As you may recall, I was to spend some time with my sister and her family after my 2022 South America Grand Voyage. When I moved the cruise back a year there was a gap with my family visits, so we flip-flopped our plans and my sister decided to come to Arizona and visit me! Over the week they stayed we did many things – and each seemed to require at least an hour drive each way…

We started by escaping – from an escape room! Alcatraz Escape Games has a “Harry Potter” inspired room. I have never tried escape rooms before, and it was a fair bit of fun. We had an hour to get out. Hidden rooms, trap doors, lots of locks (numbers or letter/word solutions) where we needed to decipher the clues and learn the combinations.

They say this room has a 65% escape rate, and that included us! Just barely. We solved the clue for the last lock with one minute to go and then role-played it up. “Hurry, or we’re doomed!” “Arrgh!”. “C-3PO, shut down all the trash mashers on the escape level!” We made it with 37 seconds to spare. From left-to-right in the picture we have: Stevie (Brother-in-Law), Rachel (Niece), Lia (Sister), Cole (Nephew) and your ever-lovin Cruise Boy.

You can’t come out West and not visit a ghost town! Goldfield is an abandoned gold mine and supporting town. The buildings seems authentic – I don’t know what building codes are enforced there, but it seems ready to collapse at any moment. We took the mine tour and visited the saloon and other sites. An enjoyable few hours, so long as you don’t get in the middle of the staged gun fight.

We then decided to visit a hole in the ground, so we drove almost three hours north to Flagstaff and stayed a few days in a great cabin. It was amazing to see the eco-system change as we drove north – cactus to shrubs to full pine tree forests. We then drove an additional hour north and found the Grand Canyon.

You can’t really understand the scale, so along the rim trail I looked back and took a picture of where we were. Those little dots on the top right are people.

We spend about half a day with our eyes as big as saucers looking at the canyon. We started at the main Visitor Center (closed for renovations) and walked the rim to Yavapai Point and the Geology Museum. We then continued on the “Trail of Time” to the Verkamp Center and then doubled-back to the Market Plaza for lunch. Now, I’ve been walking 2 miles 3-to-5 times a week since moving to Arizona in 2020, but I completely forgot about the 6000-foot (1800 meter) elevation increase compared to Phoenix. And this was about a four-mile hike. I was huffing and puffing but made it back to the car alive. I hope to make many more trips to the Canyon to work on my landscape photography skills – I’m planning a series of dawn and dusk shoots.

Here you can find the large versions of my Grand Canyon pictures. Warning – they are 25x to 90x larger than the ones on this page!

Next: Ewoks, Butterflies and ATVs. Oh, My!