Day 25: Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon

Day two of shared driving. Seriously, this makes such a huge difference; I didn't end each day feeling like I needed to sleep for 24 hours, and get myself a whole new knee to replace the one in my right leg that had seized up. And that's just from driving an automatic!

We drove into downtown Santa Fe for a couple of hours before heading out, because it's one of my mom's favourite cities. It is very beautiful; almost everything is adobe buildings, and not much over 3 floors. And yet the city stretches out over quite a wide area, and has a big freeway system, so it does *feel* like a city; just a...short, quaint one. :)

We headed out from Santa Fe through to Arizona, apparently following much of the old Route 66 highway. We had almost made it out of the state when the first car-related trouble of the trip hit: a rock bounced up off the highway and crashed into my windshield, making a circular mark in the lower middle part of the windshield.

As a side note, we'd driven over some gravel road the day before (because there was construction work; I'm not taking my poor little Echo off-roading, don't worry!), and my mom had immediately leaned forward and started pushing on the windshield. Apparently she'd read somewhere that this can prevent cracks if rocks do actually bounce up and hit the windshield. I'm not sure of the science of of this, but the information is now out there for you. Use it wisely. I will warn you, however, of one thing that this method *does* result in: fingerprints on the inside of your windshield.

Anyway, the rock hit us just outside of Gallup, NM, so we went into town to get some coffee (we're like the English that way, only on crack: espresso instead of tea.) We find a coffee place, park the car, get out, and realise that there is a glass place right across the street from the coffee place. So I pop on over, and they tell me they can do the quick fix thing (which my mom - who knew she was such an expert in autombile glass??? - describes as squirting some gel in and making the mark go away) in 15-20 minutes for $25. Awesome! So we wait.

Turns out there are *2* rock holes on the windshield; we have no idea when the first happend, as it's so low and small we didn't even notice it. So it takes a little longer and we pay a little (a very little) more. The holes didn't quite disappear, but they also weren't spreading, so we were happy enough and went on our merry way.

We drove mostly interstates, in the interests of time (we wanted to get to the Grand Canyon in time to put up the tent before it got dark), so there wasn't much to see. We stopped in Flagstaff for dinner, and may I just report that the staff at the Flagstaff Visitor's Centre were among the least friendly I've run into during this whole trip? On the other hand, Flagstaff has some good-looking restaurants, and the one we ate at had some delicious vegetarian fare. I knew nothing about Flagstaff, so this was a pleasant surprise!

Then we high-tailed it up to the Grand Canyon, because there was a break in the clouds and we were hoping to get the tent up before it started raining again. There was virtually no traffic on the two-lane highway we took most of the way, which was a bit unnerving, *especially* since there were no signs to reassure us that we were, in fact, taking the highway to the Grand Canyon! However, there were various "adopt a highway" signs with the names of local businesses, and we reasoned that those would only be there if this was a regularly-travelled highway, so all was well.

We made it to the Grand Canyon National Park, found our campsite, put up the tent, and hightailed it out to the Canyon to catch as much as we could before the light faded.

Wow.

I was a little worried that it had been built up so much that it couldn't live up to expectations, but it did. It's difficult to describe in words - or even to capture in film - how amazingly gorgeous it is. It's huge, with amazing colours and rock formations. Also, however, full of tourists. Many of whom are telling ecach other entertaing "facts" about the Grand Canyon, so that was kind of amusing. :)

Then we got back into the tent and went to sleep as early as possible, with our alarms set for 5 a.m. so we could get up and watch the sunrise.