Arizona: On route to the Grand Canyon.....

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Had long drive on the coach from San Diego up to Phoenix although thankfully the time went quicker than i expected! We stopped at a few places on route including at very cool Sand Dunes in California which apparantly are heavily used by Hollywood for any films requiring desert scenes! As we were only in Phoenix the one night didn't get to see all that much of the city but seemed to cover absolutely massive area as its really spread out. I wasn't feeling too well so only went out to dinner before having an early night but most people went out and apparantly was a lot of fun so was a bit of a shame to have missed it. Todd the tour manager had gone to college in Phoenix so took everyone on pub crawl of his old haunts!

The following day we continued the drive up to the Grand Canyon stopping off again on the way. First we picked up people who had been hot air ballooning and we had the opportunity to take photos of all the cactus plants. A guy on the tour called Matt who was from Adelaide got too close and got a massive chunk of cactus stuck in his arm! Luckily he saw the funny side of it and even took a photo! The incident earned him the nickname of Cactus Matt for the rest of the tour! After that we drove to a place called Sedona where  lots of us went on a really cool jeep tour which took us off the road and saw lots of the red rock formations in the area which were quite spectacular. Sedona was a really interesting place to stop off as its famous for being a new age place but at same time still also had a traditional cowboy element so bit of an interesting mix!