David and I have been watching a fabulous documentary on PBS the past couple of nights about the National Parks. I know, we sound like such old people, but it has really been beautiful, interesting, and moving.
Subsequently, it has made us decide to take a road trip to the Grand Canyon next summer...we think. If you google map a trip to Grand Canyon National Park from Middle Tennessee you'll see that the estimated traveling time directly across I-40 is 1 day...that's right...24 hours. I'm not sure about taking such a long car trip, but we could stop on the way there. We would also have audiobooks, movies on our ipods, etc. to keep us entertained.
Now, David has never seen the Grand Canyon, but I have. When I was in elementary school our family set out on the journey that I think every family should take just once...the Great American Car Trip (well, in our case it was a minivan trip, but you get the idea). The extent of entertainment on that trip was books, coloring books and crayons, a travel game of Trouble, and the state license plate game (We saw all 50 by the time we got to the Grand Canyon. The last one we found was West Virginia at the Grand Canyon. To this day I still get excited when I see a WV license plate.)
Our end destination was Las Vegas because my Dad had a business trip there, but we took about a week to get there and almost a week to get home. We learned everything you'd ever want to know about Native Americans. We saw a meteor crater. My parents almost got a citation from a National Park Ranger who did not seem to understand that thousand-year-old ruins are just BEGGING for scrawny, country, been-cooped-up-in-the-car little girls to scramble all over them. We saw the OK Corral in Tombstone and a western movie set in Tucson. We even visited one of the oldest restaurants in North America where we ate sopapillas so light and flaky that I've never forgotten them. We also learned that my Dad knew a song about almost every town we came to because we got to hear him sing it the last hour or so before we got there.
Anyway, our last stop before Vegas was the Grand Canyon. If you've never seen it I can't begin to describe it...you just have to see it in person, and when you do...you will be speechless too.
1 comment:
That trip was awesome! I remember I got to touch a King Snake at the meteor crater. I also think of when we were hiking DOWN into Mesa Verde, (little) Carla asking why the people coming back UP the incredibly steep trail were "huffing and puffing."
Post a Comment