Grand Canyon

That was a long drive - 5 hours each way, to the southern rim of the Canyon. But, it was well worth it! It started with the breakfast in the same diner - The Coffee Cup is its name - in Boulder City. Then onward across Arizona's highways to the Grand Canyon National Park. There were many cars and quite a lot of tourists. The elk was around and feeding near the road and people stopped everywhere, making it difficult to pass, to take pictures of the elk, despite the enormous sign at the entrance warning not to approach the elk and other wildlife as it could be dangerous. The digital camera revolution which placed it in everyone's cell phone, made a paparazzi out of everyone. Disgusting.

The Canyon was breathtaking, as I knew it would be, and as I remembered. The vastness of it, the redness, the beauty! It's one of those rare things in life that can be neither described in words, nor captured in pictures--the only way to experience it is to be there! To stand at the edge of the crumbly rock, to look at its belly with horizontal layers of pink rock sliced through by many millennia of floods and winds; to feel its grand-ness and your own insignificance. That's where the Nature made sure to show off its work and put a human into perspective, as if saying: "Look what I can do, and you'll stay just one of my minor creations, small, unimportant and vain, until I make you perish".



We stopped at a few viewpoints, took our pictures, squeezed by the others armed with cameras, clicking and snapping away. All along I craved to sit down somewhere, away from the tourists (impossibility at that touristy photo-stretch of the canyon) put down my camera, let the wind sing to my ears through the ancient rocks and let the canyon talk to me in its many sounds. To allow the heart to fill up with it, if that was at all possible.

The weather must have also been fed up with us tourists, because it sent a huge mass of clouds which slowly cast a deep shadow over the canyon, but not before we reached the end and saw it all. Maybe Mother Nature felt my deep respect for its artwork and allowed us to finish admiring it, before she sent the rain along to wash out the human maggots.

We drove back to Vegas between the two storm systems, with rain lines trailing visibly from the clouds to the left and an impressive lightning show to the right of us. But, other than a few drops on the windshield of our rented Chrysler, we passed through mostly dry.
The problem turned out to be finding a place to eat--we stopped again in Boulder City at 9 PM, but all the restaurants we saw along the way were closed already. So, on we went to Vegas, returned the car at the after hours drop off at Stratosphere hotel and casino and had another Denny's dinner across the street from it, before grabbing a cab to our hotel.