Had to take a short break after 8 hours of driving so far. Still want to put in a couple more hours before it gets dark, but it was time to get out from behind the windshield and relax a little bit.

   I'm currently about 60 miles west of Des Moines, Iowa on I-80. With luck I'll end up somewhere around Davenport when I finally pull in. Left Imperial just after 8:00 a.m. this morning. Earlier than usual, but I have about 1,800 miles to go, so I needed to get up and on the road. A bit of fog for about an hour this morning; really pretty watching the corn and sunflower fields flashing by as I went down the road. It finally burned off around 9:30 and it was a typical sunny, autumn day again. Still cool outside though, I think the high today was somewhere in the low 70's, so just about perfect travelling weather.

    Not much else going on, just lot's of tunes on the iPod and finally an NPR station with some news in Omaha. I think someone needs to figure out how to make the month of September about 3 times longer. This is certainly the best month out of the year.

Below are the photo's from the 2nd day on our Grand Canyon rafting trip. Sorry for such a long delay, but it takes about an hour to import these to the blog. A slow process to be sure, but it is still fun for me to see them again also.



The start of our 2nd day on the river. We have been up since 'o-dark-thirty' because that is when the crew are up and starting breakfast. There is something inherently wrong with being awake while bats are still flying. But here we are a few hours later, down river a few miles and ready to start a short hike up a side canyon.

The plant in the photo is Datura, also known as 'Moon Flower' because it blooms at night to conserve moisture. I just thought it looked neat growing out of a pond that was left over from the last rain storm.

The end of this hike was at this last pool. We could of gone farther but the day was starting to heat up and it was time to get back to the river.

Anywhere there was a little water you had toads, frogs or polliwogs. This one is about half the size of my little finger nail. Those are grains of sand he is sitting on.

A good friend of mine, Donna. I thought the layers of rock were kind of neat looking.

A nice thing about being in such a deep canyon is that the walls often block the sun until late in the morning.

Back on the river and onto one of the many rapids we hit today. This one is probably only a class 3-4 on a scale of 1-10, so not very big. These were often the wettest ride though as the guides had no problem with just aiming the boat into the middle of the biggest waves on these little ones.

Floating out the bottom of the rapid. I'm afraid my camera isn't waterproof so this is about as good of a picture in rapids as I got. My friend, Jim, did have a couple of waterproof camera's along so I hope to add some of his photo's and video once I get them from him and download them to my computer.

Lunch time and we have stopped at a huge opening in the cliff at the side of the river. Scoured out by the river when it was at a higher level, it evidently broke through to a more erodible layer at some point and left this huge cave behind to astound everyone who comes by.

John Wesley Powell stopped here on his two trips down the river and reported that he thought more than 5,000 people could comfortably fit into this area. The acoustics are such that you can talk in a normal voice near the river and still hear it at the back of the cave. My friend Tom took a few moments to play one of his Native American flutes.... it was really cool.

Stunning views like this were everywhere you looked.



Where there was even a hint of water there was something growing.

Our 2nd night's camp site. Plenty of little nooks amongst the trees, bushes and cacti.

The dish washing station and a look at what some of our view for the evening was.