Day 26 (by Krysta)

The next morning we went Subway for "breakfast", but really lunch...because it was about 11:05am, and they couldn't possibly make a breakfast sandwich.  Then we headed over to Grand Canyon, which was about an hour or two away. 

Of course, the Grand Canyon was beautiful.  We took lots of pictures, headed down a little side path at one of the overlooks and pretended to fall of the side, and saw a herd of very large deer.  We later saw a small herd of small deer as well.  At some main overlooks, we walked up to a little visitor's center, which also had some nice views.  While we were there, we looked through some provided binoculars at where we had been the night before, the North Rim.  It was called the "Governor's Lodge" (the creepy motel-like place with red lights).  It was pretty windy by the end of the day, and Paul wasn't wearing a sweatshirt, so he was freezing (his fingers were numb by the time we got to the car).  I sat at an overlook for awhile, watching the sunset...again, we stayed until just about sunset and then headed out.  We  stopped at a place called "We cook pizza and pasta" for dinner, where we (not surprisingly), ate pizza.

While we were at the Grand Canyon, though, we called Mom and Dad to reserve a room for us that night.  We ended up going down to Flagstaff, Arizona, where we stayed in a Super 8 motel.  I was still exhausted from the night before, so I went to bed at about  9:30pm.  Paul stayed up though, to write the blog, which got erased.  At about 1:30am, Paul woke me up to inform me that there were bed bugs in our room.  He had seen one run across the bed, and killed another one.  Needless to say, I was horrified, and I remember saying "What are we supposed to do?".  We went outside in the frigid temperature to cross the creepy parking lot to the main office.  The lady was very nice and moved our room, her advice was just to put the clothes we were wearing in plastic bags as tightly as possible and to shower.  That's exactly what I did the next morning, but that night I stayed awake until about 4am, not covering myself with the blankets for fear of bed bugs in this room as well, and watched some ridiculous cowboy comedy movie starring Billy Crystal (Mike Wosowski's voice in Monster's Inc.).

Day 25 (by Krysta)

After waking up in Las Vegas, we ate some breakfast that we brought in from the car (from our food stash in case we get lost along the way).  Thankfully we had that stash... We went to the lobby of the hotel we were in and reserved a room on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  So, at some point in the morning we headed out.  Unfortunately, we thought that the room we reserved was on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon...

Before that, though, we drove through two beautiful National Parks. First, we drove through Zion National Park, which was amazing.  It reminded me of a smaller Yosemite, but in red.  It had thin, windy roads and a couple tunnels. 

After leaving Zion, we quickly headed over to Bryce National Park before sunset.  Bryce was also quite unbelievable.  It had one road straight in and out of the park.  After the amount of time it took us to get through Yosemite, we thought that we would not make it to the end of the park before sunset, but we did!  So, we stopped at each of the overlooks and took pictures.  The last site was probably the most breathtaking.  It was called Rainbow Point and its elevation was over 9,000 ft (I believe that the entire park was very highly elevated, but this was the highest point).  From Rainbow Point, we could see like 100 miles. I'm not even sure that is an exaggeration!  And since we were there around sunset, I got some amazing pictures.  Once again, we drove out of a national park in the dark.

After leaving Bryce, we decided to head to our hotel "on the North Rim" (but not really!).   We made it all the way to the road that leads to the North Rim, passing by a few creepy restaurants named "restaurant" and a little inn called "Jacob Lake Inn".  We started to head down the long straight in and out road that leads to the North Rim.  We had assumed that since there was a hotel on the North Rim, that there would also be a place to eat.  As we drove down the extremely dark road, we noticed were the only ones on it, which seemed suspicious.  We saw an amazing number of stars on the way in, as well as an amazing number of deer.  About forty five minutes in, Paul looked at his iPod, where he saved the address of the hotel.  We discovered, to our dismay, that the hotel was on the South Rim.  (We had just entered the north rim of the Grand Canyon into our GPS).  So, there we were on a dark, abandoned road surrounded by a million deer.  We decided that instead of turning around, we would see if there was anything on the North Rim...a place to eat or to sleep.  When we got there, though, we drove by a little motel-like place, with red lights outside, and a pickup truck parked at it...basically it looked like something from a horror movie.   We parked in a little lot at the end of the road, near an RV and random other car that were there.  Thankfully, Paul had a tiny bit of phone signal, since I had none.  He called the hotel and they tried to help us, but Paul had almost no battery on his phone and there was nothing that they could really do.  We stayed there for a little while, eating Nutri Grain bars and drinking water bottles from our food stash.  Paul went to the trunk to find his car phone charger.  It was taking so long I thought he was eaten by a bear, especially since I said his name and he didn't reply..the first time (he did after the second one though).  Then we turned around and drove out the the North Rim.  On the way, though, we almost hit a deer, swerving out of the way just in time to save us and the deer! :)  We went by Jacob lake inn again, but unfortunately it was closed by that time (it was about 10 or 11 by this point).  So, we filled up the gas tank at their little gas station (you could fill the tank with credit cards, even when no one was there), Paul drank Coke right out of the bottle because he was scared of falling asleep on the way and we headed toward the South Rim. 

Looking at a map, we decided that we should stay in a town just on the other side of the rim and texted William for the phone number of a Super 8.  We got it and called them, and they told us we didn't need to make a reservation because there were plenty of rooms.  So, we headed to Page, Arizona.  Again, though, we were driving through such darkness, I was confused when I saw the moon behind the clouds. Paul and I both had no idea what the "creepy light" coming from the clouds was, I guess we had forgotten that the moon even existed, haha! 

Already been a year...

Since this week marks one year since we went on our long West Coast road trip, I figured I'd revisit this blog. Sorry I never really finished up posting about the trip, was typing up about the night Krysta and I got lost at the Grand Canyon, and accidentally deleted my whole post. Was really frustrated about that and fell so far behind that I just gave up. I'm going to start blogging again about stuff that interests me, don't really care if anybody reads it or not, but I just want to do this for my own sanity. Krysta had typed up some stuff about the rest of our trip, so I'll post that soon if anyone's interested.