Across the USA

The next day, our tour started. The first stop was Zion National Park. Unfortunately, it was high season in June and the park was completely overcrowded. The first challenge was finding a parking spot somewhere in Springdale. From there, a shuttle takes you into the park. In the summer, you can only travel through the park with the shuttle bus. After about an hour of waiting, we finally got a spot on the bus. We drove to the last stop and then took the bus back to the stops that were interesting to us. In Zion National Park, you find yourself at the bottom of a vast canyon that is quite green due to the Virgin River. Since we had very little time, we only took a short hike to the Emerald Pools. After a much too short visit to the park, we had a two-hour drive to Page ahead of us.

When we arrived in Page, we quickly checked into our hotel and went straight to Horseshoe Bend, where we unfortunately arrived shortly after sunset.

The next day, in addition to visiting the Grand Canyon, we also booked a tour of Lower Antelope Canyon, as it looked absolutely beautiful in photos. We had signed up for the first tour of the day. The colors and shapes of the canyon, formed by flash floods, are very impressive, and I have never seen anything like it. Our guide showed us how to adjust the white balance on our phones' cameras so that the phone can detect the fluorescent particles in the rocks, making the colors in the photos even more beautiful than what you can see with the naked eye. The Lower Antelope Canyon is relatively wide at the bottom and narrows as you go up. This creates the effect of small beams of light shining into the canyon at certain spots. After that, we had a 2.5-hour drive to the Grand Canyon Visitor Center.

The next morning, we set off early as we had the longest stretch of the tour ahead of us. Our route took us from Williams on the Route 66 through the desert to Joshua Tree National Park and then on to Palm Springs. The drive was very exhausting because we had temperatures between 45 and 50 degrees in the desert, so the air conditioning couldn't cool the car properly, and we were a bit worried about the car's coolant as we encountered very few cars or villages where someone could help in case of a breakdown. 

Joshua Tree National Park also has a scenic road through it. However, due to the very high temperatures, we only made very short stops. From time to time, I looked at the soles of my shoes from below to check if they were melting. All in all, we didn't find the national park as beautiful, as it is very barren and mainly consists of sand, rocks, and Joshua trees. Perhaps it was also due to the temperatures that we couldn't fully appreciate the national park.

When we arrived at our hotel in Palm Springs, we broke our temperature record again; it was 52 degrees there. Since all hotel rooms have direct access to the outside, the air conditioning didn't really manage to cool the rooms. As is typical in America, we didn't feel like walking, so we also drove the few hundred meters to McDonald's by car.