It wasn’t until we started to walk along the rim, and the view began to change with each overlook, that it became real to me. The sheer size and volume is staggering and I’m positive that no one can understand the size just by looking at it. There is a story told at the visitor’s center: when the first white men laid eyes on it, their Indian guides tried to make them understand by telling them that the Colorado was a mighty river below, but the explorers were simply unable to grasp the size of the canyon and were convinced that what they were looking at was about a six-foot wide stream that was not very far away from them.

Most of our exploration at the Canyon was limited to the rim’s paved walkways and the overlooks, due to having children with us. The trails are not lined with rails, of course, and they are a fairly grueling hike, so we decided against doing too much with the boys. We did walk down Bright Angel Trail to a not-too-distant point where there is an archway carved into the rock to allow the trail to continue (pic at right). I think if we visit this place again, we will do it when they are older and then we can possibly hike to an overnight stay at Phantom Ranch, or to the beautiful waterfalls in the Havasupai part of the Canyon.

As you will see if you view the whole photo album at our photo site, I only uploaded a small portion of the 200 or so photos I have from the Canyon. They all look the same after a while and I didn’t want to bore anyone, so I just picked a few highlights. We went back to the canyon another day for the sunset, which I will write more about in another post, including pics.

In fact, there is a signed illustration by John Lasseter (from Pixar) on the wall in the visitors center. He and his son took this trip a few years ago, and Seligman was one of the main inspirations for the film.

Two brothers, Juan and Angel Delgadillo, who grew up in this town, watching the birth of Rt. 66 in the 1920′s, and again seeing Seligman bypassed by Rt. 40 in the 70s, decided to do something about it. They started the first historical Rt. 66 society and petitioned the state of Arizona to mark the remaining pieces of Rt. 66 (some of it has disappeared and is no longer passable) as a historical route. This started the present-day nostalgia tripping along the road. Read this page about Seligman.

We had eaten at the Copper Cart (1st pic below) the evening before, when we first arrived in town, then toured the world-famous museum and barber shop owned by Angel Delgadillo (2nd pic). Then, the highlight of Rt. 66 that I was looking forward to: we ate at the Snow Cap Drive-in (3rd pic).

We thought it was supposed to be sunny and warm in Arizona?? Along this trip, we had rain, then sleet, then actual snow, in May in Arizona!!!

Oh well, it’s supposed to finally clear up and start warming up this morning (Sunday). We’re heading to the Grand Canyon today. Will write more later.

Then it was a 1.5 hr ride to Kingman, Arizona, where we hopped on to Rt. 66 and headed West toward Oatman. This stretch of Rt. 66 to Oatman is adventurous, to say the least. There are wide-open spaces that last for miles, with buttes and rock mountains lining the desert valleys.

As you get nearer to Oatman, the Black Mountains loom large in the distance as you drive across the desert floor. They continue to grow in stature, and then all at once, you are ascending them on a winding road the likes of which I have never driven before.

There are so many switchbacks that you begin to feel like you’re going nowhere in a hurry. The steep drop-offs from the road to the valley below are mostly exposed, with no guard rails and I would not have wanted to be the one in the passenger seat, having to trust the driver.

On the way up, we stopped at Fishbowl Springs, where there are rock steps cut into the side of the mountain, close to the road. At the top of the stairs is a spring that used to be the only source of water for weary Rt. 66 travelers for many, many miles. Back then, the vehicles would routinely break down trying to make the difficult climb up the mountain, so this spring may have saved many lives. A bowl has been fashioned out of the rock w/concrete to catch the spring water and make it easier to dip your canteen into.

When you get to the top of the long climb in your vehicle, you will find yourself crossing Sitgreaves Pass where you can pull off and look back down into the miles of open valley, glimpsing traces of the old Beale Wagon Road trail hugging the left hillside. It’s barely there, but you can make it out.

Then it’s a slow descent back down the other side of the mountains, where we found this car (picture below), which apparently didn’t fare as well as we had. It’s also obviously been there for many years. Enlarge the picture to see what looks like a pile of rocks at the top left of the car. That is actually the edge of the road which we had just driven from and he apparently decided to take a shortcut.

We arrived in “ghost town” of Oatman, AZ, This town was booming during the gold rush and early on in Rt. 66′s history. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their wedding night here in the Oatman Hotel in 1939. The town became deserted when the mines stopped producing. The miners left behind their burros, which have actually thrived in the wild, so now the town is also famous for it’s wild burrows wandering around where they please. There are now performers who are there during the day, as it has become a tourist attraction. We spent a couple of hours there, watching the gunfights, touring the old buildings that are still standing from when it was just a ghost town, feeding the wild burrows.

Oatman is a great place to spend an afternoon, especially if you have kids.

We then headed back the way we came, over the mountains and through the deserts until we happened upon the restored historic Cool Springs Filling Station (1st picture below). We kept going, touring through Hackberry General Store (2nd picture below), and finished up by spending the night at the Rt. 66 Motel in Seligman, AZ. More about that in my next post.

The boys loved the plane ride! Evan just kept giggling when we took off. Vegas was pretty at night as we flew over it. The way they line every street with identical lights makes it look like a giant circuit board or something as you see it from far off.

We’re staying in the Excalibur hotel, which looks like a giant castle (click the picture to enlarge it).

We will be seeing some kid-friendly places here in Vegas today, like the Circus Circus; roller coaster and other stuff at the New York, New York; and of course all of the fun things to do here at the Excalibur.

Ok, we’re going for breakfast now (8:30 Vegas time). I’ll write more tonight.

