Shirley Goodness: The South Rim

Wednesday morning, May 22, dawned bright and early...at least for me! Arizona time is 3 hours behind ETA since they don't observe Daylight Savings Time. This got really interesting after we left the Grand Canyon! But for Wednesday, it meant I was up early. Jennifer got up a little after me, but Ashton declared that she had already acclimated to the time change and wanted to sleep.

So Jenn and I went to get breakfast at the Yavapai Lodge. Bagel was fine, but the bacon was super overcooked. They did give us a lot of it though! After that we went shopping at the Canyon Village Market. We bought our Rim to Rim (R2R) souvenirs and tried to buy plastic Smart water bottles. They are eco-friendly at that store so we could only find metal water bottles.

After shopping we went back to the room to get Ashton and explore the South Rim of the GC. The funniest statement of the trip came from Ashton at this point..."I thought we didn't have plans today??" Has she never met her aunt!?!?

The South Rim essentially has two sides and kind of a middle. The middle was where we ate dinner the first night. Then there are two sides...the Desert View Rd. to the east and Hermit's Rest to the west. We started the drive to Desert View. At all the overlooks, we kept trying to figure out where we would be hiking tomorrow. It was starting to seem daunting!

We stopped at all the overlooks and ended at the Desert View Watchtower. In my mind it was something that the Native Americans had built since it is on Navajo Nation property, but it had actually just been built to resemble a Native American Watchtower. But the view from the top was spectacular.

Desert View Watchtower

We left Desert View and drove into Tusayan for Smart water bottles and lunch at Wendy's. Then back to the GC to see the rest of it!

We shopped a little at the Hopi Houser and Lookout Studios.

Then we hopped on the shuttle to see all the overlooks headed to Hermit's Rest.

Although we stopped at every overlook, our favorite was Powell Point since we are Powells! It is dedicated to John Wesley Powell, the man who first rafted through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River and he is our ancestor. He was a Union soldier who has lost his arm in the Civil War, but he still made it down the Colorado. We definitely needed that same kind of dedication to finish our R2R the next day!

We finished our shuttle ride and headed to Maswik Lodge for dinner...pizza. We accidently went to the food court pizza instead of the pizza restaurant, so pizza was okay. Then we went to Yaki Point to watch the sunset.