The Grand Canyon.... The Wonder I Almost Never Saw

A couple of weeks ago, my family and I went to on a self tour of the American Southwest. We hopped on a plane (my first time) and took a nice, leisurely flight to the Las Vegas Airport. We landed, disembarked, and went to the rental car building. After an hour and an insurance fiasco with the agency, we hot- footed out of Sin City and went to Laughlin, which is right on the border of Nevada and Arizona. The only bad thing about Laughlin was there were no restaurants. And I mean that literally. The only thing we could come up with there was an overpriced Outback.

The next day we drove on the historic (cliche, much?) Route 66.  Whilst driving, we stopped on by Havasu City, and walked on the London Bridge.

However, our second night in Laughlin proved to be very successful. We decided to go into Arizona for dinner, and in Bullhead City, we found Callioni's. That place is amazing! Between the service, the pizza, and the price, you can't go wrong with them. At first we thought Callioni's might be a bar because loud music was playing. But we ordered our pizza and enjoyed the oldies, played by Melody Louise and her piano player. A little while after dinner a saxophone player named "Marvin from Vegas" came and joined the show. Gosh, he was incredible! I've never seen such an accomplished saxophone player. It was truly and incredible evening.

After Laughlin, we went to Williams, Arizona. Williams was a nice little town. At dinner it was snowing!!! In Arizona!! In May!!!! It was very cold. Brrrrr!
 To go with our hotel, Mom made reservations for the train, so we got to travel like people did in the 1920's (when the train was built). We made friends with our train attendant and our fellow passengers. Everyone was really nice. (They were nice because the train was heated.)

Well, we finally got to the Canyon around 1pm. Much to our disappointment, the Canyon was completely fogged over! However God decided to do us a solid, and He cleared the fog for about 10 minutes. Good thing it wasn't any longer because Mom was near frostbite.( Not really but it makes the story much more dramatic.)

Just for fun we decided to go New Mexico because none of had ever been there. We ended up staying at this really neat hotel that was built by a movie director in the 1930's. Apparently, a whole bunch of famous, Old Hollywood movie stars stayed there. Each room was named after one of them. Ours was named "Jimmy Stewart".

We had another day to kill so we went back to Laughlin because it was finally something we were familiar with.

We left Laughlin, and on our last night of vacation, we spent it at the New York New York Hotel in Las Vegas. Coming from a small- ish town, Vegas is the epitome of culture shock. But then you think about it, our family, as in Pa, Ma, Dick, and Jane went to the town where regrettable behavior was invented.  But you know, we did nothing regrettable, except spending twenty bucks for coffee. Oh, caramel latte.....