Through the Storm

On Friday, we made it to Long Beach to stay with our friend Calvin and catch up with Bo's high school friend, Gloria. Long Beach is a small beach town just outside of LA with a very SoCal feel, complete with palm trees, awesome beaches, and great weather. It seemed like there was always something cool going on - even in just the two days we were there.  We watched boat races and saw the US Open of Surfing, and saw a few other events going on in the city.

Huntington Beach when they host the US Open of Surfing.  So legit.

Boat races at the marina

Chillin

Palm trees

We left Long Beach on Sunday with intentions of making it to the Grand Canyon. Normally the drive is about 8 hours long, but the fast route through the Mojave desert had major flash flood and storm warnings, so we decided to play it safe and take highway 10 south of the Mojave to avoid the worst of the storms. Even so, as we left LA the clouds looked pretty ominous in the distance:

We hit the storm a few hours into the drive, and man did it rain hard! We were caught in torrential downpours, saw huge flashes of lightning, and the flood and rain water on the side of the road was pretty crazy. At one point, we were delayed because a crew was working on a part of the road where it had done a bit of damage.

Right lane completely broken off

We thought we had passed the worst of it, until we turned onto highway 177. This is a smaller highway that would have led us back to highway 40, but the highway was impassable due to all of the recent flooding. We stupidly tried to drive through it for about a mile after watching a small sedan make it through on of the wet sections, but quickly turned around:

Not being able to take that forced us to go all the way through Phoenix. We kept hitting pockets of storm all night:

We finally made it to the Grand Canyon campground around 2am. We passed out immediately, and then woke up 3 hours later to see the sun rise over the canyon! The views were spectacular:

 

 I guess it's a pretty big drop down there

Up next, Zion!