We wanted to start early as the Grand Canyon is a 600 mile roundtrip by car. Apparently opening times and attitudes are fairly flexible during the early daylight hours in Las Vegas. The car rental place is supposed to open at 8am. In Australia the staff would arrive early and prepare for the days operations. In Las Vegas the staff show up at 8:12am to three groups of customers waiting at the door. Needless to say it took a while to get our car and get on the road.
The actual trip to the Grand Canyon South Rim via Hoover Dam is actually pretty straightfoward with few turns to negotiate, it is just a really long drive. Only 30 miles to Hoover Dam where we took some photos and had a bit of a look around - the facility looks a lot smaller in person (still very tall). They are building another bridge over Hoover Dam for a road to run along the top of the hill rather than cutting through. I took some photos of the precarious construction of the arch bridge supports suspended by steel cables.
After Hoover Dam it was a 100 or so miles of not much followed by a turn and another 100 or so miles of not much. The area after Hoover Dam appeared very harsh - there was no vegetation just some powerlines and hard rocky ground. As we progressed further we saw more vegetation gradually. The drive was mostly uphill (although you couldn’t really tell as the gradient was very slight) but we went from 2000ft above sea level to 6000ft above sea level. It was funny to see a sign warning of ice on the road in the desert but as we got closer to the Grand Canyon we could see mountains with snow on them still (coming into summer over here).
We didn’t do the skywalk over the canyon as this is located at the west rim and the access to the west rim is via dirt road (forbidden in the rental car). We drove to the south rim which was recommended as being the more scenic location (just a very long drive). We took some pics and wandered around the trails for a bit. A lot of the tourist section is unfenced and people were standing right on the edge or climbing out to rocky outcroppings for photos - crazy!
After about 45mins - 1hr we headed back onto the road again for the long trip back to Las Vegas. Half the return trip was in darkness and this made a lot of the communities we drove through seem larger the second time as we could see light stretching further than before.
The rental car was a Porsche Boxster. While we did the drive to Orlando in a left hand drive car it was an automatic transmission. The Porsche was a manual transmission and several times I wanted to shift gears using the door handle. By the time we returned the car the next day though it was fine and I had no problems pulling out into the busy traffic or switching lanes (visibility is excellent with the top down). The max speed limit we have seen on the trip is 75 miles/hour (approx 120km/h) which allowed for some comfortable cruising speeds. I used cruise control a lot set to the speed limit but would often get overtaken at speed by all sorts of vehicles. The highway patrol are kept busy (driving from Orlando to Miami I saw the same car get pulled over for speeding twice) and it is not unusual to see three patrol cars with their lights on booking three lots of people at once.
