Day Seven

Grand Canyon! I'm glad we got there early. I heard a guy at the Plane Museum saying that he was surprised how crowded the parking was the day he went and I was worried. When we left at 3pm, it was totally full, parking lot sharks everywhere.

We watched a few shows about the park. Watched a couple movie things, which was cool because just the day before the word “extrapolate” came up in “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” and there were some perfect examples here. Looked at a lot of displays. Browsed the bookshop for anything not propaganda, found a book by John Wesley Powell called “The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons”, very nice. I've been reading it ever since. It was very hard to find anything written older than the last few years or any first hand accounts of anything.

The canyon was gorgeous. It looks like a backdrop painted and hanging to hide the real world. We speculate that there really isn't anything there because it's hiding some big government conspiracy or alien world. :))

We took the very crowded shuttle around to other parts of the rim and saw a couple other visitor centers. We all liked the pieces you could see closer up. Staring out across it, it just doesn't seem real. And its hazy and unclear. But it is awe inspiring to see the layers in the rocks closer to you.

Here something weird. At the visitor center, there was a large crew of maybe 20 people planting things and running water pipes to everything to keep it growing. The Grand Canyon gets no water and has to pipe in water from a spring on a reservation miles away. Now. If the park is supposed to be preserved as nature grows it, why would we plant things and keep them looking nicer than they really would be if we just left it alone? Why not just make some roped off paths so that people won't trample it to death and then let thing along to grow as they do naturally. Yep, it certainly wouldn't be as pretty, but it would be real.

All in all, we all liked seeing it, but felt like we had to get out of there. The crowds, ick. And really you can only stare a the hole for so long and from so many angles. Unless you are backpacker or a river rafter, or maybe an artist, there isn't much to do but stare at it and wonder what it is, how it got there. That's fine if you are alone and meditating, but when you've got two little boys...well, we left. On to other “attractions”.

We headed to Flagstaff and found it to be crowded and busy too. We stayed at a Walmart parking lot. Yes! I called and asked permission! I rock! We had the best steak dinner ever at the Outback next door and then bedded down for the night.