We Made it to San Diego

This past week took us from the desert of Arizona to the coast of CA. Along the way we had some fun experiences..  The Grand Canyon was one, a big check off on the Bucket list.  We took a detour down through Yuma because 120+ degrees through the Joshua Tree NP was not an option and held on with bated breath as our car crawled along, up and down, up and up and up in the mountains nearly over heating.  Well we made it to YUMA only to endure 124 degrees in the parking lot of their water park.   We looked up the temps in San Diego and decided the 70's were where we wanted to be!!

The Grand Canyon:  what is there to say that has not already been said? You simply have to be there in order to  appreciate how "Grand" it is. From my perspective it felt like being a dot in one of those micro painting and therefore was impossible for me to capture by camera the whole landscape.  I did manage to capture snippets, which we're happy with.

Beyond overwhelmed "not" he was just tired and hungry this morning.

  Depending on the light and shadows the landscape was never the same. Jackie and I were a bit overwhelmed to say the least and as for Alexander I think he was beyond overwhelmed and had not much to say at the time.  He simply rolled along with what ever we did/said. If we can't put it into perspective how can we expect him to.

One  highlight took place at the end of day driving back to our hotel . I spotted several cars parked off the road with many people pointing cameras at one of those wild life mentioned in our brochure. I insisted that Jackie to make a U turn:  "we have to take some pictures" I yelled; of course this was at the end of the day and I had already taken a million pics by then so by now she was not feeling the love but did it and it was worth it. Here are some images of this animal standing tall and majestic, very much at home and comfortable being "shot" at by some many humans.  Quite unreal. We were thrilled to have caught the moment on film.

The next morning we visited a place call BEARIZONA.   We had seen the billboard advertising it two days earlier on the way to Williams, AZ.  Now being from the northeast my first reaction was "what sort of  red- neck place would call itself Bearizona"? It reeked "tourist trap".  After some handi-dandi internet research I learned later that it was a  drive through "open concept" zoo: a sort of safari park were the bears roam "freely" and actually come up to the cars.  So we had to go and see for our- selves:  we saw bears, bison, and some wild cats. ( Jackie here:   I'm not fond of traditional zoos, for the most part, and I'm not sure everyone was happy here but they did have many acres to hang out in and it was an up close encounter.  We stayed for a well done and informative presentation about predatory birds. I considered this the park's redemption.   We learned that the park is a non -profit organization which rescues and rehabilitates many indigenous wildlife with the intent of returning them to their natural habitat, if at all possible.)  Some of the pictures are fuzzy because it was a requirement to keep our windows up while rolling pass the bears. Really at no time did we feel unsafe and luckily no bear crawled over our hood.