Driving from Las Vegas to The Grand Canyon
By traveltripz on Feb 29, 2008 in Las Vegas, USA
On Friday 29 Feb 2008, we have breakfast in the Monterey room at the Gold Coast Hotel, which is great value for money, then check out and load up the car for our trip from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon.
It takes a while to set up the GPS system because the gadget has difficulty recognising “Grand Canyon” and eventually we type in the name of the Holiday Inn hotel where we will be staying in Tusayan for a couple of days.
Getting out of the city wasn’t as much of a hassle as we thought it would be, thanks to having the GPS system for our rental car. We found it to be invaluable although at times it would have been a bit more helpful if the voice instructions were given a little sooner so that we could move to a particular lane ready for turning a bit earlier.
We headed south through Boulder City and on through to Hoover Dam. The scenery was pretty spectacular to start with but after driving for hundreds of miles we were a bit over the scenery. We wanted to get to the Grand Canyon before dark so we only stopped for a short time at Hoover Dam to take a couple of photos.
The road is pretty good and the speed limit varies between 65-75 miles per hour.
As we got closer to the Grand Canyon the scenery changed and we were surprised to see that there was ice all over the ground. For some reason we thought the Grand Canyon area would be hot during the day and cold at night. However, we never expected to see snow.
Paula takes over the driving just outside of the Lake Mead National Park turnoff; this is her first stint at driving in the US although she has driven on the wrong side of the road in Italy. There are lots of rest stops on the way and we finally pull over at Ash Fork to fill up the gas tank.
Of course the pump doesn’t take our Australian credit cards so Paula heads into the store to prepay for the gas. The store owner holds the credit card until the gas has been put into the car. We know from our last driving experience in the States the there is no automatic gas tank lever in the car and the gas tank has to be opened manually, so I am not sitting in the car trying to find the gas tank lever this time.
Once the gas tank is full we go in to pay for the gas and pick up some drinks and nibbles for the rest of the trip. Paula had 
been talking to a gentleman who resembles ‘Grizzly Adams’ about where we were from and where we were off to. His advice was to go and see the Grand Canyon movie at the IMAX theatre in Tusayan. He reckoned we will look at canyon and say “Yep that’s an impressive hole in the ground and yep that’s an impressive pile of rocks”. However, we are sure that we are going to enjoy our experience here.
We continue on and we finally arrive at our hotel after a trip that has taken approximately 5 hours from Las Vegas. After checking in and dropping off our bags we head off to check out the surrounding area.
Tusayan is a quaint little village of rather impressive looking hotels and stores that are reminiscent of a bygone western era. There is a McDonalds, Wendy’s, a few other restaurants, a mini market and a general store with a Post Office which unfortunately is closed. I have some stuff to post home to Australia and have been waiting to find a post office, looks like I will still be waiting for a while.
The air is quite cool and although we have jackets on, we don’t hang around outside for too long plus it is starting to get dark.
1 Comment(s)
By Aaron Wakling on Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Aaron Wakling