Grand Canyon and more — August 2019

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Link to more photos.

We went on this tour. After a night in Phoenix, we traveled to

• Sedona, Arizona
• Grand Canyon  National Park
• Monument Valley 
• Lake Powell (Glen Canyon National Recreational Area)
• Bryce Canyon  National Park
• Zion National Park

It was very good. The weather was mostly hot, as expected, but not overly so. We had a bit of rain at Bryce and Zion.

We had time after lunch in Sedona to walk around. It's a pleasant town, but it's impossible to avoid all the nonsense there:

We experienced a brief intense hailstorm after leaving Sedona. The hailstones were grape-size or maybe a bit larger. They made quite a racket on the roof of the bus:
 

I had been to the Grand Canyon, Bryce and Zion as a kid, but not since. We had time to hike a bit at most places. At Grand Canyon, we went a short ways down into the canyon. (Victor went twice as far down as I did.) Here I'm looking up at the canyon wall, and you can see the trail:

At Lake Powell, I would have traded the boat ride for a chance to visit slot canyons and Rainbow Bridge.

At Zion, Victor tried the bison meatloaf:

It was a large double serving. Victor enjoyed it. I ate a bison burger on Catalina Island years ago, and I had a bite of Victor's meatloaf.

On this trip, we saw loads of amazing geology, but very little wildlife — deer several times and elk twice. These deer are  in front of Zion Lodge:

The tour ended at the Las Vegas airport. I scheduled our departure later in the day, hoping to show Victor a bit of Vegas. We did see the Strip and we went to the Bellagio, but the timing wasn't right for the water show there, and the buffet was much more expensive than I remembered, so we didn't do that, either.