We got up fairly early with an alarm that went off at around 6am. The cheap hotel had a key drop, so we used that and headed out.

The morning drive out to Grand Canyon was quite nice. At some point, we ran across a 200 mile sign and set one of the odometers. It hit 200 miles at around one of the intersections near south rim. All of the signs up until then were quite accurate.

Along this drive we saw plenty of cactus and Joshua Trees. We didn't stop much as our original target was 9am. But we learned on the way that sunrise was at 6:15am, so 9am would not have been early enough.

We arrived at the Grand Canyon at around 11am local time (10am Pacific -- so we were only really an hour late). The sun was high already. We stopped at the visitor center and got stamped. After that we drove a little way down to park closer to where we wanted to go.

Traffic and parking was pretty bad so I dropped Laurie and went off to find parking. I think I found the farthest spot away as I had to walk through the area where the mules where and across the train tracks. I got to where I left Laurie but she wasn't there. I saw a trail heading down and wondered if she'd decided to go down a bit. Then I realized she probably headed down the rim trail like we had planned.

After a little bit I saw what looked like Laurie standing way out on a ledge that had nothing under it! It was her as she waved at me first. I snapped a couple of pics and went off towards her. The ledge was bigger than it looked and she wasn't that close, but it was still well off the trail. Silly Laurie. ;)

We then continued on down the trail taking a bunch of pictures. We filled all of her memory cards before returning. I took a bunch with the Casio as well, knowing that they couldn't possibly be as good as the DSLRs especially with the 100-300mm zoom lens (providing about 160mm to 480mm on this camera).

We saw a couple of gorups of mules coming up from below. They were cool watching. At the top we hung out near them taking more pictures. It was a cool day but these mules were absolutely drenched with sweat. Poor mules...

When done, we took the trek back to the car and sped off towards the Hoover Dam. It was mid afternoon by now and Laurie was hoping to get to Hoover Dam with some light left. By 530pm it was starting to look dark. That's about when I remembered that not only was sundown at 645pm but that we were in Arizona still and it was actually 630pm.

We got there with only a little light left. We both had fun doing exposure in the few second range, with Laurie taking many more and hers turning out better, of course. A couple of nice shots came from the Casio, though.

We then headed out towards Vegas. It's only about 30 miles away and 10 miles in we had a specacular view when dropping down in to Henderson. From there you could see nearly the entire Vegas metro area, including the strip which was about 20 miles away. This city is absolutely massive.

We arrived at the Westin at a decent time. We were fairly tired, though, so we decided to stay in. The room, we'd been told, didn't have a bath tub -- only a shower. Except that it did have a bath tub -- and a cool dual shower head thing ("heavenly" branded like everything else Westin). We got room service, which was quite good, and watched a movie. We decided not to set an alarm but instead left the curtains open. The view was up towards the Stratosphere and was quite nice without a whole lot of light.

This woke us up fairly early, with sufficient sleep.

(Yes, this was back posted. Maybe Laurie will correct my memory flaws. ;))

Posted by Shane on March 26, 2004 10:17 PM | Permalink