One of the most disconcerting issues with living in Florida is how many children, grandchildren, relatives, and friends find their way to your home each winter. Who can blame them? the weather here is great, even in the depth of the winter months and, if you are trying to escape the cold and the snow, why not head south for a few days or weeks? Besides, we love seeing all these people and welcoming them to our home, though it does tend to get a bit tiring after many visitors show up. You sometimes begin to feel like a cruise ship activity director, planning new activities each day. But there are certainly worse fates in this world than having a lot of visitors and enjoying them being around for a while.
But after months of visitors, the need to simply have some down time grows and, if possible, a trip to somewhere beautiful for some photography seems like a great plan. Where to go this year? Well, the Grand Canyon slipped into my mind and I couldn’t shake it. I have never been to the Canyon in the Winter months, but the attraction of few people, the ability to drive anywhere, and decent weather (though freezing cold mornings!!) was overwhelming and really pulled me in. So I made my plans, packed my gear, and off I went. Elaine was happy since she could now golf and dine with her friends and not feel guilty at all. So she also had her own little vacation.
As with Death Valley, I wanted to get more color into my images by being out during sunrise and sunset. The nice aspect of the Grand Canyon is that there was reasonably good and much less expensive places to stay right outside the park, with internet and phone services, something that the Canyon itself lacked. The National Park System is having a really hard time coming to grips with cell phones and the Internet, trying to pretend that these are not essential components of modern life that simply cannot be ignored. But my lodging was fine, and I was only 2 miles outside the South entrance to the park. The drive to any of the viewpoints was quite easy and I could be at one of the major viewpoints within about 15 minutes. Perfect!
I had not visited the Grand Canyon for about 6 years prior to this trip. Once again, as soon as I saw the Canyon, it was a mind-boggling experience. You know what it looks like, having witnessed it in person and seen it in so many images, yet it never fails to take your breath away. You know how it was formed, you’ve read the story many times, but actually seeing the eons of erosion and the geological layers makes it almost incomprehensible that something like this could actually happen, give or take a few hundred million years or so! The Canyon itself is simply frying your brain in disbelief, yet the beauty and majesty of what you are seeing makes you immediately reach for your camera to take a picture of almost anything. It takes a while for you to actually calm down a bit and begin to focus your feelings upon creating some images that will speak to other people who are not standing there next to you. But no photos really do justice to the Grand Canyon. Capturing a small section, even with a beautiful sunrise or dramatic sunset, are wonderful, but represent just a sliver of the majesty of this wonder of the world. But I tried my best, and for the next week, took several thousand images of the Grand Canyon that made me totally forget the stresses of Florida visitors. It was a marvelous trip.
