I once read that the average tourist spends less than four hours at the Grand Canyon. Let's see, it's 277 miles long, in places it's ten miles wide and over a mile deep and the best these visitors can do is drive, or shuttle, from one vista to another, take a few pictures and get back in their car or board the next shuttle bus. They won't know what they've seen until the film is developed (old school) or they download the images onto their computer. The sad reality is that those pictures will never do it justice. The Canyon is too big to be digitized and then displayed on a 13, 15 or 17 inch monitor and I don't care what resolution the screen has; it just doesn't work. I have over a thousand pictures of the Canyon that I took during a number of visits, I've looked at them once and that's it; unless I show them to friends or family. The images that I do remember are all mental: visual, audio, tactile and olfactory.

There was a young couple hiking up to the rim on the South Kaibab Trail. It was late afternoon and the two of them looked as though they had been models posing for the cover of a sports magazine. Bright-eyed, fresh faced and clean they briskly walked past us toward the rim. At the trail head I had a chance to speak with them. They had left the north rim at 5 AM and were completing an annual Rim to Rim hike. It was his fifth and her first. That's a 21 mile stroll!

Hiking down the trail we were passed by a mule train heading up. The smell of leather, sweat and dung fill our nostrils. Someone wanted to know if it was safe.

"No ma'am, those mules all suffer from acute depression when they consider their lot in life. Quite a few of them have been known to just walk right over the edge and take their rider with them."

At the Bright Angel Lodge someone inquired at the information desk, "Is the mule train to the bottom of the canyon air conditioned?"

Watching people standing at the rim with their eyes focused on the screen of their smart phone, texting or playing an online game. The GC. OMG! GTG. BFF. LOL. A geologic wonder that's 80 million years old is reduced to a handful of acronyms; there's something wrong with that.

Walking down the trail there is the feel of sand and stone crunching under my feet. I realize that just two steps below the rim and I am geologically standing on a layer that predates the existence of humans. 

When Spanish conquistadors first saw the canyon and the river below, they noted that the river appeared to be no more than six feet wide.

These are the memories that I keep and revisit from time to time. The pictures I've taken are stored on CDs and backed up onto an external hard drive. It takes a few minutes to find those pictures. Closing my eyes I can retrieve all the other memories in a nanosecond.

So welcome to my blog. I'll be sharing my memories with you and may even include some pictures. There will be history and anecdotes. I enjoy travelling and telling the tales. Several people have encouraged me to start a blog; so here it is. You may be a traveller yourself, or just an armchair adventurer, but when you consider the fact that we're all passengers on this planet as it travels around the sun, then we're all travellers.

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God"
Kurt Vonnegut

Enjoy!