Driving westward towards the Grand Canyon through Navajo country, there are hundreds of "Indian Made" souvenier and gift tents by the side of the road. There are also hundreds of places to pull off to the side and take in the scenic wonder that is Arizona. Occasionally, they save real estate and combine these two concepts, forcing you to walk through their flea-market style shops before getting a glimpse off the safety-railing-free overlook into the abyss. There is a small little river branching off the Colorado river called the "Little Colorado River," appropriately named, I suppose, for the little canyon it snakes through. Dont get me wrong, this thing was HUGE. But, even having never seen the Grand Canyon before, I know it would blow the socks off of this place. After expressing this to Matt, he reacted somewhat cynically, that all this Grand Canyon stuff is probably overhyped, and that he couldn't imagine the Grand Canyon to be any larger than this! A fair call, I guess, for someone who's never seen it. After all, the view we had here of 800 foot cliffs was beyond impressive. We tried childishly to throw nearby rocks as far as we could, trying to hit the river below. It was so far, we kept losing sight of the rocks halfway down! Heaving heavier softball sized rocks revealed how far off we were: As hard as we could throw them, they would always fall out of view behind the same canyon wall on which we stood! And, of those, only two made an audible sound.

Of course, no pictures can do the Grand Canyon justice. You really wont understand the scale and awe of this place unless you see it with your own eyes. Even seeing it, standing here on this ledge, I have trouble believing it. It looks completely fake and disproportionate, like a painting. The trouble is that the farther away an object is, the harder it is for our stereoscopic vision to determine its distance. As the difference between the angles of our eyes approaches zero, the scene approaches a flat two-dimensional backdrop. Our eyes are fooled so easily, because we've never experienced anything so MASSIVE, so impressive, that they just give up and stare in wonder. I continually found myself looking at one small feature, rock or tree in the nearest foreground layer, sometimes looking back towards the people behind me. It was as if my mind and eyes were so overwhelmed with the enormity of the situation, they preferred to just ignore it. Matt instantly compared this phenomenon to his feelings of moving away to Australia: The sheer size of the thing is so frightening, we've just been ignoring it for months now. Perhaps the the whole thing can be pieced together when all the pictures are finally developed...

"Little Colorado River"	Panoramic 1	Panoramic 2	Panoramic 3
On the road near a smaller canyon	"Desert View" Panoramic 1	"Desert View" Panoramic 2	"Desert View" Panoramic 3
Lipan Point	"That's Pretty Big"	Raven over Moran Point	James and Matt
You could almost jump across	Another raven flys by	Perched	Trail Closed
From Grandview Point	Matt and James at Mather Point	Wasp	Joshua tree

As we left Arizona via the Hoover Dam, the sun was just setting in the sky ahead of us. Living my whole life on a flat island of clay and sand, I've never seen a sunset over the mountains. From the altitude we were at, it was like driving into the clouds as the distant ranges turned to a soft hazy blue, backlit by orange and red. It was incredible:

Storm cloud dropping	Desert Sunset	Blue Mountain Sunset	Turning orange...
Desert hills	Between the hills	Jagged Horizon	Silhouette
Ripples of color

By the time we got to the Hoover Dam, the sky and mountains were exploding with color. There was no time to take a tour of the dam, but we couldn't resist parking the car on the shoulder and capturing some of these images:

Hoover Dam at sunset	Almost in Nevada...	Sky over Hoover Dam	Insane Cable Car
Lit up	Wow	Clouds on fire	Boulder City sky at midnight

We'd originally planned on passing through Las Vegas and staying somewhere in California, but somebody told us that you can stay in Las Vegas for $20 a night, and have a lobster dinner for only $5. If you haven't already noticed, Matt is more of a let's-go-do-it-and-find-out kind of a guy, and I'm more of a no-let's-find-out-first-and-have-a-plan kind of guy. This trip has so far been leaning heavily to the whatever-happens side of that coin, allowing me a small bit of pre-planning and risk-acessment for the trip. But tonight, we wouldn't have found a place to sleep were it not for www.hotels.com and maps.google.com. You just can't drive through Las Vegas as if it were a small two-traffic-light town shopping arround for the best price. Let me simplify that: You can't just drive through Las Vegas, period! The lights and signs and confusion and cars is so blinding, that you just want to pull over and park, only there's no place to park! But, laptop on lap, googlemaps open, I was able to navigate us directly to The Sahara, a past-its-prime three-star hotel/casino for only $45 a night, with relatively safe parking in their relatively safe parking garage. There were signs for cheaper places, but we didn't feel comfortable leaving our car at those places overnight, let alone ourselves. We gorged ourselves on the Sahara's gormet buffet, and slept at long last, relaxed.

Balcony panoramic 1

Balcony panoramic 2

Balcony panoramic 3

Balcony panoramic 4