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Published: December 6th 2010
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Today Mandy, Sandy, Rachel and I drove to the Grand Canyon.It was a good day. I had fun.
Oh how I miss reading journal entries from my Grade 1's! So simple and yet so entertaining.
Ok here goes, in all seriousness. It was Monday the first of November, the day after Halloween and whilst some of us had retired to bed at a reasonable time, others (not going to mention names but it starts with M and rhymes with Candy!) crawled in at hmmm around 6am?! So for some of us it was a tough morning to wake up, pack up and get on our way.
We didn't arrive until about 8pm, a slight mis-calculation on our part of travel time. It was a beautiful drive, amazing in every way, although most of us were pretty wrecked and unfortunately slept part/most of the way, unless driving of course!
Unfortunately we missed the glorious sunset but we were able to grab the last glimpse of sun reflecting off the forever changing colours of the rock below. Have I mentioned how cold it was? My goodness, after spending a good week and a half in shorts and t-shirts we arrive in the
desert completely under-dressed and which in turn meant we were freezing! Embarrassingly enough I think we only looked into the canyon for at the most 4 minutes?! However we made up for it by waking early Tuesday morning and driving to a lookout point for sunrise, also a very brisk morning, but worth it just the same. So peaceful and need I say scenic.
As soon as we'd eaten we drove to the hop on hop off bus and explored the entire South Rim. It was simply magnificant. No words can really describe the feeling you get when you're standing in front of something so overwhelmingly huge!
We walked right around to Hermit's Rest which was our final destination. Far too many photos, a good bit of exercise (it had been a while) and glorious weather made for another memorable day.
After eating some lunch it was time to move on and move out, we were off to Yosemite National Park via Vegas , so needed to get on the road. It was a long drive, but relatively straight, so not too painful.
Wednesday saw us take part in an epic journey through Death Valley. It was an extremely hot
day, I had an unexpected bout of motion sickness (I've never felt so sick in my life and I don't think the recommendation to turn your air conditioner off helped!) and we were all tired and hot, have I mentioned it was hot?! So hot that when we finally arrived at our destination ( Beaty was the town lucky enough to house us for the night and heart of Death Valley....creepy much?!) we went straight to sleep...awww.
After a surprisingly good nights sleep, and the discovery of bed bugs!! we were ready to endure another epic journey to Yosemite National Park. After a huge 10 hours (the most we'd driven on this trip) we arrived at our little home away from home in the beautiful Yosemite valley.
A terrible nights sleep on everyone's part, we woke up ready to conquer some hikes! We drove to the N.P which was about 15-20minutes from the lodge and got things underway. We decided to hike up to Vernal Falls on the Mist Trail which was, let's say a consistently steep hill followed by hmmm only about 600 odd steps! But it was all worth it, as the trail takes you right to
the top of the Vernal falls where the view is breathtaking.
Wow! the park was beautiful, so green and lucious, lots of large old trees, huge leaves and gorgeous views. It was also really nice to get out hiking again after doing it so often in Banff our bodies had almost forgotten. We then ventured back to the village for a snack (always eating!) and then ventured to the Nevada falls view.
We visited the park at what I think was the perfect time of year, the fall colours still changing and the moderate temperatures. We were very lucky it didn't rain and that we were able to enjoy our hike in such beautiful weather. I definitely recommend you pay Yosemite a visit, it's well worth it!
And so we headed back to the lodge for some dinner, a bit of net surfing (where rach and sandy randomly booked a holiday to Hawaii! ) and watched a really obscure movie. An early night (as always) in order to get ready for the drive back to San Francisco....which yes you guessed it, meant we were only 2 days away from our little foursome being shattered into tiny little pieces!!NOOOOOOOOOOO
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