PHX-Grand Canyon

The flight was quite bad, when i boarded, the plane was freezing  cold, during the flight it was searing hot and they didn't serve any food...After landing i confirmed my reservation with the shuttle service and got my bags. The last two parts of my long journey were ahead of me.
      It took us 2.5 hours to get to Flagstaff and another 2 hours to Grand Canyon Village. My friend Kiril was waiting for me at "Maswik Lodge" which was a hotel and a place where you can get something to eat. His apartment was 10 minutes from there, and after a brief walk through a forest we were there. I unpacked my suitcase, we ate dinner and chatted a bit. The only thing in my mind was sleep.

The next day i woke up around 3:00am, in hindsight maybe going to bed in 20:30pm was a mistake. It was -6 degrees centigrade outside, luckily there was central heating in the apartment. The plan was to spend the first week of my trip at the Canyon, and then a trip to Flagstaff to get a look around and buy stuff, followed by a trip to Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even though it was only my second day in the USA, i was feeling quite nostalgic already, probably enhanced by the lack of cell phone signal and internet at that moment.

  
Around 7:30am we went outside for a walk in the nearby forest and saw lots of Elk and Mule deers. We had breakfast and William Patrick, who is a friend of Kiril and an MPS employee at the Canyon, arrived for coffee later. He is quite the character, and looks like someone from the wild west, with his cowboy hat, boots ant long mustache. We climbed in the pickup truck and went to buy some lottery tickets in the nearby Tusayan village, which is supposed to be the smallest in the USA. Its quite new, it has an IMAX cinema, gas station, lots of hotels and restaurants. The jackpot is around 100'000'000$ and we had a gentleman's agreement that if some of us won, would give the others 500'000$ each! Then we went to "Desert View" which is one of the many viewpoints around the Grand Canyon. Its famous with the Lookout tower build in the 1920's in Native American style.

There i had my first view of the Canyon, the vastness of it is just staggering, because its so huge you cant compare it to anything around you for scale, the things that seem close are 10 miles away.. We headed for the diner since we were starving, i had a cheeseburger, and i have to say that it was quite good. Then i got my backpack from the truck and went in searching for an interesting viewpoint for my first picture of the Grand Canyon.

On our way back we stopped by the "General Store" to buy some food, the prices were 3 times higher than the ones back home! But i had no choice so i bought some orange juice, eggs, bacon and some other stuff. My "Visa Card" wasn't working so i used my "MasterCard". William gave me his bicycle so now i had the means to move around.