John & Allison's Adventures Down South: Catching up

Today's date April 3, 2014

Hello followers. Well since my last post in January I did a couple of great hikes in the Mesa area. Then we traveled by car through Mexico to Punta de Mita, Nyarit which is near Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco. Spent the month of February there with friends, doing many activities including: paddleboarding, kayaking, shopping at local markets, scuba/snorkeling, a cultural evening, golfing (John) and visiting friends in another town. We then drove back to Mesa. On the way home we had our friends the Gaumonts traveling with us, as they wanted to take the vehicle they had down in P de M back to the US to get some work done on it.
Both drives down and back were, thankfully, uneventful ie: no car problems, no problems with authorities, no problems with "banditos", nada. (nothing)
Back in the good ol' USA we have been golfing, hiking, doing our desert walk behind the Colby house, drove to Palm Springs to visit our good friends Erna and Derwyn Lowe, where we were treated royally by our gracious hosts. A very fun time!
Now we are back on the road, slowly making our way back to Canada.
Our first stop is where I am writing from, the KOA campsite just north of Williams, AZ on highway 64 which takes you to the Grand Canyon.
The day after we arrived at the KOA we backtracked to Sedona as we hadn't been there yet. We took the scenic hwy 89A into Sedona then did the Bell Tower hike. We had stopped at a visitor info when we first arrived and the the helpful fellow highlighted on a map places to see. We did most of them and were happy to have had the map and info. Really quite spectacular sights to see in and around Sedona.
Yesterday we headed up to the Grand Canyon. We stopped first at the National Geographic Visitor Centre and watched an IMAX film about the canyon's history.
We utilised the "America the Beautiful" National Park Pass again. I highly recommend purchasing one if you ever tour in the USA. Very good value!
The Grand Canyon is indeed GRAND!! I took plenty of photos and even though the weather was not grand we really enjoyed the park. Words and photos really can't capture the grandeur of the place. We have decided we would like to return another time and spend about 3 days there so we could take in some more activities. The park is really well run with excellent shuttle buses that travel the length of the rim trail so you can hike that as much or as little as you like or just the areas you want. They run every 15 minutes so you never have a long wait, which was great yesterday as we got dumped on by a big snowstorm from about 1pm on. At points you couldn't see into the canyon because of the whiteout.
The drive back to the campsite was very snowy and it continued to snow throughout the night so we woke up to a white blanketed morning.
We decided to take another night here to let the snow and ice melt off the rig and let the roads dry up before we take off to our next destination. St. George, Utah.
Now I will post a load of photos: