunks of sausage graced with a bit of gravy) before heading on up through Utah. I will tell you, we didn’t take any pictures going through Utah, because we were pretty exhausted after tramping around the grand canyon and didn’t even stop at Bryce Canyon (a shame, but Ben was napping as we passed). We spent a whopping 11 hours on the road and ended up backtracking for an hour, because again all the hotels north of Salt Lake were completely full. Lesson learned: find good hotel at 6 p.m., stay.