Giant Freaking Holes.

I'll assume that you've seen National Lampoon's Vacation. Well, sadly my trip to the Grand Canyon wasn't nearly as funny. If only my father was Chevy Chase. But he isn't, and it tears me up inside. Every day. I just hope you like holes in shit.

Cause here's a million pictures of just that.

Arches National Park

Our first stop on our five day tour of the American Southwest was the Arches park just above Moab, Utah. It was a great way to start the trip, lots of funky looking rocks, but it was like a million degrees there. Also my parents got fed up with my scrambling to get good angles and left me for dead at one point.

I lived.

Bryce Canyon National Park

The next day we traveled along Highway 12 Scenic Byway, an All-American Road.
I couldn't see what made it more American than any other road, as found no trace of baseball or apple pie. There was a Boulder, Utah along the way but that place sucked. Not even one walking mall! Anyway. We eventually made our way to Bryce Canyon, the hoodoo capital of America. There were many European tourists (pretty much during the whole trip really) which was fun because I learned the word for hoodoo in like five languages.

It's hoodoo.

The Grand Canyon: North Rim

So the next day we left Utah and crossed into Arizona. I have to say I liked Utah. I never would have expected to, since I hate everything, but it was really quite pretty, and aside from Arches much of it was temperate and green. And despite what I had heard, I didn't see a single Mormon church until we entered Arizona. Also Utah's getting the Pirate Party, which is just awesome. But, as this was a Grand Canyon trip we had to go stupid old Arizona. A few hours later we made it to the North Rim of the canyon. Eagerly I grabbed my camera and headed for Bright Angel Point to take in a panoramic view. But that freaking hole scared the hell out of me. I took a few pictures and got out of there. Then, as if I wasn't anxious enough, we went to a higher view point... the highest in fact: Point Imperial. This is best phrase I could really think of to describe exactly what this view was like in person:

Jesus Shitting Christ-Fuck.

If I fell somehow (quite impossible from where I was standing, tethered to the car), I would probably have died of starvation before I hit the ground. Yeah. It was pretty high. But what was really neat was that up there we could see a rain storm coming from like fifty miles away... quickly.

So we had a picnic.

The Grand Canyon: South Rim

But of course, that wasn't enough for us. When we were done with the North we drove all the way around that damned hole to the South Rim. Passed right through the Navajo reservation territory too. This was not an All-American Road. Go figure. When we arrived at the first viewpoint I noticed right away how much more touristy it was. I bought a veggie-burger at the food court. Behold the majesty of nature. But bring cash. Despite the crowds and the.. gift shops.. it was a good view, much wider than the North Rim angles. At the next viewpoint it started to rain a bit, so I started running and yelling at my family to get back in the car. "Ball lightening!" I shouted, "Shut the door!" For those of you who don't know, ball lightening is real. It will find you, and it will kill you. We were able to keep ahead of the rain, having about five minutes at each view before the storm caught up. But then further along the canyon we looked back, and there in the sky was a vivid rainbow:

Nifty.

After that the rain blew over and we were able to see a fantastic sunset over the canyon. All in all a pretty eventful day. It would have been perfect if we could have pulled over on the road and seen the stars out there, but my father was paranoid that we wouldn't get a hotel if we didn't get back into a cellular service area and make a reservation immediately. Of course we ended up having no trouble finding a room. The next day we headed down south into central Arizona, and there was quite a bit of confusion surrounding what time it was. Apparently they don't have daylight savings time in Arizona, except in Navajo country, so at some point our cell phones auto-corrected the time. My dad's watch, however, was an hour early, so on top of his usual impatience and slave-driving, I'll bet he thought we were all deliberately sleeping in to spite him.

And that's when things got ugly.

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Stay tuned for the anti-climactic conclusion to the Drakos Family Southwest Vacation.