On to Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon - June 2

After a great dinner and a good night's sleep (not to mention some needed laundry chores) we're off to see new places!

Today we're heading out from Bluff, Utah, all the way to the Grand Canyon!

On the way, we pass through a little town call Mexican Hat.Can you guess where it got its name?

Entering Monument Valley

There was a scene in "Forest Gump" about right here.  It was the place where Forest decided to stop running and go home.

See, I told ya!

There were lots of other movies shot here as well. These are just a few:

Stagecoach (1939)

Billy the Kid (1941)

My Darling Clementine (1946)

Angel and the Badman (1947)

Fort Apache (1948)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Wagon Master (1950)

Rio Grande (1950)

The Searchers (1956)

How The West Was Won (1962)

Easy Rider (1968)

The American West of John Ford (TV Documentary) (1971)

The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Back to the Future Part III (1990)

The Lone Ranger (2013)

A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)

But...we must move on because the Grand Canyon awaits!

We're approaching the Canyon from the east - this is the Little Colorado River Gorge - but I had the girls  believing it was the Grand Canyon~

Finally we arrive at the east entrance near Desert View and the Watch Tower.

We drove through the park on AZ64 and then south of the park about 5 miles to our home for the next few days.  

This is a quiet place!  Arriving a day early and we even got the site we had reserved and didn't have to move!

 Campfires are a requirement with us!  How else will you make delicious s'mores?

 Bike riding, hiking, campfires and much more! Tomorrow, our first visit to the park.

 We had the girls close their eyes as we lead them to the viewpoint at the Visitor's Center.  We then asked them to describe their first impression.  Words like Awesome! - Amazing! and Wow! were their response.

The girls and I went back in the late afternoon and did part of the Bright Angel Trail.  I reminded them repeatedly that the trip back to the top would "take twice as long and be twice as hard", but they kept wanting to go farther!  

The first tunnel on the way down.

Needless to say, they weren't very talkative on the way back to the top!  We made it back up just before dark!

Our neighbors during our time at Ten-X.

That pretty much describes day one.
Tomorrow - back to the Park!