Tuesday 31st March

We made a reasonable start and got on the 64 heading for the south rim of the Grand Canyon. The amount of traffic on the roads showed us what to expect when we got there. It was quite something to drive in there, park up on the side of the road, walk a few dozen feet through some trees and then have the unimaginably vast panorama of the Grand Canyon laid out before you. I wasn’t quite ready for just how wide it is, let alone how deep. Like many sights we have seen on this trip, it doesn’t quite seem real as you are looking at it, almost like your brain is having some difficulty comprehending the messages being sent by your optic nerve. We walked a little way along the heavily populated rim path, then decided after a trip to the visitor’s centre that we would head out on the Desert View Drive, to see if we could do a little hike to a less populated part of the rim from somewhere along the road.
After a Reuben sandwich and a fabulous chocolate brownie, we started on the drive and found a very appealing looking trail just a little way along it. The road had curved away from the rim a little so we thought it would make a good bit of a hike through the trees to get there. We parked up and started walking out amongst the trees, soon realising that there was no trail as such to follow. The trees were sparse enough that we could easily find our way through. It was great to arrive at the rim at a much less trodden section of it. We went towards an appealing looking promontory to see if we could get an even better view. When we got there we found that we could safely get all the way to the end of it, and were well rewarded with spectacular views that the vast majority of visitors probably do not see from this angle. From the position that we were in, we actually could not see any other people in any direction, it felt like we had the entire Grand Canyon to ourselves!
Very satisfied with how things had worked out today, after the disappointment of not being able to do our hike yesterday, we got back on the road heading west on the I-40 towards the Mojave National Preserve. We knew we were back in Nevada when we started seeing all the casinos again. We stayed in a town called Searchlight on the 95, probably the smallest town we had stayed in so far. We went for dinner in the Golden Nugget Casino, as it seemed to be the only option other than McDonalds, and I had my first taste of meatloaf! Before going to bed, we actually drove a little way into the Preserve with hopes of getting some good views of the night sky. Unfortunately it was fairly cloudy, and it seems that the Vegas light pollution was affecting us even this far away. However, it was quite a strange experience to be out in the desert in the middle of nowhere in the dark.