We’re used to getting late starts, since it takes a while to get four kids moving in the same direction. But moving from Mountain to Pacific time and having a baby who wakes everyone else up as soon as she’s up got us out the door early: even after a long breakfast, we were on the road to the Grand Canyon before 9 am local.
The drive wasn’t bad: standard northern Arizona/Colorado scenery. We came in the Grand Canyon from the east, stopping at the visitors’ center there, climbing a tower thing, and getting our first views of the Grand Canyon.
It’s almost too big. Maybe it’s like how so many people treat athletes or movie stars as objects: they’re too famous to consider them real people, so that’s how people can yell things from the stands or harass photographically in a way that they would never do to regular people. The Grand Canyon is hard to consider a real natural formation. There’s just too much. It’s a bit inaccessible perceptually. Maybe that sort of immensity needs focus to appreciate, and focus on scenery is one thing we cannot afford when we are making sure no child ends up falling off a cliff. The Grand Canyon isn’t something you can just glance at one or two moments every minute and expect to grasp it; maybe we’ll go back another time when we could do more than glance at it one or two moments every minute.
After the east side stuff, we followed the road along its South Rim, stopping once to take some more pictures, and then again at Angel Bright Trail to do what is for us a serious hike. We ended up hiking down into the Grand Canyon about 30 minutes, and then coming back up in twice that time. It was a nice trail, and gave us some great views, but Malachi is unable to exercise judgment, Marina has perfected the art of whining, and Cora was missing her nap. Erin had planned on hiking down for an hour. She was optimistic.
We drove back to the hotel, stopped at Chipotle for dinner, went to the pool, and called it a day.
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