Playing catch up

We were up early for the driver meeting ahead of the group drive from Page to the Grand Canyon but since we had missed Antelope Canyon the day before we decided to start there and meet up with the group later.
We were able to head out on the first tour of the morning and the ride in the back of the pickup truck down the wash was as terrifying as I remembered :) Our tour guide showed us where all of the beautiful pictures were and told us many tales of snakes, spiders and floods. It was already quite windy too so there were several sand showers as we hiked through the canyon.
Back at the parking lot we were leaving Page about 2hours after the main group. Luckily we had very little traffic in transit to the Grand Canyon and we were able to run at our own pace through the twisty highways from Kanab to the park. We did stop off for lunch in Jakob's Lake for lunch and fuel too. When we arrived at the park the rest of the group was just about to head on to Springdale so we were able to make up about an hour.
This was my first visit to the north rim and it is so very different from the south rim. The initial drive in feels much more like driving into Yellowstone, except for the lack of buffalo. There are much fewer viewpoints at the north rim too but we did hike out to the Bright Angel Trail which gives you views down the length of the canyon. It was very, very windy along the exposed trail which made things more interesting but we still got a lot of great shots before heading back to the car. We were still about an hour behind the main group so we were thinking we could possibly catch them at their planned fuel stop in Kanab.
We had another fun drive back out of the park with very little traffic but we couldn't quite catch the group. We did have a very nice drive through the east section of Zion on the way to Springdale, Danielle's first time into the park too. We got into a bit too much traffic to play too much in the Mt Carmel tunnel but I'm sure the cars around us have a new found appreciation for five cylinder engines :)
As it turns out we only missed the main group by a couple of minutes after all, but we did have fun trying. We crashed pretty early after dinner with plans to get an early start in the morning.