Crew 3’s ‘Epic Western Expedition’ – Yes It Was: Day 4

Day 4 for Venture Crew 3 would be a fairly easy day, or so we thought, turned out to be a day I'll never forget, and for all the right reasons. Hello Jim's Bucket List, today it's the Grand Canyon!

This is it, while there are several places we stopped on this trip that could be considered "bucket list" places, for me this was the ultimate. I have wanted to see the Grand Canyon with my own beady little eyes ever since I knew it existed.

... and ya'll, maybe you've heard it before, maybe not, pictures DO NOT do it justice.

I have never seen anything this big and beautiful before, nor can I imagine seeing anything it's equal ever again in my lifetime here on earth. The sight of it touched my heart and soul in ways I've never quite experienced before. I choked up bad, to the point of embarrassment really. I couldn't talk for fear of blubbering like little kid.

Crew 3 stopped at this lookout point to have sammiches and cookies and check phones.

If you look closely in the middle of the pic below, I managed to capture a bird in flight over the canyon.

In the one below I zoomed in a bit on the Colorado River, it's kind of hard to see from most places on the South Rim anyway.

After we got back to Flagstaff, which was our base of operations for 3 days, and had dinner, it was time to go the Lowell Observatory right up the road and mountain from us. The telescope pictured below is the one that discovered Pluto. Stop it! Not the dog.

I wouldn't put the Observatory on my "bucket list" but it was pretty cool for a complete amateur stargazer like me.

Day 4 was mind-blowing for me with the visit to the aptly-named Grand Canyon, could the trip get any better than this? Hard to imagine but yeah, it kinda did.