The Grand Canyon

We had a perfect day to visit the Grand Canyon.  The weather was cool, sunny, and clear. That made for better pictures and easier walking.  We drove up instead of riding the train, which would have been fun, but it's would have limited our time in the park.  We got there before the train arrived, but had to wait 20 minutes to get past the gate.  We had the Senior Lifetime pass which was only $10 when we got it, but it saved us $30 at the Grand Canyon National Park.  They had 4 lanes and all were 20 cars deep.  I'm glad we were here now and not in the summer.

After finding a parking place we jump on the Blue shuttle bus to go to the visit center/bus depot. They have 3 bus loops, the Blue Shuttle loops around the middle of the park and connects to the Red and Orange loops.  The Red loop takes you to the Hermits Rest out west and the Orange Loop takes you east to Yaki Point.  The Visitor center is walking distance to most of the rest of the park.  But that's a matter of point of view.  We road the bus to the visitor center with 4 girls with backpacks who had just finished 150 miles hike to the bottom and back up, and around the Colorado river basin.

There were tons of foreign visitors and too many of them climbed out past the safety barriers to take selfies.  I ask a Ranger if they had many fall and he said they had more than you'd guess, but only the fatalities make the national news.

The trip out to Hermits Rest is only accessible in the busy season by the Red shuttle bus and was a part of the park we've never seen.  It is where you have the best view of the Colorado River from 5000' above.

On the way out of the park we took the east exit past a number of view points that were also new to me.  At the end we went to the Desert View Watchtower. The east exit took us past much better views than the route we took into the park from Williams.  We exited through Cameron and then south to Flagstaff.  We stopped in Flagstaff at Cracker Barrel, which was our first stop at a national chain restaurant this trip, but we needed the taste of home cooking and there isn't any out west except at Cracker Barrel.

All in all a great day.  While I'm not a fan of crowds, the Park service handles them well, at least in the spring.  I have photos uploaded to Flickr, here.