USA Trip Day 13 - The Grand Canyon
After losing yesterday to some kind of heatstroke/food poisoning combo, today was an early start for the Big Boy Pants. On joining our coach, we were struck by how ridiculously spoilt Americans are, as if living in a country with a low-paid, tip-hungry, top-notch service industry has made them incapable of coping with any kind of delay of slight discomfort. By the indignation and complaining of some of our neighbours as we got on the coach, you’d never have guessed they were on their way to see the Grand Canyon.
Paul the ex-Marine was our very efficient and (we thought) quite amusing bus driver, whose ongoing spiel seemed to aggravate the whining Septics even more. The couple behind us were particularly amusing, a poisonous pair whose only thing in common seemed to be how much they hated each other and everyone else.
After passing the Boulder City home of Tom Selleck, our first stop was the Hoover dam, as seen in Transformers.
This had easily the tackiest gift shop that we’ve seem all holiday and was, to be frank, kind of underwhelming. Most impressive to me was the construction work on the new highway suspension bridge which will soon take all traffic off the top of the dam.
About an hour or so later, after 17 miles of very bumpy road through a Joshua Tree forest, we arrived at the West Rim of the Grand Canyon for our helicopter/boat ride. I can’t recommend this experience enough; without it the day would have felt a little lacklustre. We were taken by chopper down onto the floor of the canyon, then rode on the Colorado River for about 20 minutes, giving us a different perspective on our surroundings.
After this, we rejoined the rest of the tour on the 3-stop Shuttle Bus that would take us to Eagle and Guano Points and then back to the coach.
Eagle Point is so named for the rock formation the resembles a giant eagle protecting the valley.
For some reason, in amongst the rocks was a plastic rock with a hinge and a padlock. I do not know what this concealed.
Guano Point provided us with lunch and some really spectacular views of the river we had ridden on earlier.
We’d been given strict instructions by Paul that we needed to be back at the coach for 2:45 in order to beat the traffic at the Dam. For all their mocking of him, our fellow coach travellers were all back on time, so his idiot-proof constant repetition of the drill obviously did the trick. We rattled off down the dirt road back to Vegas.
We were making good time until Paul pulled over to the side of the road and the engine died. What had happened was unclear, but we were apparently leaking water and this had caused us to overheat. The reaction of our moaning friends on the coach was close to hysteria. There was talk of us being “stranded” in “the middle of the desert”. In actual fact we were on the the shoulder of a main highway, about 5 miles from Dolan Springs and only 60 miles from Vegas. Worst case, a new coach being sent to pick us up would be with us in under 2 hours.
Paul managed to get us rolling again after about 45 minutes and we met our replacement coach at the Dam. He did his best to speed up the drop-off process by doing multiple drops at hotels linked by overhead walkways, but even this was greeted with complaints and gripes, including the ridiculously selfish woman who insisted on being dropped at her New York New York door rather than making the 5-minute walk from Excalibur. This trip round the block added 20 minutes to our journey. When he left us, his last stop, he seemed broken and dejected. Poor bloke.
That night we re-met Mark and Vicky, our hosts from San Francisco, for dinner at the Top Of The World restaurant at The Stratosphere Hotel. I ate beef carpaccio followed by a shrimp and scallop platter with a curried sauce which very slightly overpowered the scallops, but went very well with the shrimp. K’s choice of duck confit ravioli with foie gras won though.
While the food was very good, what really makes The Top Of The World special is its location - the 107th floor of the Stratosphere tower, 820 feet above the Las Vegas strip. The restaurant floor slowly rotates, giving a stunning panorama of the lights of the city with the mountains in the background.
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