Day 8 -- leaving Winslow, passing through Meteor Crater, terminating at the Grand Canyon

From Winslow, we had a pretty short drive to Meteor Crater. Meteor Crater is literally in the middle of the desert, and you take a several-mile, isolated road to reach it. The road coincidentally passed through a free-range area for cattle, so some caution had to be used when cresting hills and the like, to make sure we wouldn't run smack into a herd in the road... and we did see some cattle perhaps 50 yards from the road at one point. Kenny heard that if you actually hit a cow out here, in addition to your own injuries/damages, you also get to pay the farmer for his (likely deceased) cow.

The crater:



A big piece of the meteor that created the crater; it is very metallic, and has more of an appearance of unpolished silver than anything else:



From there, we hightailed it across some pretty desolate terrain to the Grand Canyon; here's the view from one of the more populated lookouts on the south rim:





People throw coins into the canyon; included in this batch of coins were many foreign coins, and we also heard many foreign languages among the other visitors to the rim.



We were disappointed to find that every single room in the park with a canyon view was taken at the rim lodges; on the other hand, this forced us back out of the park into the neighboring town of Tusayan, which is two miles from the park entry point. There, we stayed at a really nice hotel, the Grand Hotel, for much less.

A neat trick that Kenny has discovered is, after making friends with the hotel desk clerk, he asks whether there are any ghosts in the hotel, or if there have been any recent or notable deaths in the hotel. So far, we're two for two; a suicide in the La Posada, and a natural-causes death in the lobby of the Grand Hotel.