We left Las Vegas at around 8:00 am, heading for the south rim of the Grand Canyon. We had a nice break from camping, but we are all excited to get back to it. When we asked Brady what he thought of Las Vegas he commented that it was alright, but he prefers camping! We had decided that we should drive by the Hoover Dam on the way. We thought we might be able to spot it from the new bridge that they put in a few years ago, but the barriers were too high so we had to turn around and go and walk the bridge in order to see it. It really was worth seeing! It is just really interesting to think about what they went through to build such a large dam.
From the Hoover Dam we drove another two and a half hours to get to The Grand Canyon Caverns. This cavern is not part of the national park system, but they call themselves that because the air that comes through the cavern actually does come from the Grand Canyon, over 90 miles away. We thought it would be cool to take the kids down into a cave so we included it in our itinerary. To get to the cavern we had to drive a section of route 66. We had read that the movie Cars had been inspired by the stretch we were going to drive and we were hoping to see relics of the old days of route 66, so we were a little disappointed to not see too much of that. The exception was the area where the cavern was. The cavern has been a tourist attraction for over 100 years and you can tell. The tour itself was a little corny and our guide was not quite as enthusiastic as I would have wanted (an older guy who seemed to have given this tour a few more times than he would have liked), but it was really neat to be 200 feet below the surface in a dry cavern. Joe and I have been in other caves, but they were all much different than this one. I am used to dripping water, stalagmites, and stalactites, but there was very little of that in this cave. There was no water, which is why it's called a dry cavern, and the formations were mostly crystals like popcorn crystals and snowball crystals (so named because that is what they look like). At one point in the tour we came upon a large room that was full of emergency supplies, as this cavern had been declared an emergency shelter during the cold war. There is also a petrified bobcat in the cavern. It had apparently fallen in back when the only entrance was a hole in the ground, and petrified very quickly due to the air in the cavern. The end of the tour was a bit odd when our guide pushed a button to start a light show accompanied by music (it just seemed a bit random and out of place), but overall we enjoyed this stop.
From the cavern we had about another two and a half hours to go to get to the south rim. It was a nice drive. I really love the scenery in Arizona. When we got to our campground at the south rim it was about 5:30. The funny thing was, though, that Joe and I really weren't sure what time it was! We knew we had gone over a time zone line, but our cell phones never switched. It turns out Arizona doesn't change their clocks for daylight savings so we were still on California time. We didn't know this for sure until the next morning! We were really happy with our campsite. It was large and flat, which is perfect. After dinner we had a campfire and went to bed, looking forward to exploring the Grand Canyon the next day.
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