Grand Canyon---Rim to Rim RS#2804
Trip Start
Unknown
1
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Where I stayed
Phoenix, Arizona
Sunday, October 5, 2008
-Louis Comfort Tiffany
We left Orlando at 9 AM on Southwest Airline. We had a half-empty plane as far as Albequerque, NM, at which point they jammed the plane for the continuation to Phoenix. Not very comfortable! We arrived in Phoenix at 11:45 AM PT, 3 hours later than Florida. It seemed like a long flight but part of the problem was waiting 2 hours at OIA. (John is a believer in being at the airport WAY before scheduled departure.)
Our niece, Meghan, picked us up at the Phoenix airport. Bless her heart! That saved us the cost of a shuttle to our hotel. She drove us to a cute Mexican restaurant where we met Steven, our nephew. We had not seen Meghan for a while but had not seen Steven since he was in high school and by this time he had finished college and worked at least a couple of years. We had a very pleasant lunch at Asi Es La Vida. We did some catching up but fell into "teacher talk" with Meghan at times. Poor Steven!
After lunch Meghan took us to our hotel. We were a bit early for the Elderhostel (Road Scholar, now) since registration was at 4 PM.
We were so surprised to see the landscaping in Phoenix---lots of rocks and cacti instead of grass and trees!
Dinner was at the Hilton across the street and it was VERY nice. We met some friendly folks from Kissimmee right away. After dinner and back at La Quinta we had an orientation by leaders, Mary and David Best. Then we shared a little about ourselves with the whole group. We pretty much fell into bed after the introductory session since we had been up since about 5 AM Florida time!
