It was an easy drive to the Grand Canyon, made even easier by the coffee we picked up on the way. Luckily for us, the canyon wasn't busy by canyon standards, so we easily parked up by the visitor’s centre. Otherwise there’s a park and ride system that we’d have to deal with. We grabbed something for breakfast, prepared bags of water and food, went into the visitor centre and swiftly exited when we realised that we already had the information we needed. On the way in, we’d had to buy a car pass of $30 – that was the only charge to enter – and been given a handy map and set of information. We walked up to our first viewpoint, called Mather Point, which was just by the visitor’s centre. The view was breathtaking. The canyon is massive!

There are options to drive around parts of the canyon roads, but many of the routes were shut to cars . Instead there were free shuttle buses taking various routes around the south rim. We took the blue line bus as far as the Hermit’s Rest Route Transfer, and took in the views there before hopping on a red line bus and stopping at Maricopa Point. Here we walked to Powell Point, followed by Hopi Point, further along the edge of the canyon. We hopped back on the red line bus and stopped at Pima Point, before our final red line stop at Hermit’s Rest. All of the views were simply spectacular. We had only covered a few miles of the canyon, and there was so much more to see on the south rim, let alone on the north and west rims! Our last view was when we drove up to Yavapai Point, where there was also a Geology Museum. Unfortunately we had no time to visit this, as we had to get back on the road. With a long drive ahead, we were off to Barstow again, for an overnight before our long drive to San Francisco the following day.

Jayna drove most of the way to Barstow. It was lengthy and thankfully uneventful. We arrived late into Barstow, and had another motel room. This time, the lady checking us in was lovely and had even set the air con going for us before we arrived. This was a much nicer motel, with a big, comfortable bed, not so noisy and less temperamental air conditioning, and a decent bathroom. We were tired after a long day and had an early start the next morning. With a strict deadline for returning the hire car, we were off to San Francisco!