After leaving our unexpectedly ski lodge-esque Flagstaff version of the Comfort Inn we headed out into the snowy, snowy desert toward the Grand Canyon, which was everything you expect it to be, except the scope of it is incomprehensible. We rolled into Grand Canyon National Park where we saw our first sign that we actually were in Arizona - a cactus buried in snow. Then Eleanor took photos of Park Ranger Sam as if he were a character in Disney World and then he sent us on our way. Obviously there was a ton of snow at the Grand Canyon as well, and by a ton I mean a ton more than we expected, and what we expected was none. Anyway, despite the fact that half of us were wearing wildly inappropriate footwear for traipsing around a snowy Canyon, the snow turned out to be amusing and Natalie hurled several snowballs into the hole.
After we'd experienced enough grandeur we set off for our projected favorite stop on the road to Los Angeles: Vegas. Baby. We also quickly learned that the Widget, though immensely helpful most of the time, (I don't know how people would find their way anywhere without one) has absolutely no idea what he's talking about in terms of Grand Canyon Village. So it was back to basics as we found our way back to our beloved I-40 W, stopping briefly chez Wendy's to make friends with some more Grand Canyon natives. Then we drove and drove and drove (all of a sudden four hours has become almost nothing in terms of a commute) straight through to the Hoover Dam, where we were determined to be non threatening by the Hoover Dam Terrorist police. Since the Hoover Dam is sandwiched between The Grand Canyon and Las Vegas it's kind of got a tough break in terms of garnering excitement but at the very least it prompted us to make dam puns for the next forty five minutes. One of the many themes of this road trip happens to be Pun Always Intended. We love puns. One of my greatest disappointments in life is the fact that not everyone finds puns as side splitting as I do.
In Nevada we stopped to clean up our acts and the car because the image of pulling into our hotel in a car covered in five days worth of American soil and filled with stray corn nuts, empty water bottles and shoes was a little embarrassing, but probably would have been funny, if it ended up being anything like how I imagine it to be. So we washed the car, threw out the trash and tried to consolidate all of our road trip entertainment into the Speeding Ticket Compartment. Then we stopped at a CVS, where we learned that every place in Nevada that sells food also sells alcohol. We got a confirmation of this from the checkout girl, who was literally baffled that there are places in the world where, if you want to purchase alcohol, you need to go to a specific store where only alcohol is sold.
Go figure.
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