Grand Canyon

Wow.   Don't die without seeing this.

Describing the Grand Canyon is a thankless task.  If you've seen it, you know what I mean.  If you haven't, just go see it.  I can tell you that it's 10 miles across, a mile deep and absolutely amazing, but you'll never get any sense of it from either my descriptions of my photographs.  Just get your butt in harness and go already.  I also recommend that you take a helicopter ride over it.  It was well worth the money for a view you can't get any other way.

Martin and I drove out to the Grand Canyon from Vegas (about a 4-5 hour drive).  Luckily I've driven with Germans on the autobahn and had some idea of what to expect, or it might have disturbed me the way Martin snapped photographs of the countryside while driving with his elbow at 100 miles an hour.  As it was, I merely turned very pale and offered to take pictures for him while he was driving.  He clearly hasn't driven very much with American women, or he wouldn't have been so astonished at my complete incompetence in refolding a map.  But we pretty much agreed on the radio stations, and that's the main thing. 

One thing I never did get used to was Martin's rather disconcerting habit of wandering away when I wasn't looking and simply disappearing.  Our cell phones weren't working at the canyon, and it's, um, really big and overflowing with tourists, so it is a bit more difficult to find someone than if we were at, say, Walmart and I could page him.  The best part was that, when I did find him (usually in a gift shop perusing a book about smoke signals or down a ledge somewhere), he'd look up at me in mild surprise and say reproachfully "Where did you go?"  My absolute favorite was just after we booked the helicopter trip, which we did from one of the lodges (which included a hotel, restaurant, and gift shop)  in the Grand Canyon national park.  We had about an hour and a half before the trip, and about a 20 minute drive to get to there.  We both needed a bathroom, and they were conveniently located, side by side, just in front of the booking desk.  I emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Finally, it occurred to me that unless Martin had suffered a fatal heart attack, he would have been out of there long ago.  Since he'd been in perfect health last I saw him, I asked the man at the booking desk if he'd seen the guy I was with head off anywhere in particular.  He shrugged.  I checked out the restaurant.  No dice.  I looked in Martin's favorite haunt, the gift shop.  No Germans in sight.  I walked all around the lodge complex, to no avail.  Then I did it all over again.  At last, on my second circling of the lodge, a car pulls up, and it's Martin, who said, "Where did you go?"  I said "I went to the bathroom.  Where did you go?"  He said, "The logical thing was to go out to the car in the parking lot."  (The parking lot was about the size of many small European nations, by the way.)  I said, "No, the logical thing was to wait for me outside the restrooms!"  We didn't come to a consensus on this one, so I'll let you all be the judge.  We missed the helicopter trip we booked, which turned out to be a good thing.  They ended up upgrading us at no extra cost to a longer, better trip, and as I said, it rocked.

We stopped at Hoover Dam on the way back to Vegas, which was cool.  I drove to the Hoover Dam from the Grand Canyon, and I'll be damned if there isn't something about driving that route that doesn't make you drive 100 miles an hour, or at least as fast as our cheap little tin can would take us (Martin compared our rental car unfavorably to his Porsche on several occasions).   I mean, it's just one straight line for four hours.   I suddenly understood how Martin could be snapping pictures while driving.  If we'd had a cooler in the car, I would've considered climbing in back and making a sandwich while driving.  Just as well we didn't have a cooler.

Hey Martin -- you have a link to this site.  This account is my test to see if you're reading it!  Feel free to comment and dispute it, but this is my story and I'm sticking to it.