Leaving on a very early flight this AM from Toronto Laney and I arrived in Vegas just around lunch time. A quick dash for (some expensive) Burger King and we were set for the long drive to the Grand Canyon! Yippee! We picked up the rental car and went to pick up Jonny, Mei and Kwok who had flown in direct from London last night. Thankfully we had our GPS system to get us to where we needed to be!

Photos photos photos.

The drive was relatively smooth until we hit Hoover Dam where the traffic slowed to a standstill! Which is to be expected as one of the major tourists destinations coming out of Las Vegas. Parking wasn’t easy to find but eventually we managed to sneak into a spot. By this time it was 2pm and the weather was absolutely glorious. Obligatory photos were taken and then we resumed our journey after about half an hour which is all you really need!

And yes Rubik’s made the journey with us too!

The rest of the journey was pretty smooth after we left Hoover Dam but unfortunately we just missed the sunset. Amusingly the receptionist at our hotel told us that there wasn’t much nightlife in the Grand Canyon and that not many things shut by 9pm so here we were at the Grand Canyon at about 6.30 with not much to do! Ha ha! We ended up having dinner in the hotel’s bar (where we made a friend), heading across the road to another bar and then coming back to our hotel to play some pool. It was a bit bizarre.

This should have made getting up the next morning before dawn easy but it wasn’t! We still hit the sack pretty late and ended up getting only a few hours of sleep before getting up at before 5 to get ready to go catch sunrise on the Grand Canyon. Which we only just missed! Still got some beautiful photos though!

There are free shuttle buses which operate from sunrise to sunset on the South Rim (as its inaccessible by car.) The round trip is about 75 minutes and has about 9 stopping points. They came pretty regularly so that was quite good and we got around to a good few of them. They recommend Hopi Point as being the best one but some of the others weren’t too bad either.

The Grand Canyon was as magnificent as I remember it. Of course viewing it from the ground like we were was nothing like the experience from the air but still it was just breathtaking and I could have sat out there looking out all day long!