We stayed Sunday night in Williams, Arizona. Susan and I are experiencing quite a bit of deja vu during this trip; apparently, we stayed in this same town the last time we went to see the Grand Canyon together, almost twenty years ago.<\/p>\n

Our last two trips (Chicago, and this one) run parallel with Route 66. Almost every place we’ve stopped has Route 66 coffee mugs, t-shirts, hats, and kitchen magnets. The kids keep wanting to buy Route 66 mementos and I keep having to remind them that we live about a mile away from Route 66 back home.<\/p>\n

We stayed in Williams, Arizona because of the Grand Canyon Railway and their train tours. Tourists (us) can catch a train, ride two hours down to the Grand Canyon, spend a few hours there, and then catch the train back to Williams. So that’s what we did. <\/p>\n

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Before boarding the train, the crowd got to witness a “Frontier City-like” old west gun fight. One poor guy got killed two or three times because “somebody didn’t show up.” It was cute. Before and after the show, kids got to meet the gunfighters and their horses.<\/p>\n

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After that was two hours on a train, which must be akin to what it’s like to travel to the moon. The launch is exciting and the moon is exciting, but between the two is a whole lot of “not exciting.” You can only trick kids into thinking trees and mountains are interesting for so long. <\/p>\n

So as the train stopped and 500 people departed, 496 of them went left, but Susan decided the Grand Canyon was to the right. So ignoring all logic, we went right, walking up inclines and through cabins and trees and could not find the Grand Canyon. Then we walked back, and couldn’t find it either. I want to make sure you’re getting this visual; we took a train called the Grand Canyon Railway TO THE GRAND CANYON WHICH IS 270 MILES LONG AND WE COULDN’T FIND IT. Sure seems funnier today than it did yesterday …<\/p>\n

Eventually, of course, we did find the Grand Canyon, and I took a hundred pictures that look like this:<\/p>\n

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As I looked through all my pictures last night I realized none of them do the place any justice. <\/p>\n

The kids got to hear a ranger speak about the park, and we had lunch while we were out there. A few hours later it was time to head back, and we did. As we got close to our destination, the conductor warned us that the “bad guys” from that morning’s gunfight had broken out of jail (not difficult; the jail clearly had no back wall) and might rob the train. The train stopped and we did indeed get “robbed.” The actors accepted tips (I didn’t “get it” at first) and for only a dollar we had Mason roughed up a bit by one of the goons.<\/p>\n

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Amazingly, we all made it out alive.<\/p>\n

While in town we ate some pizza before hitting the road. Three hours later we were on the Las Vegas strip. <\/p>\n

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The kids and I have planned a mutiny and are hoping to stay in Vegas for a second night. Susan is going to look at the schedule and see what can be done. Everybody is tired of being in the car at this point. Right now we have 1,400 miles on the trip odometer, and at some point, we’re going to have to go back home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We stayed Sunday night in Williams, Arizona. Susan and I are experiencing quite a bit of deja vu during this trip; apparently, we stayed in this same town the last time we went to see the Grand Canyon together, almost twenty years ago. Our last two trips (Chicago, and this one) run parallel with Route 66. Almost every place we’ve stopped has Route 66 coffee mugs, t-shirts, hats, and kitchen magnets. The kids keep wanting to buy Route 66 mementos and I keep having to remind them that we live about a mile away from Route 66 back home. We… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}