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Thank goodness for Google and free in room wi-fi otherwise we may have had quite a detour on today’s journey. In fact we ended up with our shortest day of the trip time and distance wise. I’d logged onto the Grand Canyon website to get a weather forecast so as to gauge what to wear when I noticed something about the Northern Rim being closed. As our plan was to head to the Northern Rim, our original plans were a tad scuppered.

Luckily we had plan B, the Southern Rim which is where we headed. Just before we got to the Canyon proper we were swayed by the signs for the little Colorado river canyon, which was free to get a look at but half killed both of us clambering down and up the rocks to get a view.

We entered the park and paid our $25 (which is better value than the crater at $15 each) and had a chat with the park ranger on the entrance gate. We explained our change of plans and she said that the Northern Rim wasn’t technically shut, as long as we were prepared to trek 42 miles on cross country skis or snow shoes we could get to the visitors centre that way. Wow, an American with a sense of humour, probably rarer than the canyon itself.

We stopped off at the Desert View viewpoint and wandered our way down, and to say it was spectacular is doing it an injustice, it really is a wonder of the world. It is one of those things you have to do once in your lifetime. Of course, what we hadn’t really thought about was how the altitude and the walking around was going to affect us. Ok so we all know that Fatman and Hobbling are not the fittest of superheroes but you’d have thought even we would have been able to handle a bit of wandering around at 7000 ft.

We drove on to the next view point and took some more photos, and repeated this for the next couple. After that it began to get a bit samey. Don’t get me wrong, it is fantastic and you do get different perspectives but one rock does began to look very much like another after a while.

We decided to head for the visitors centre in the hope of free cake. When I was on the net in the morning finding out about our change of plans I noticed that today was the 90th anniversary of the opening of the Grand Canyon national park and that they were holding a celebration and were opening a new visitors centre. When we entered the park we were given an invitation for the opening ceremony with the promise of free cake. When we got there, there was no sign of a new visitors centre or free cake. We had envisaged us getting caught up in a media circus and appearing on TV and websites around the world, but that was just our imagination running away with us.

We did make the mistake of parking in the disabled parking area at the visitors centre. Ok so it gives you better access to the centre itself, but if you want to then get to see the canyon itself from there, it’s a nasty up-hill trudge. Worse still when we did get there, a bus load of Mexican school kids turned up so we had to fight our way through them to get some decent pictures.

We had timed our visit well, there was quite a lot of snow laying around still which made for good pictures, but we were just outside the time from when the tourist shuttle buses started, which meant it was a little less busy and we were able to get access to more of the park in our own car without having to jump on and off the shuttles. That said, by the end of the road, we were both shattered from all of the walking and decided to call it quits.

Next was our decision as to where to stay, we had Williams which was only an hour away or Kingman about 3 hours away. Given our previous experience in Kingman that wasn’t tempting, but we didn’t think we’d find anything in-between plus anything further past Kingman would take us back in the wrong direction. Our mind was made up when we both started feeling tired on the drive out of the park so Williams was our destination.

As you can tell from the above blog we ended up in a Best Western in Williams but it is far enough away from the interstate and nowhere near the railroad. The better news was that the restaurant in there was really good. I had one of the best deserts I’ve had in ages, a three layer orange, raspberry and lemon mousse, exquisite. So although we only covered 150 miles today, it was a good day all round.

I think a visit to the North Rim and Zion National park is in order next time I’m over in the summer. Just the damn dam to do tomorrow and then on into Vegas. Viva Las Vegas.