Day 5 – Grand Canyon

Got up on Day 5 and looked for a tire place at the Canyon, there was a garage, but they couldn’t fix our camper and directed us to Williams, AZ, which was about 60 miles from us. We decided to look around the canyon before we went there since we knew we wouldn’t be going back once we got to Williams. We found a parking spot and walked out to the place where everyone goes on the hikes and mule rides. We walked down a little ways, it was really amazing, would be a lot of fun to ride the mule down or to hike down, but we would really have to be prepared.

 

If you look really close, you can see where the trail goes all the way out to the point.

This lady died in the Grand Canyon and the family allowed this to be posted on the bulletin boards to show people that you really have to be careful when you hike down into the canyon.  Here’s a link to the article I found on her death.

 

We then got on a free bus that they have there and went to the red route, which took you along side the canyon. We could see really well, and mostly just looked out the bus, then we got off at the next to the last site and walked to the end of the bus route, it was about a mile and really neat hike with a nice paved path. Lots of plants, trees and flowers, and Kasey’s favorites, lizards! If we had more time, we probably would have walked a lot more of it. We then rode the bus all the way back and headed out in the camper with our bad tires.

 

Here we are on the bus!

Colorado River was a long ways down!

Kasey thought this was really a cool flower, but I wouldn’t let him blow it out! 

As we headed out of the park, we spotted these elk.  Can you find both of them? 

Luckily we were able to make it to the town and to the tire store. We bought 2 new tires and put them on the front and moved the two front tires to the back. They were shocked that we made it as far as we did on those tires, but we drove really slow, like 45-50 mph the whole way down there. The guys also said they had never heard of the brand of tires that we had on the camper, probably some foreign tire. 

The cool thing about this shop was that this was the inspiration for the Luigi car in the Disney Cars movie. The guy told us that the shop was going to be replicated at Disney when they build the Cars amusement rides at Disney. So maybe we’ll see it if we go there.

This was in the town, a store had all these statues out front, I got Kasey’s picture in all of them.

And of course, Kasey found a little girl to play with, he always gravitates toward them.  :)

We ate pizza at a little pizza place and Kasey stayed in the back for probably 20 minutes playing video games.  We didn’t tell him that he was only watching demo mode and wasn’t really playing anything.  At least it kept him occupied!

More of these guys in front of the store on the way back to the camper.

The Luigi car.

 

This was one of the bad tires.

This was the other bad tire.

 

Kasey in the car.

The outside of the tire store.

We then headed out on I-40 toward Kingman, AZ. The wind was blowing like crazy, so we decided to take old Route 66 to Kingman from Seligman, hoping that the wind wouldn’t be quite so bad since the big trucks wouldn’t be blowing us over. We drove right through Peach Springs, which was the inspiration for the Car’s movie town of Radiator Springs. Sure wasn’t much there, was a pretty destitute area.

We found a campsite on the way to Hoover Dam, it was at Willow Beach, there was just a little line on the map and we saw a campsite sign so drove down to it. The road was narrow and really windy, with canyons and hills on each side of the road, it wasn’t a scary road though, just long and windy and steep in some places. We finally made it to the bottom and there was a river at the bottom. It was the runoff of the Colorado River from the dam. The campsite was only 2 weeks old, and cost us $20. I think they were supposed to charge us $35, not really sure what happened there. It was a full hook up. It was really hot outside. We unhooked the scooter and drove down to the lake, the water was 52 degrees they said all year. It was really pretty.

The first thing Kasey did was to climb to the top of this hill and slide all the way down.  Yikes!

 

Kasey thought the light was cool and he liked turning the water on and getting all muddy, much to my dismay!  He’s all boy.

This was after we left, on the road looking down at where we were.