Grand Canyon Road Trip!

Well, I am still working on writing on this thing more frequently... But a lot of people have asked me about my trip to the Grand Canyon and want to know how it was, so I figure I better write in here! Martin had work until about 4:30 that day, so we left around 5:30 Thursday evening and headed down. All things considered though, we made pretty good time. According to GoogleMaps, it should have taken us about 8 hours and 45 minutes, and we made it there in 8! The only downside though was that we still didn't get there until 1:30 in the morning! We traded off driving about halfway through, and Martin was having trouble staying awake the last 30 miles, so we traded off again. Then, the last thing anyone wants to be doing at 1:30am after an 8 hour drive is set up a tent! But, what can ya do? We got everything set up and then crashed. Even though we both were exhausted, the sun came much sooner than we would have liked *and* it was freezing (quite literally - it got to about 31 that night!), so needless to say, we didn't get much sleep! We finally got going, ate breakfast, and left for the shuttle bus (it's free!) around 10 or 11.

We got to the first viewpoint and seriously, the Grand Canyon looks fake! It looks like this huge painting that can't possibly be real. It was one of those things where you just sort of look at it and think "...wow..." We went to a few viewpoints that day, went down part of one of the hikes you can go, saw a California Condor bird show thing, and went to lots of gift shops. The hike we went down is actually a 10-12 hour hike round trip if you take the whole thing. Luckily, we didn't go down very far. I wish I was good at hikes, but for some reason they just kill me. :(

Oh, it was also incredibly cool how many different languages we heard throughout the day! I can't even begin to count the number! And it was so funny because we even had that stereotype of a bus full of Japanese tourists pull up. I couldn't help but laugh. We did however, see an entire tour bus full of French-speaking tourists as well. Martin heard what he thought was Swedish, and so went and talked to them and was right - that's where they were from! Later on, we even ran into a family from Norway and he talked with one of them for a while. It was funny though because the guy thought I spoke Norwegian as well, so after a few minutes of talking with Martin, he turned to me and said something in Norwegian and I just had this blank look on my face and said "what?" haha.

We called it a day around 5 or 5:30 and headed back to camp. We made hamburgers and hot dogs over a fire, and then played games until about 8. Both of us were so exhausted that we called it a night somewhere between 8 and 9. haha, I can't even remember the last time I went to bed that early!

Saturday was a lot of fun as well. We took a different shuttle bus most of the day to a ton of other viewpoints and had about 10 minutes at each point before the next bus came to take us to the next stop. Martin liked getting as close to the edge as possible with a lot of the spots and some of them definitely made me a bit nervous! There were, however, a few of them that I wouldn’t let him do. :P There’s one picture he convinced me to take where I am pretty dang close to the edge myself and after uploading the picture and seeing how close I was, I can’t believe I managed that! My depth perception must have been off that day! Haha.We again called it a day around 5 or 5:30 and headed back to camp. However, we had almost run out of bread and were going to need some more before our trip back the next day and they conveniently had a whole grocery store right next to the campsite! I was worried about how much just one loaf of bread would cost when this is the only store within miles of anywhere else, but I was amazed at how cheap everything was! We bought bread for $1.79! That’s cheaper than some local stores! Everything was very reasonably priced, and some things were even cheaper than a store like Smith’s. So we decided that next time we come to the Grand Canyon, we won’t bring as much food with us on the 8-9 hour drive, but will instead just get everything we need once we get there. Oh and we also found out that they have four different church services each Sunday – one of which is an LDS service! However, it wasn’t until 1pm and we needed to leave before that in order to get back at a decent hour. :( We got back from the store, ate dinner, and played some more games. Again, we turned in around 8:30 or 9 because (1) neither of us had been sleeping very well (the first night was freezing and the second night had such strong wind, I thought my tent was going to blow away!) and (2) we had had another long day and were exhausted.

We got up Sunday morning, ate breakfast, packed everything up, and headed out. We stopped at a few more points on our way out, and then again a few times after we were actually outside of the park at a few lookout points they had along the road. One of them was awesome because it was a bridge over the Colorado River! We never really got to see the river close up while actually at Grand Canyon, so it was neat to see it so close. We decided that next time we come, we’ll have to do the white water rafting. That would be so awesome! We switched off again almost halfway. The total mileage from Provo to our campground was about 489, so roughly 250 miles each. About 100-150 miles into the drive, Martin took a nap… and about a half hour after he woke up, I needed to take a nap so we switched off, and it was right around 200 miles at that point.He had seen on the map that Bryce Canyon was only 17 miles off the road we were on and wanted to stop by there since we were so close, so we did. We lucked out too, because normally it’s a $25 entrance fee just to see the canyon, but since we were getting there right as the little tollbooth thing was closing, he let us in for free! (the same thing happened at Grand Canyon – we’d gotten there after hours and didn’t have to pay $25 there either!) Bryce Canyon is really cool as well. They had about a mile hike down and up and we took that and it felt like we were going into the depths of a cave or something. It was really cool, though. We spent quite a while there (an hour or two) going down the canyon, hiking back up, going to several other viewpoints, etc.

Then, before taking off again, we made a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for our ‘dinner.’ Haha. About 30-40 minutes before we got home it started pouring! I was so glad I wasn’t the one driving at that point! :P We finally made it back to Provo around 10:45… and guess what our mileage was?! 1,000... .4. Haha we were so incredibly close to having our trip be *exactly* 1,000 miles! But alas, it was 1,000.4. Still, pretty close! Anyway, so there you have it. There is my trip (and first road trip ever) to the Grand Canyon!

PS, all my pictures are on facebook if you want to take a look at any of them. I’ve got two albums I posted this week.