Sunday 28th March 2010

[04:35 PDT]

Despite not going to bed until gone 4am (UK time) last night, our body clocks woke us up around 3am this morning. This at least will give us some time to get ready, have something to eat and post updates online before we are picked up for our Grand Canyon trip.

Despite it being very noisy downstairs and in the lift last night - everyone seems to be shouting at each other to be heard above the background din - we had a peaceful night.

[07:59 PDT +1]

This bit has all been updated the following day.

We were picked up right on time from the foyer of the hotel. As it turned out, we only has a block to travel as the starting point was the Planet Hollywood hotel - next door!

The coach we were on was a big one and it was almost full - 54 people I believe.

The plan was to drive over to the Hoover Dam, stop there then move on to the Grand Canyon, with some stops along the way.

We left at 7:15 and reached the dam at 8:05, stopping there for 10 minutes. Sadly, you cannot stop on the business side of the dam - where the water comes out, but you can stop on the Lake Meade side.We moved off after ten minutes and headed towards the Grand Canyon. You can look at the route by loading the attachment file into somewhere like Google Earth. The next stop was a place called Kingman, a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, the 'in the middle of nowhere' seemed to crop up all the time. As we drove through Arizona, we often went past tiny farms in the middle of what looked to be your basic desert. I'm not sure what they are farming. Apparently, they need to collect their water in big water trucks from a collection point miles away. 2 cents a gallon!We left Kingman at 9:35 and stopped for a buffet lunch at a place called 'Grand Canyon Railway' which is where a steam train starts it's route to the Grand Canyon proper.

The trip was long - there's no other way to put it! After lunch we had another 90 minutes before we arrived at the entrance at 1:30pm. A total time of 6 hours 15 minutes!

We had a total of two hours at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We moved from Mather Point over to Bright Angel Point after the first hour. As you can see, the weather was perfect. Sunny all the time and, although there was still snow on the ground in the shadows, the temperature was probably in the low 20'C.We finally left the park at 3:50pm and headed straight home with only a brief stop at Kingman to refuel. Fortunately we were one of the first hotels on the drop off list as we came in from the bottom of the Strip. We went straight back to the hotel room and hit the pillow straight away - we were that exhausted!