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Saturday, October 25, 2008, Locsin's house, Morgan Hill, California: The end of the trip and the beginning of a new chapter in life.
We got up before the crack of dawn and drove into the Grand Canyon National Park. When it got light enough to see, we discovered we were next to a deep river gorge with painted cliff walls. What a sight. We hadn't even gotten to the real Grand Canyon yet and already it was breathtakingly beautiful. We stopped for a short while to take pictures then entered the main park. By then the sun was coming up. We were some of the first ones there, so there were no crowds; we enjoyed the unbelievable views and took lots of picture. There were dozens of places to park and view different vista points, so it took hours to tour and we saw less than half. The museum was great and we discovered that to canoe down the Colorado River on a selected date, you must make reservations two years in advance and it costs about $300 a day, too much for us. The trip to the Grand Canyon was well worth the extra miles. Next time I would like to hike down to the river. When we left, we were hoping to take another short detour and go through Las Vegas and see a couple of our favorite sites: Caesar's Palace and The Rio Hotel (for the buffet). Unfortuneately, it was too late. We wouldn't have made it all the way to Morgan Hill before Sunday late if we did, so we decided against it and made our way directly toward northern California. I took a nap at some point in the early evening, which helped a lot to make it through the night. All of us were eager to make it the rest of the way to California and begin our new, albeit uncertain, chapter of our lives. At least we would be with our good friends, the Locsins, who said we could stay with them until we found a place of our own. We knew we would be arriving late so we told them and they left the studio room open for us when we arrived, at 5:00 am, Saturday morning. They had already laid out blankets and pillows and arranged the room for us to sleep. How good it was to sleep horizontally, in a bed again. We all fell asleep quickly, I think. But the memory of the trip would be etched forever in our minds. I know it is in mine.