The Grand Canyon and Lava River Cave- Day 6

We started our day off in the middle of the desert in Page, Arizona. After packing up our campsite, we headed off to The Grand Canyon! The road that took us to The Grand Canyon was closed (our guess is because of rocks falling). Matt found a detour.

We took this dirt road around the closed part of the road for about 8 miles. Driving on all these dirt roads really makes you appreciate paved roads!

After a couple of hours of driving, we finally made it to The Grand Canyon!

It was very windy! My hair is whipping Matt in the face in most of our pictures at The Grand Canyon. :(

We got a couple of decent ones!

We climbed this tower to get a better view of the canyon.

This is the inside of the tower. You could peak out the windows on the way up.

Here's our view from the top of the tower.

This is the road we drove on in The Grand Canyon National Park. We drove along the road and pulled off at various spots to get different views of the canyon. Isn't it crazy how different this area of Arizona looks from Page, Arizona where we were in the morning? 

We were amazed at the size and the beauty of the canyon. It was a lot to take in!

After The Grand Canyon we drove off to Flagstaff, Arizona. We wanted to go to Havasau Falls because the pictures looked beautiful! Even though Havasau Falls is really close to The Grand Canyon it was a 5 hour drive because of the lack of roads in Arizona. We decided to scratch Havasau Falls off the list.

We stopped at Lava River Cave before Flagstaff. The cave isn't a well known place but Matt heard about it and wanted to check it out.

This is the road we had to take to get there. Matt is loving the off roading and I am thankful that I brought Dramamine!

This is the start of Lava River Cave.

We are going IN there!

We had to climb down these rocks to get into the cave. Once we got in it was a 3/4 mile hike through the rocky cave. 

It was VERY dark and we had to have flashlights.

It was hard to take pictures because it was so dark. I'm freaking out and Matt is having a blast. Matt thought it was the coolest thing in the world and I was having a panic attack! Dark places under the Earth are not my favorite!

The cave was formed by lava flowing through the earth. You can kind of see the hardened lava in this picture.

This is a picture from online, we made it until it split off which was almost all the way. I couldn't do it anymore and I had to get out of there. I couldn't handle going into another dark, rock tube. Matt loved every part of it though. He was so excited to go on an adventurous hike through a lava cave! Now that it's the day after this hike, I can say that I'm glad we did it and it was a pretty cool experience!

After the Lava River Cave, we went to Cracker Barrel (thanks to Matt's grandma)! It was nice to sit and relax after the emotionally draining hike! 

Today we are hopping back onto Route 66 and we are off to California! What should we see along the way?