Las Vegas: Grand Canyon

Ross and I took a quick vacation a few weeks ago to Las Vegas. During the summer we decided a vacation would be great and thought about California or Las Vegas. If we went to California, we'd go to the beach, but the beach did not sound fun at 5 months pregnant, so we opted for Las Vegas. Neither of us had been to Las Vegas before and we'd always talked about going and thought why not. We figured it would be a while before we would get to go on vacation again and also treated this as an early 5-year anniversary present to ourselves. Our 5-year anniversary will be next April, just about 2 months after Molly will be born...not the perfect time for a vacation!

I really wanted to go to the Grand Canyon while in Las Vegas. It's about a 4.5 hour drive from Las Vegas and I thought that we couldn't pass up that opportunity. We were so close, relatively speaking! We didn't want to spend a whole entire day driving and Ross found an airplane tour we could take that would fly us over the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon in a total of 4 hours. We thought this was a great idea and decided to go for it.

A shuttle service picked us up at our hotel Sunday at noon and took us to an airport about 30 minutes outside of Las Vegas where we got checked in and had to wait a bit for our flight. The plane we flew on was a small, 20-seater plane. Ross and I were in the very back row and I was very happy to see how big the plane windows were. I was afraid they might be small like regular plane windows, but they were a very good size.

The plane took off and right away I could tell we were in for a long flight, even though it was supposed to last only 1 hour. There was quite a bit of turbulence and I was scared right off the bat. It almost felt like the plane was just going to drop out of the air at times. It was definitely not a smooth, steady flight like a commercial airline. We flew over the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead then made our way to the Grand Canyon.

It was so neat to see the Grand Canyon from the air, however my stomach didn't quite agree with that. The turbulence got to me and I ended up throwing up in the little airplane barf bag. I'm so glad that thing was there! I've always wondered what it would be like to throw up in one of those things and now I know! That was not fun at all, but I did feel a little better after the fact, but the way back was still rough. Ross didn't feel so great himself, but was able to keep everything in! It did make me feel better that the girl sitting in front of Ross threw up, too. :)

Overall, it was worth it to me. I loved seeing the Grand Canyon and it was from such a different perspective that I would have gotten had we driven there. Enjoy my pictures!