The desert-ed Arizona

We  left off with us riding into the heat of the Arizona desert. I have to say my expectations were proven as wrong as they could be. I imagined a boring rock desert and a seemingly endless drive in the middle of nowhere but in reality, the 7-8 hours drive was barely enough to get my jaw back from the floor. First, the change from the green vegetation to the desert is very sharp, if someone falls asleep in the car for five minutes, he/she can wake up in a completely different scenery. 

To summarize it, It’s just beautiful beyond reason. It’s the classical western scene, which prompted us to play Morricone songs. More precisely only one, the „Man with the harmonica” from the movie „Once upon a time in the west” but as it  fades into itself perfectly, we didn’t realize for long time that the iphone was on repeat mode and we had been listening to a three minute song for a half an hour. 

Anyway, trying to describe the scenery in words wouldn’t do much justice to it, so I’ll just leave it to the pictures to speak for themselves (I’ll try to make them available asap, but given that we have around 3-4000 of them it’s not going to be a 10 minute job). I almost gave my life to make the sunset pictures as I just jumped out of the car and sprinted up to the top of a hill which turned out to be a pretty bad idea given the extremely hot air and the ammount of dust in the air. As a result me and oxygene grew kind of distant from each other, but at least I can say I have the photographer’s spirit.

Beyond the natural beauty, it’s also a pretty cool place, rowdy bars and diners  are lined up in tiny towns around the road, one „world famous” burger/steak/random food place after another. Things got even better when we took the historic Route 66 from Kingman. The diners turn into museums or classic chainsaw massacre stlye gas stations, ghost towns and theme diners, it’s just plain awesome. We even found a diner that claimed itself to be the official Bedrock, and for five bucks, we could have walked into Fred Flinstones living room. Well, we did not, but instead we got the world’s cheapest coffee for five cents (!) and some random but delicious burgers. 

The short story of Route 66 is that during the late 19th/early 20th century gold rush, it was the standard paved road to get to California from Chicago giving birth to an army of entertainment and service ventures along the way. Of course, the establishment of the modern highway system made it obsolete and now it’s just of historical and touristic value.

We arrived at our Grand Canyon lodging long after sunset but we couldn’t wait to check it out, so even before occupying our room, we drove to the so called mother’s point and took some night pictures. The moonlight was perfect and thus long exposure time yielded excellent graphics. Of course, we had to check out the ledge, and take pictures there, what we didn’t see though was the incredible depth under us, a sight for which we had to wait till the morning.

The lodging receptionist was probably the model for Walt Disney’s Goofy, I swear he even did the doi, doi sometimes. It turned out that in the US, when you book a room for five people, it might very well happen that there’s only four bedspace coming with it (maybe the price is for the oxygene consumption of the fifth person) and we had to pay an extra $10 for a fifth bed.  Swallowed this, we swallowed our usual whiskeybottle-content and called it a night.

The next day we saw the canyon in the daylight. To put it into 16th century English court manners, it’s just F-U-C-K-I-N-G mindblowing....period. Again, you guys have to wait for the pics but I can honestly say that it’s one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

We took a hike down a trail that would have eventually (in a day) lead to the Colorado river at the bottom of the valley. As we were on a tight schedule we only took a three hours hike down to a lookout point that gave us yet another view I can’t describe as I’ve already run out of the proper adjectives. 

Upon finishing and taking one of our most popular blazer check-in photos, we hopped back into our second home and hit the road towards Sin City  Las Vegas, but that’s a completely different story...