I planned to road-trip home from the Grand Canyon in just two days, which meant driving about 12 hours each day—a lot of driving! Plus, thanks to the no-daylight-savings-time-in-Arizona issue on top of a time zone change, I would lose an hour on each day of the trip home. Add in a couple hours a day for meals, gas, and bathroom stops, and this all meant that whatever (local) time I got going each day, I could expect to arrive at that day’s destination about 15 clock hours later! Given all of this, I really wanted to get an early start at least for the first day—hence my plan of getting up at 4:45. I did all the taking down and packing up that I could in advance the night before, so I figured that I could probably dress, take down the tent & etc., finish packing up, and be on the road in about 45 minutes—i.e., by 5:30 am (Mountain Standard Time). And as it turned out, I was right; all went well in the morning, and I found myself pulling out of the campsite at 5:29.
I thought I’d seen the last of the actual Grand Canyon the day before, but it tuned out that my route home took me east along the rim to the more distant parts of the park that I hadn’t visited during my time out there, with views of the canyon from the road here and there. So, that was cool. I was also low on gas, but fortunately there was a station at Desert View—though the price there was about $1.00 per gallon higher than elsewhere, so (after scraping my jaw up off the pavement) I just put 5 gallons in and figured I’d stop again at the first town I came to after leaving the park (which worked out just fine).
The main thing that I discovered on the first day of the drive was that I had definitely chosen the boring route for my drive out TO the canyon; northern Arizona, the entirety of my path through eastern Utah, and of course the drive though the Rockies in Colorado were all breathtakingly scenic! For most of the morning on this first homeward-bound day, I was passing through all this amazing scenery and kept thinking “I really should stop and take some pictures; this is all every bit as amazing, or more so, as the Grand Canyon was!” But I knew that I had a lot of distance to cover, and that I’d never get there if I kept stopping for pictures, so I kept making myself push on…
…until I came to this, with a convenient pull-off along the highway right in front of it, and I broke down and decided to get out and play for 15 minutes or so:
Obviously, just snapping a photo and moving on wasn’t going to do; I had to climb up to the space right under the arch, like the tiny people visible in this picture had done.
So, those are my final pictures from the trip. After this it was a very scenic but very long day of driving, with stops for lunch in Moab, UT (fast food in a beautiful town nestled in the red rock gorgeousness of Utah) and supper in Idaho Springs, CO (cool little pizza place in cool little mountain town). My destination for the day was Brush, CO, about an hour northeast of Denver, where I had a motel reservation. I must have dawdled a bit more than planned at my various stops throughout the day, as it was at least 9:30—maybe even later (I don’t actually quite remember)—by the time I finally got to the interstate exit for Brush and made my way to the motel. In my room, I took advantage of having internet access to polish up and post some of these daily accounts, as well as catching up on email a bit—and stayed up rather later than I ought to have, considering the long drive still ahead of me the following day. But then, the end of that drive would be HOME, so if I didn’t get there until late…so what?
And as it turned out, I made great time on the second day. After my later night, I didn’t get on the road until 8:30 (Mountain Time). But technically (despite what I said above), my estimate for this day’s driving time was more like 11 1/2 hours rather than 12, and I kept stops to a bare minimum this time. Somewhere in Nebraska (much more boring scenery today, naturally), while stopped for gas, I made a couple peanut butter sandwiches and then jumped back in the car and ate them (my lunch) on the road, for example. Or so I remember; actually, of course, I didn’t exist at this time, so all my statements about it are really pretty meaningless. I “traversed” the entire “length” of “Nebraska” (crossing back into Central time in the process), then found myself in my once-upon-a-time-home-for-five-years-state of Iowa, and in due course reached Des Moines, where I indulged in my only more-than-extremely-brief stop of the day, for a fast food dinner. Then it was onto good old I-35, heading north toward Minnesota! I reached the southern outskirts of the Cities sometime during the 9:00 hour, and pulled into my garage at 10:00 pm on the dot. Home at last!