July 24-25, 2016

This is how packing works.  We’ve got a couple boxes for dry food and other loose items, a cooler for cold food items, and then the campsite stuff and backpacks.  Car camping makes a lot of things convenient.  And at $12 a night for camping, this is a lot cheaper than other options – it probably helps that I like camping a lot too.

They provide well water at the info signs, which is pretty neat.  And it’s pretty decent tasting too.  We decided to refill jugs for free while we’re visiting the watch tower tonight.

We’re back at the location where we watched the sunset the previous night.  There’s three upper stories in the watch tower and hopefully they’ll have great views.

It’s a shame the windows kind of cut off the panorama.

This sign is all over the building.  You’d think people would have enough respect for a park like this to not deface things…

…but people are jerks.

Dave is definitely a jerk.

More defacing!  Actually, this was art in the watch tower – there are pictographs in certain parts of the canyon.  We didn’t go see the real ones.

A cool plateau in the distance.  The guide originally said this was located on tribal lands off the national park, but upon further inspection via google maps, this is on national park land and we could have gone out there.  We probably could have anyway with tribal permission but it’s nice to know for future reference.  I imagine you need permission to drive across tribal lands to get there unless you want to hike across the canyon.

Afterwards, we drove to the visitor center again just to finish out our trip to the Grand Canyon.  We finally visited Mather Point, which is the main canyon view from the VC.  We found a place to view the South Kaibab trail again, which is neat to look back on.

Some really cool formations you couldn’t see from the trail.

Another cave, past the point where we went on the hike.  You could probably spend the rest of your life exploring things in the Grand Canyon and never even come close to 50% of it.

At the back of the visitor center, there’s an elk just resting in the shade.  We thought it was fake at first.

About midday, we finally leave.  Driving through Tusayan – we have to stop at McDonalds.  Given the prices around the rest of this ridiculous city, we expected overly-priced food…and it was only slightly more than normal McDonalds.

The next part of our drive is to Temecula, CA (489 miles), about 80 miles south of Los Angeles, to visit my Aunt who just moved out there.  We spent a good portion of the drive on I-40, which was two lanes and tons of traffic (especially trucks) the whole way.  A lot of desert out here, and not the pretty desert like in NM.  At some point, traffic came to a complete halt, due to construction and a possible accident.  It was hot outside and there wasn’t a city, gas station, or rest stop in sight…I’d hate to have a car break down out here.

This was our view for most of the trip.

Until we got closer to the coast, that is.  Then this became the view.  There’s a big fire in the Monterey area, which could put a kink in our plans to visit Cannery Row and Laguna Seca Raceway…

When we finally got past San Bernadino it cleared up.  We met with my Aunt in Temecula and stayed with her the next couple of nights.  We introduced her to Korean BBQ the first night.  She worked the next day, so we decided to check out LA.

After driving two hours to get about 80 miles (JA got a taste of LA traffic), we got to Hollywood Blvd and drove through.  The Museum of Broken Relationships; the name cracks me up.  We didn’t stop.

JA wanted to see Rodeo Blvd, so we drove down that for a bit before deciding to hit the beach.

Muscle beach.  We grabbed some food from one of the boardwalk places and then spent a couple hours playing in the surf before deciding to go back to my Aunt’s place.

The night was spent making tri tip steaks and chatting.  We’ll take off in the morning to Santa Cruz.

Back to Grand Canyon Day 2 Part 2 ::: On to Santa Cruz and Yosemite