UPDATED at 9:10 PM:
We’re back in the hotel room now getting everything packed back into our bags. We will start the best part of our trip tomorrow. We’re really excited. Vegas has a lot to see and it’s really shimmery, but I guess it’s just not really for us. We did have fun at Circus Circus (very kid-friendly) and also while walking and driving along the strip looking at the various spectacular hotels. The MGM was really nice inside and we got to see the lions come out into their glass-enclosed cage, which we could walk underneath of. The New York, New York was our favorite one just based on the design of it, inside and out. Really cool. We wanted to ride the coaster, but Evan was a little bit short of the height restriction.

More tomorrow.

Google Maps

At some point in the first few days of researching the trip, I realized that there were so many places to visit, that I was going to have a hard time keeping everything straight in my mind without some sort of advanced planning and documentation. The first thing I did when I saw how much there is available to do and see, was to check Google Maps for the driving times between each destination and our base location in Flagstaff. This is when I realized that I needed to save the locations into a Google “My Maps” saved map, so that I wouldn’t have to continually what else we wanted to see and where these places were located. My Maps lets you save locations as push pins, and highlight areas, paths, and roads by actually drawing right onto the Google map that you are working with. You can add video, photos and website links to the maps, and annotate them however you like. I now have a map that I can check each day while we’re on vacation to get information about each location I’ve saved and the website links to go with those. I can easily plan my route for the next morning’s excursions by routing from one location to the next. Here is my actual map, for you to look through. You can click on any of the points of interest that I’ve marked to get an idea of what each one is about.

Gmail

I also used Gmail’s labels feature to label all plane, hotel, resort, rental car email reservations as “Grand Canyon Trip” emails and archived them so that months down the road (now just less than a week away), I would be able to click the label and see all of my related email and information, and print it all out to take with me on the trip. I have been emailing information websites that I found about points of interest to myself over the past few months and have all of that gathered info at my fingertips. I can even link to these emails straight from my Google Map.

Google Calendar

I also set up a calendar in Google’s Calendar program and share it with my wife’s Google account, so that she could access it and update or change it if needed. We are now actually using it as a family calendar instead of having a written one hanging on the wall, but I originally started it just for planning this trip. I have all of our days planned out, morning and evening. We have so much to see and do, that it was imperative to have it planned out well ahead of time so that we could fit it all in without feeling rushed and tired out. We may not make it out to that area again, so we wanted to make it count!

Google Spreadsheets

One last Google Product that we used is Google Spreadsheets (part of their free online office suite). We created a spreadsheet to help us track everything that we thought of that we needed to pack, like cameras, clothing items, toiletries, etc. It’s a shared document that both Ebeth and I can edit and get updated when the other person edits. Over the past couple of months, we’ve just added whenever we thought of something that we might want to have with us.

Have Fun!

The final tip I will give you is to have fun once the time for your vacation actually arrives! It’s going to be tough to do that if you haven’t planned well. You don’t have to use Google products, but planning months in advance of a big trip is a must.

Well, I began the same way I did when planning our Canada trip last year: Google Maps and Google Earth. The first thing to do is find out the major highlights in the area. These two programs are great for this, because of the amount of users who are constantly adding bookmarks highlighting places they’ve been or points of interest. This is when I began to realize the plethora of natural wonders in Northern Arizona. The Grand Canyon (with all the adventure that can be had there), Canyon de Chelly, Antelope Canyon, the Sedona Red Rocks area, Slide Rock State Park, Monument Valley, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, a mile-wide Meteor Crater,
Montezuma Castle ruins, the Tuzigoot ruins, and so much more that I’m tired of listing them already.

There are 1000′s of square miles of tribal lands, with ruins and modern-day communities, and one more thing that I hadn’t really given much thought to until I started studying the maps: historic Route 66, “The Mother Road”, which helped travelers in the early half of this century travel from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles. I’ll have more about this road, plus our travels on it, in later postings.

Of course, since we’re flying into Vegas, there are all of the attractions there (although, not many of them are family-oriented, of course), and the Hoover Dam is on the way to Flagstaff.

Now that I realized all that was to be had in the area, how would I be able to plan such a large trip and keep all of the locations straight, not to mention actually trying to fit them into about a week and a half-long vacation without feeling worn out? That’s where Google Maps new My Maps features, combined with Google Calendar and Gmail came in handy. (More about that in a later post.)

Read the next post about this trip >>

For me, it was a couple of different moments. Sometime last Fall, I was giddily flipping through all of the new HD channels that had just been launched by DirecTV, when I happened across a program about the Grand Canyon. I have always wanted to see it, but this time was different. I don’t know if it was the great memories of our recent trip in August ’07 to Niagara Falls/Quebec City/Maine that whetted my taste for adventure, or if the High Definition eye candy on my Samsung HDTV overpowered my senses. Either way, I decided to find out more about this beautiful area of our country.

As I started to look into a possible trip to northern Arizona, I came across countless websites and photo tours that were posted by people who have already made this trip and came back with tales to tell and images to show. I started to realize all that the region has to offer. Of course, Las Vegas is within an afternoon’s drive (We are flying in to Vegas to start our trip. More about that in a later post.) The Hoover Dam and Lake Meade are also along the way to Vegas. But, also found within 1-3 hours drive from the Grand Canyon are many natural and man-made wonders, national parks, national monuments, great camping, hiking, off-roading, swimming, boating, and of course, the historic Rt. 66 runs all the way across this part of Arizona, with countless miles of interesting Americana to see.

As I learned more about it, I realized that this could be the perfect family trip. After talking it over with Elizabeth and showing her all that I had found out about the area, she got excited about going, also. So, it won’t be long lines at Disney World for this family, at least not this year. Instead, the Poyners are heading out on the Great American Wild West Trip 2008.

I will be posting more about what the area has to offer and what our itinerary will be. Also, while on the trip, I’ll have my laptop with me and hope to find internet access so that we can post each day.

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