Grand Canyon Family Trip 2016 in Travels with ConnieK

We returned from a wonderful trip to Arizona to a tropical storm in the Gulf! Thankfully for us, Hermine (who thinks these names up? What’s wrong with “Sue” and “Betty” and “George” and “Harry”? Instead we get all the weird new age names. Okay, tucking grouchy ConnieK away.) decided to head north, but not before strengthening to hurricane status. It strengthens and slackens, but I doubt it’ll be stronger than a category one storm and anyone living in hurricane country should be able to weather that! So, lots of rain for the past few days, a few idiots trying to drive through flooded streets and not making it, and the public beach was flooded in two feet of water up to the parking lot. No strong winds so far.

It didn’t seem that we’d planned a lot when we left, but now that I’m home, I feel as if we hardly stopped to catch our breath! We met here at our house and left for Tampa at 4 am. Our son rented an SUV to ferry us all and arrival/check-in, etc. went without a hitch.

The 4 hour plane ride was long, though, so once we got settled in to our connecting flight from Phoenix to Williams, we’d sort of had it.

The plane didn’t leave the gate. An announcement was made that because of weather in Williams, they had to lighten the load and were seeking 6 volunteers to reschedule or they’d start kicking off those who’d boarded last. We talked it over and decided there were 5 of us and we could rent a car and just make the 2 hour drive, but American Airlines would not comp us, so we stayed put. The people who were ejected were quite unhappy. One couple simply refused to leave! Finally, another couple went instead. An hour after departure, we finally left, wondering why the plane could burn fuel on the tarmac for an hour but didn’t have enough to tote 6 extra people.

It was COLD in Flagstaff! We’d expected temperatures near 100 degrees, but Flagstaff is a much higher elevation and it was monsoon season. We fell into bed at our Ramada Inn accommodations. The rooms were reasonable and standard Ramada: mini-fridge (nice, since we were staying 4 days. We used it to store drinks & lunch makings for our hikes), microwave (my tea with no coffee flavor from the coffee maker!), coffee maker (with pot, which my guys prefer rather than single serve), iron & board, etc. My only complaints were a noisy a/c unit (they all are, so I expected it) and the room hadn’t been vacuumed. Cleaning was better the following days. Oh, and they did not offer a continental breakfast, which surprised me. Instead, they gave us 15% off on any meal at the onsite restaurant. The food was pretty mediocre.

Day Two was filled with stunning views of the Grand Canyon. Pictures cannot do it justice, but I will try. We began at Mather Point, working our way along the west rim, toward Grandview Point, Moran Point, Lipan Point, Navajo Point, the Desertview Watchtower, and finally to the Tusayan Museum and Ruin.

I loved the stone architecture of the Tusayan museum. The ruins date to around 1185 AD. It is estimated that around two dozen people lived in the community. The last picture is of a kiva, a ceremonial chamber. Most kivas are underground. Some experts think this one was above ground because the ground was too hard to dig out. This is an ancestral Puebloan culture.

We only walked a part of the trail down. The kids went further:

I mentioned earlier that it was monsoon season. In some of the pictures you can see rain in the distance, but we ran into very little of it. More in the next post!