People You Meet

Over at Grand Canyon West, you meet tourists from all over the WORLD. Now Grand Canyon West is still under development, there's 14 miles of washboard dirt road to get into it. Before the Sky Walk opened, they got maybe 20 cars a day at the most. Since the Sky Walk has opened they are getting somewhere around 1500 visitors a day, quite a few by air, but still a LOT of cars and buses. You park at the air terminal and then they shuttle bus you around to the different stops. The buses run constantly, so you get off and on when you want.

People on the buses are talking all different languages. We met people from Brazil, France, Italy and Texas. The Texas guy was taking his son to college in Sacramento and stopped to check it out on the way. I heard one guy say that he was from New Zealand, and then later I thought I heard him say he was originally from Samoa. So when I got a chance, I asked him. He said yes, he was from Western Samoa. I told him I had spend 3 years in Apia at Pesega, and he said he had gone to school there too! Turns out he went there in the 70's so I couldn't think of anyone we might have known in common.

We got up at 4:00 to go there, turned out to be the perfect time. We got there about 8:00. We were the first private vehicle in the parking lot and it was not crowded at all. By the time we left around 12:00-1:00 it was getting crowded. The parking lot had lots of cars, and helicopters and planes were coming and going constantly. We passed lots of cars and buses on their way in as we were going out.

I talked to one of the pilots on one of the tours out of Vegas. I asked him how much a package was. The one they were running that day included a helicopter ride down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and breakfast down there. Then they were doing the stuff at the top before heading back to Vegas. He thought the clients were paying around $500.00 each for the package and it was a "special". Normally he said they could run about three flights from Vegas to Grand Canyon West in the same amount of time as this one. So the other flights should be cheaper.