More very sad Indian settlements en route today, all looking like each other. Not sure what happens in these "reservations" in regard to entitlement to land, but the houses just seem to be randomly erected in no order, often even with no real roads in to each house, sometimes in loose clusters of three or four, and often a lone house sits with no-one else nearby. They do seem to share the Aboriginals' penchant for collecting wrecked motor vehicles of all shapes and sizes!
Bit cloudy today, but still warm. The weather has been amazing.
Every few miles there is of course another weird church, full gospel happy clappers, or some never-heard-of-before church. The occasional Seventh Day Adventist church appears, but definitely none of the mainstream churches have bothered to put much effort into these communities. Haven't even seen a Mormon church today - must be getting out of their territory too.
Mostly pretty flat, uninteresting country, scrubby growth, with the occasional herd of cattle, a few horses and even, surprisingly, some sheep!!
More roadside stalls selling cheap jewellery.
First canyon we saw was the Little Colorado River canyon - very impressive, but sure the real thing will be more so. This is now very close to the border between Arizona and the south east corner of Nevada.
Once on top of the plateau in the Grand Canyon National Park, the area is heavily wooded, with substantial pine trees (dunno what sort of Pines) but they are no longer the scrubby specimens of past days.
And then..... We'd arrived at the Grand Canyon. Yee haa!!!
Parked the Van and took the shuttle into "town". We did the South Rim Walk this afternoon, which took about four hours. Truly awe inspiring scenery, and although we've all seen photo's, you just cannot believe what you're looking at when you're there!! Dragged ourselves away, and got back to the RV park at about 5.15pm.
Much to our delight and amusement, the park (which is in a National Park) was full of wandering Elk. One huge Male with the most splendid set of antlers, a couple of young bucks who were just establishing themselves, and had a fair way to go, and about 20 females of varying ages and sizes.
The large male spent the entire evening bellowing his weird call at full volume as he wandered around the park - we were not sure whether he was trying to assemble his 'girls', or whether he was warning off other males. But they were there all evening and again in the morning, really just ignoring the humans, and SO close, at one stage, Arthur fed one of them with a handful of tiny acorns he has picked up off the ground. This is apparently their food of choice in the park.. We have photo's.....
To think we spent hours driving here and there in Yellowstone to try to see some Elk, and there they were just outside our door!!! Cool, very cool........
Arch cooked up some spag. bol. for dinner. Bed. Stuffed......
Monday......
Waking up in the National Park, it was amazingly quiet. Very few bird calls, and it was strange when you think how noisy our dawn chorus is in Oz.
Having a late start today, we thought we'd use up the eggs and bacon. Sounded good, but our fridge has been behaving badly, and as Arch cracked 3 of the 4 eggs, he realised that they were frozen. Had never cooked frozen raw eggs before, and they looked a bit funny, but tasted okay!!! We have also periodically been having Pepsi 'Slushies' as the fridge freezes anything liquid. The frozen Pepsi is okay, except you have to slice the top off the can with a can opener to add it to the Rum, but the Budweiser slushies have no redeeming features, and are definitely NOT okay.
We had a 45 minute helicopter flight over the Canyon this morning This was amazing, and we flew right down inside the canyon for minutes at a time, and then hovered in front of a wall, gradually rising, for several minutes, also, and repeated this over different sections of the Canyon. To see the fantastic colours and layers of rocks up so close was brilliant. The amazing Colorado river down below seems so small, but is SUCH an important river in north America.
Poor elderly citizens had a nap this afternoon. Nice......
Drinks and Bar food in a cocktail bar - okay, and no cooking or cleaning up in the Van...
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