Ah, the Grand Canyon. I had really grand (heh, get it?) plans for our trip to the Grand Canyon. My parents were visiting from Ohio and, as you all know, you can’t take a Midwesterner to Arizona without a stop at the Grand Canyon. We would drive up to the North Rim, avoid all the tourists, and go mountain biking for a few days on the Rainbow Trail that traverses the rim of the canyon. Sounds swell, right? Of course like most of my grand plans, I failed to consider a few details. In other words, I made Travel-Newbie-Mistake Numero Uno (for probably the millionth time, I might add) and never plugged anything into Google Maps until the night before we were supposed to leave Albuquerque and drive to the Grand Canyon.

What’s that you say? It’s TWELVE HOURS of driving to the North Rim? Are you kidding? It looks SO close on the map. SHIT.

And that, friends, is East-Coaster-Mistake Numero Uno. To all of you who hail from east of the Mississippi, just remember, it takes fucking forever to get ANYWHERE in the western half of our beautiful country. Abso-fucking-lutely forever. And this is with 75mph speed limits.

Macky and I were still game for the venture because we have a poorly-developed concept of time. It goes along with our whole live-life-to-the-fullest mentality, which we take very, um, literally. My dad, who does not share this tendency, did some of his own research and discovered that the last 50 miles or so were all on 4X4 track (oops) so….you know…we went to Flagstaff instead. Which was fine. In fact, it was great. But we still wanted to see the Grand Canyon.

And so, one morning we were up at the crack of dawn and driving north from Flagstaff. (Edit: that was the original plan. What actually happened was that we got up at 7am, Macky did a circuit training workout and I wrote a blog post and we started driving at 9am. So, uhhhh, basically the crack of dawn…) We took the scenic route and drove into Grand Canyon National Park the back way on Route 64. I can definitely recommend this because we saw no other humans the entire morning. We ate lunch by a beautiful (and somewhat terrifying) cliffside, snapped some photos and then figured we’d continue to the visitor centre, because, why not?

Family portrait at our stellar lunch spot.

And that is the really inexplicable thing about the Grand Canyon — all of a sudden this vast landscape goes from totally unpopulated to ABSOLUTELY FULL of tourists. It’s mind-boggling. We couldn’t find a parking space on a Tuesday in May. Eek. Everybody and their mother, plus approximately 10 gagillion tour busses, seemed to want to wander around the Grand Canyon visitor center lookout, ogling the canyon and feeding the ridiculously tame squirrels. Okay, whatever, fine. Frankly the Grand Canyon is really impressive, no matter how many fellow midwesterners are surrounding you while you look at it. It doesn’t really matter. It’s worth seeing. Sure, I’d love to hike to the bottom someday, or ride the North Rim, but on this particular day, I was pretty content to take a few photos and then go back to Flagstaff and ride my bike down the Arizona Trail, which, by the way, is pretty hardcore.

I’m stressing this “hardcore” business because one of the first things I did upon leaving the Grand Canyon was post this Instagram photo from, yes, you got me, the Grand Canyon visitor centre. And naturally, some internet troll comes out of the woodwork to inform me that my photo is from the top of the Grand Canyon (wow, really?! I had no idea! the big drop-off wasn’t a hint at all!) and therefore, not hardcore at all. Ah, now I remember why I hate people, thanks for the reminder, dude.

This annoyed me on a number of levels, because A) I don’t know this person and really don’t appreciate unnecessary negativity from people I don’t know, and B) it wasn’t like I had any illusions that looking into the Grand Canyon made me “hardcore.” I do plenty of hardcore things in my life, and sometimes, frankly, I get tired of the effort being “hardcore” takes. Oh and sometimes it hurts too.

My legs after over-doing the “hardcore.”

And even if I were hardcore all the time (can you imagine the carnage? yikes…), it wouldn’t make me a better person or a better traveler. This is one of my huge gripes with the travel community — all this “holier than thou” because I went “off the beaten path” bullshit. It’s so tiresome and unoriginal, not to mention judge-y and annoying. There’s a reason people go to tourist attractions — because they’re worth seeing. But if you’re too cool for it, it’s fine by me, just means one less idiot to trip over.

Travel is very personal. As someone who routinely rides my bike down mountains, I understand that my travel style isn’t appealing (or accessible) to a lot of people. Of course, I’m biased and I think traveling as a mountain biker is the best, but I make an effort to respect other people’s travel styles, even if they’re doing things I have no interest in doing (like bungee jumping or staying at luxury hotels).

Here’s the moral of the story: As long as you’re nice and clean up after yourself, I don’t give a damn how you travel. But if you leave me obnoxious comments, I WILL call you out on it. Sorry, not sorry.

Oh, and the Grand Canyon is beautiful and you should go.

Being totally un-hardcore (but adorable?) at the Grand Canyon.