Sarah's writing the blog while we sit in the airport. Alan's comments will be in green.
Hello all. Yes, as Alan said, we are at the airport bidding farewell to Las Vegas, finally!!! I have well and truly had enough of the smoke and the noise. Why can't those slot machines just shut up!
We had an early morning today as we needed to be checked out of our hotel, bags stored and be outside for the pick-up for our Grand Canyon Tour by about 9.05am. It was a lovely morning, a fair bit cooler than we have had.
The pick up occurred at 9.15am and we were driven to the tour organiser's office. After the embarrassing weigh-in, we were kept waiting for about 45 minutes before we were on the way to the Henderson Executive air strip. I was not expecting the size of the plane. I was. I thought we would be on a plane which would hold about 30 people. How wrong I was. I vowed never to get into a light plane but having paid millions of dollars for the trip, Alan said I had to get on the plane. It was a tiny Cessna 206 which had six seats, including the pilot. There was only four in our group and Alan got a row to himself with me playing co-pilot for the trip. I was playing photographer during the flight as I had a better view. We were surprised that hardly any of the photos turned out blurry, given the amount of turbulence. It was about 45 minutes and bumpy at times but the view of the mountains, Lake Mead and Hoover Dam was pretty nice. We arrived at the west rim of the Grand Canyon about 12.10pm and were told to get on a bus to get our lunch but we had to be back at the air strip by 1pm to get our helicopter flight to the bottom of the canyon. We and the newly married English couple we were partnered with looked at each other wondering how on earth we were going to do it. But, we boarded the bus anyway in the hope that we would make it to lunch. That didn't happen. By the time we reached our destination we had to turn around and return. We made our helicopter booking with minutes to spare, only to have them make us wait about 15 minutes. Had we known this would happen, we would have eaten lunch.
The trip to the bottom of the canyon was quick and uneventful except when we landed the silly woman helping us disembark the helicopter decided not to wait until I was free of my seat to wrench me by the arm, almost pulling it from its socket. From there we hiked down a fairly rocky trail and boarded a pontoon boat for a 15 minute trip along the Colorado River. It was a spectacular view however we had a number of Japanese people with us and a boat driver who was Japanese and I really think he told them more about the history than he did us. I don't remember him using the words "mountain goat" whilst speaking English to us.
We got off the boat and back up the trail and were soon back on the helicopter, in the hope that when we returned to the top we would then have enough time to get some lunch before our 3pm departure back on the really really really small plane. However, this wasn't to be. When our pilot came to check on us we informed him that we hadn't had time for lunch and he very nicely rustled up some grub for us which was really tasty.
The trip back to Vegas wasn't as long as the trip out but still bumpy. Sarah looked pretty green by the time we landed and the bus ride after didn't do her any favours either. My vow is to NEVER get into a small plane again, from this point forward. I'll do my research a bit better next time. Our plane to Buffalo is going to be small, but maybe not quite that small.
It wasn't long before we were back at our hotel. We collected our luggage and thought we'd make an early trip out to the airport, just in case they wanted to strip search us this time. Thankfully that didn't happen and we passed through the security without them blinking an eye lid. Oh, there was one problem ... one of our bags was overweight. Must be all those souvenirs that Alan has bought. The airport is amazingly quiet.
So here we are, three hours early for our flight but at least we are ready for an early departure in case it happens. Yes, I thought that was weird too but they just announced another flight was having an early departure and they were chasing passengers.
An overnight flight and we will be in Orlando. Let's hope the weather there has improved from what we've been seeing on the news for the past two weeks.
Trivia for the day: Las Vegas airport is so big that we had to catch a train from the terminal to the gate.
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