OUR DAY AT THE GRAND CANYON!!!

WELCOME to the GRAND CANYON!

So many photos to take...

We loved the different shuttle stops...The views were amazing!

Davi (Brazil) on our grand hike into the canyon

Ally (Australia) met a squirrel in the canyon

Representing a few of our countries!

Hike, hike hike!

We all got a free souvenir to take home-- Canyon dust! 

A few students enjoyed the view from the lookout

while others hiked below

This morning we woke up and had breakfast, it was scrambled eggs, bacon, French toast and syrup--it was a real common American breakfast.  We were supposed to leave at 8, but something terrible-which ended up being wonderful happened to our bus.  Bus 2 ended up staying 2 hours later at the hotel while Bus 1 left on time for the Grand Canyon. For the extra 2 hours, we were able to play tennis, basketball, UNO, and we even danced! We bonded like family.  We finally got to the Grand Canyon with the new AWESOME bus, the best music, and the best people.

When we got to the Grand Canyon National Park we had no idea what to expect. We got out of the bus and walked through a narrow path to find the whole canyon in front of us! No photo could ever do justice to the beautiful view that we had! We all started taking pictures like crazy, just to try to capture some of the pure beauty. Every angle gave different perspective, different colors, different depth to the canyon. After taking hundreds of pictures, we realized how hungry we were so we split up to find a nice place to eat lunch. We also had free time to take the shuttles around and see the different views of the landscape. We started taking our flags out of our bags and waving them with pride around the park, taking pictures to represent all of our countries.

After relaxing and taking in the beautiful views of the canyon, we began preparing our minds and awakening our adventurous spirits to explore the GRAND Canyon. We felt like Indiana Jones, but with mules instead of snakes all around us. We got very excited to go down, filled our water bottles, stretched our walking legs, and then, before we knew it, we were at the bottom… And then it was time to go back up! Oh, that was hard… Challenge accepted! We took some more flag pictures, refilled our bottles, and had contact with some canyon animals—birds, squirrels, and a mountain goat on a roof. It was interesting and helped distract us from the hard task ahead—going up! We took twice as long to go up as we did to come down the 1.5 miles… We stopped frequently to take pictures, drink water, enjoy the view, sit on a rock, watch the other hikers and listen to music to pump us up… The motivation was good- we had dinner waiting for us! When we got to the top, we cheered, hugged each other, sang “We Are the Champions”… We all felt like there should be a person waiting at the top to give us each a star for successfully finishing the hike (our suggestion to the Park Rangers)…

Anyways, our hungry hiker bellies were ready for dinner! We got on the bus and rode to another area to eat yummy pasta with meatballs and then brownies for dessert. They also had salad, but hikers need more, so we went straight for the carbs!

We are looking forward to the days ahead, but good night for now… Us hikers need our beauty sleep because tomorrow WE’RE GOING TO VEGAS, BABY!

Intro by Ricardo & Naomi

Grazi- Brazil