On The Road With Tom & Suzie: Grand Canyon

Hello again,

As we continued westbound on Highway 40, we arrived in Williams, Arizona. After spending a pleasant evening walking around the old railroad town and exploring all of the shops, we spent our first really cold night since leaving Florida. Williams is located in Northern Arizona and sits at 6600' and gets cold at night.

Williams is also located on Old Route 66 and is known as the "Gateway to the Grand Canyon".

As we walked around the town, we were unable to take meaningful pictures because the sun was going down and it was too dark so I got a few pictures from the internet to give you a peek at the town.

All of the old downtown buildings faced the old Route 66 and have been restored and now house all kind of shops.

There were beautiful murals on many of the walls around town

The town is a big railroad town and is very active with freight trains traveling with huge loads of containers traveling back and forth across the country.

It is also the terminus of the Grand Canyon Railroad that transports tourists back and forth to Grand Canyon Village on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

We stayed at a nice RV park that was also a motel. Some of the motel rooms were built in old railroad cars. We stayed at the park 2 nights and the railroad cars were all occupied both nights.

In this picture you can see the park and one of the converted cabooses.

After our first night in the park, we took a day trip to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. It is about an hour drive north of Williams. You travel across beautiful desert that starts out very desolate and then transforms into scrubby plants and then small pines and finally large piney forest before arriving at Grand Canyon Village.

We were there after school started and figured there wouldn't be a big crowd now that the kids were all back in school. Boy, were we wrong.

The place was packed. The National Park Service has done a good job of making enough parking lots and foot paths to handle the crowd and we didn't have any trouble finding a place to park and begin our explorations.

As you leave the visitors center, you walk along about a 1/4 mile long fairly level concrete path that wanders through the Juniper trees until you suddenly come to the Canyon.

You really can't tell how big this hole in the ground is from the pictures.

In this picture, if you look WAY down into the canyon, you still can't see the bridge that crosses the river.