the road to the Grand Canyon looked familiar...

After reviewing my posts, I realized that I barely wrote anything about the Las Vegas and Grand Canyon legs of my recent vacation. I'm writing them now in case I get flooded by more stuff to write about.

First up: my Grand Canyon road trip.

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I've wanted to go to the Grand Canyon since I received a Crayola coloring book with drawings of cliffs that take on different hues; it's the very same coloring book which taught me how to draw a dinosaur, a bat, and and alligator. :) As luck would have it, I did go to the Grand Canyon with the family; I thank Ate Grace and Mommy for organizing this road trip of ours.

Our starting point was Las Vegas NV. We rented a minivan there the day after we watched KA. Armed with Ate Grace's list of directions, Biboy's iPad (with Google maps) and his wifi hotspot of an Android smartphone, we turned our backs to the city and took the road to the outback the Mojave Desert.

I'd only seen the red desert of Australia and golden desert of Central Asia from miles above, through airplane windows, which was why I was excited to be on the ground in a desert this time around. We stayed on the Interstate (I-215 East) and then US Route 93 for about an hour. Then, we took a left on Pierce Ferry Road. That road is one of the most scenic that I've ever been too! On both sides of the highway stood a whole "forest" of Joshua trees while in front of us was what I call the "tail end" of the Grand Canyon.

Wow! The imposing mountains in front of us were amazing! That was exactly how we all reacted (Ate Grace was with us too) when we first laid eyes on the rice terraces of Hungduan, Ifugao (prettier that Banaue, in my opinion) in April 2000.

The desert road leads to the Grand Canyon, Arizona.

After the first few miles, the shock and the awe started to wear off. We were getting tired of the barren mountains, and the dusty road, and the flat highway... AND the loss of AT&T network reception. Even my internationally roaming phone couldn't catch a signal! Not knowing how much further the next leg of the trip was, Biboy started worrying about the fuel level on our rented Nissan Quest.

Thirty-ish miles along Pierce Ferry Road, we finally found the next turn: Diamond Bar Road. The adventure finally began... we were off the grid and off road! The view unveiled as we drove along the unpaved road became even better than we expected!

The closer we came to the Grand Canyon West, the more rugged the road and the cliffs became. The mountains were still barren but the details of the rock formations became a lot clearer than when were farther off.

Wilder terrain along Diamond Bar Road, Arizona.

Vehicles traversing the rough patches of road stirred up lots of dust, very similar to the road leading to San Miguel, Padre Garcia, Batangas when I was a kid. Driving along Diamond Bar Road certainly brought back good memories from childhood.

Aside from childhood memories of roads and surprising landscapes in the Philippines, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I'd already seen the road to the Grand Canyon before. Even after I've come back home, there's this nagging feeling that the road and the view should be something I know.

It finally came to me while I was watching Cars on cable tv. The route we took to the Grand Canyon had similar terrain to the "mother road" that leads to Radiator Springs and to the interstate that bypasses Radiator Springs all together. I'm amazed at how an animated movie could familiarize people to something totally foreign to them (like the desert to me, who lives in the tropics).