It was at least a 4-hour drive from Hoover Dam to the Grand Canyon, and that’s not counting the stops we had to make for lunch, a late one in this case, gas and provisions, and the occasional road delays from construction. To say it was a long drive is an understatement but once again I was lucky to serve as the de facto navigator with the freedom – and guilty pleasure – to doze off during long stretches, which were quite a few. 

It could be that I’ve just become accustomed to the Nevada landscape but the Arizona landscape as it turned out is just as rich if not a little bit more dramatic, with the road moving more like a vertical roller coaster rather than winding left and right, in the process giving us a scenes of the highway cutting through plains and of amazing rock and mountain formations left and right, and a little taste of what’s to come – an inkling of our grand destination at the end of the road.