Sunrise

I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but all of the blog posts I'm doing are from my phone, with phone pictures. I have better and more photos on my actual camera.
So, right now it's 12:55pm. Everyone has been out cold for at least an hour now, and I'm hoping they'll continue to sleep a bit more. We awoke at 3:30 this morning in order to get to the park in time to catch a sunrise bus tour. It was harder than anticipated to find our way to the correct parking lot and bus in the dark! After first parking in the wrong lot altogether, we ran the kids back to the car and got ourselves to the correct spot just before the bus pulled away! Yikes. We had a very nice guide who stopped us at Hopi Point to watch the sun come up. We also made a couple other stops afterwards, for great morning views. On the way back to the village area she drove past the sweet female elk grazing here. We also saw a mule deer and then drove past the canyon mule enclosure. It was fun to see some of them all saddled up!
The tour was over by about 6:30 so we went into the beautiful El Tovar lodge to have a yummy breakfast. We had a canyon view from our table. We visited Hopi House, then walked the rim trail to Lookout Studio. Then we took a short hike down the beginning of the Bright Angel trail. We went down just far enough to see some Native wall art, and then came back up. It was the perfect amount of walking for all of us-there are no railings along the trail. The kids were great about holding on tight, but the heights especially made Pete nervous. I was so glad we went at least a bit below the rim. Back up, we stopped in the Kolb studio. We got to see a crazy movie the Kolb brothers had made-probably the first motion picture of the canyon ever made. Pete bought a book about them. By then it was almost 10am. We had had a full
visit and were ready for a treat. Ice cream at 10 in the morning? Of course! We're on vacation!
Our plan for the rest of the day is to maybe take a swim in the pool, then buy some sandwiches to take back to the park for an evening picnic. Hopefully the weather holds off. We've been taking the rain with us and it's looking a little cloudy out there right now. We were so glad to hear the heat finally broke back home!