One Dress Month: Diary of a Road Trip: Cortez to Flagstaff. Via the Grand Canyon. Of Course.

Day 5 - Cortez to Flagstaff, AZ

     Miles: 344
     Hours: 7
     Stayed with:
     Ken
     (My mom's
     cousin)
     States: 2 -
     CO and AZ

Our first stop today was a place I've always wanted to go - Four Corners Monument - and we were in 4 states at once. The monument is on a Native American Reservation and is not a hyped-up tourist attraction at all which was very nice to see. An added bonus was that all four states at four corners were states I'd never been to. Normally I don't count a state unless I've eaten a meal or stayed there overnight, but four corners was so cool that I'm going to make an exception for Utah and New Mexico.

We then spent the whole afternoon at the Grand Canyon driving from one vista point to the next and bravely exploring some of the more accessible rocks. We went to the visitor center and were completely overwhelmed by all of the things you could do there - hiking, helicopter rides, boat rides - so we just walked around pretty aimlessly, had dinner, and rode the free bus.

Getting to spend 6 hours here completely made up for the marathon driving the past two days. One look of the canyon and we completely forgot that we'd just spent two 13-hour days in the car.

This guy wouldn't get out of my picture

We got to see a cool lightening storm sweeping through the canyon. If you look at the picture to the right there were enormous amounts of lightening happening right behind me in that giant black cloud. We tried for a bit to get a picture of one, but quickly gave up on that idea. The storm was really cool, but unfortunately resulted in a sunset-less evening as there were far too many clouds.

This pose is called 'owling' by the way...

...for those of you uninformed in the art of posing

We've already started planning a return trip because you need to spend at least a month there to see all of the cool stuff and appropriately explore from land, water, and sky.

After the canyon we drove about an hour to Flagstaff, AZ to stay with my mom's cousin who was nice enough to host us for the evening.

I tried to narrow down the pictures for the post, but completely failed so just enjoy how lovely we look at the Grand Canyon ;-).