I arrived in Las Vegas several hours before Siobhan. So I picked up the rental car, and thought that I would scout out the hotel, the Luxor, and find out where to park and check in. This proved to much more challenging that I expected. Las Vegas is not set for cars. The hotels want you take a shuttle from the airport, then stay and gamble. I should have checked where the parking was before arriving. The parking is a large parkade at the back of the hotel that serves several hotels in the area. There is a long walk from the parkade to the hotel. The hotel room was nice enough, but it was a bit of a disappointment to find that we were not in the pyramid, but in a tower attached to the hotel, oh well.
It was good that I checked out the hotel, as Siobhan did arrive relatively late, so being able to drive, park and get to the room quickly was great. Staying at a nice hotel was a bit of a waste for us. As we arrived late Friday, and were leaving early Saturday, as it is just under a 5 hour drive to the Grand Canyon. We did have a great night’s sleep and the breakfast was a pile of never ending pancakes that neither of us could finish. I remember our waitress being very friendly and curious about our upcoming trip.
We had a straightforward drive to the Grand Canyon. We stopped in Henderson NV at the REI to pick up supplies, matches and fuel (since you cannot take either item on an airplane). There is a Whole Foods store across from the REI, so we picked up our perishable foods during the same stop.
Once we picked up our supplies, we drove straight to the Grand Canyon. Siobhan sat in the back of the car doing homework all the way to the hotel.
We stayed at the Yavapi Lodge. I liked being near the canyon so we would be able to get a nice early start in the morning. The room was nice a big, with two large beds. Lots of room for sorting out our equipment.
Siobhan had homework to do hat evening and while we were in the canyon. Unfortunately the Wi-Fi was very poor at the Lodge. So, I had purchased 50Mb of data on a travel plan, and Siobhan only needed to download a few PDF files, so, how much data could it use. So I made a Hotspot with my phone that Siobhan could sign into and piggyback on the data to download her files. For some reason, the Hotspot used all my available data in about two minutes, even though Siobhan only downloaded a few files. In the end, she had enough files, but I was out of data.
The Lodge had a great cafeteria style dining area. We filled up on food for our trip, I even had a beer, Grand Canyon Brewing, Sunset Amber Ale. Then it was time to call it a night.
