Day Fifteen: Vegas to Grand Canyon

Very early Wednesday morning, we scoped out the multitude of casinos before settling on Caesar’s Palace and The Venetian for some pre-dawn money losing.

Well, all of us lost except for Pete, who seared his poker adversaries as a laser sears steak. They could not adapt to his sleep-deprived guile, and he more than doubled his buy-in in winnings. When the sun rose and the regular people emerged, we decided to leave.

Without a full night of sleep, we hit the road again. Tuesday morning’s rush hour took us over the Hoover Dam and into Arizona on our way to the Grand Canyon.

Sacajawea was convinced that we had to drive way down south past the canyon and then back north to get to the South Rim. Hoping to find some kind of shortcut, we stopped at a gas station and asked for the best route to the “Grand Canyon.” We did not anticipate the major consequences that would result from our omission of the two critical words, “National Park.”

As we followed the route the lady gave us at the station, we became increasingly dismayed as the road quality steadily diminished until we were driving on a dirt road. TIME OUT for a barrage of analogies describing the road. GO!

The road:

• was more crooked than Richard Nixon.
• had more humps than a camel convention.
• had more bends than a SCUBA diver riding a torpedo to the surface.
• made our CD skip more than the winner of a South Philly Double Dutch competition.
• was rockier than Marion Barry fighting Apollo Creed in a quarry.
• was shakier than a dance contest between Muhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox.

Penelope became increasingly dismayed by the road as well: her clean-cut appearance was sullied.

After a 45-minute trip on the notorious dirt road, we arrived not at Grand Canyon National Park, but at the Grand Canyon West airport. This was of no use to us, as the airport appeared to function primarily to separate tourists from their money. With the aid of a far more helpful guide from the nearby Indian reservation, we eventually made our way back to the proper route to the South Rim. We made it in time to quickly set up the campsite and take in sunset over the canyon: