Travel Day 1 and 2 - Getting to the Grand Canyon National Park

Day 0 (Sep 26, 2008) was massively chaotic just-in-time processing; the important thing is everything got done!

My flight from San Jose, CA to Phoenix, AZ was on Sep 26th at 1 in the afternoon. Before I could board the flight a million last minute things had to be done. One such stressful thing to do was shipping my stuff from US to India. I had arranged for the shippers to do a pickup from my apartment on Sep 25 afternoon, alas my packing was nowhere close to done by then :(. The only option left was to drop all the items at San Francisco. It is important to point that I had been packing by myself on Wed and Thu and was not lazing around :-) From speed packing on the last night, to printing shipping labels to driving my goods to the shipping dock - all required friends, that I thankfully have :-)

Coming back from SF at 10:30 am, throwing all the garbage, giving away things, adding more stuff to travel bags, taking a shower and heading to the airport - are all a bit hazy in my mind....Why you may ask? I didn't sleep even a minute on Thursday night. Just sorting, trashing and organizing all my papers took 3 hours or such....

Back at the SJC airport, things went smoothly....I reached the airport 30 minutes to fly and bags check-in, security, food purchase, all was done in 15 mins :) Slept throughout the flight to Phoenix....Boy was I really really tired! When the bags arrived - my roller bag arrived but the new backpack was missing, ouch :( :( I was told to wait from 2:30 pm to 5:30 for the next Southwest flight from SJC to arrive. I used the time well - ate some more, dozed some more and then did what I had not had the time to do at all - booked myself a nice and cheap hotel for the night in Phoenix and a rental car for my Grand Canyon rendezvous all courtesy Orbitz.com. At that moment I had an economic policy revelation - my apartment for the last 1 year cost me $45/day; so long as I could find a place to stay for <=$45/night throughout my travel I would not be spending any additional $$ on lodging than my usual. I was running out of energy and the next SJ flight was 30 minutes late so I took the shuttle to the rental company and got myself a car....This took >30 minutes although I was the only customer Payless car rental had in the hour...In fact, the small rental companies had 1 booth/cube right next to each other - Fox, Payless, EZ...And all these agents did was gossip...My Product hat was curious when Payless told me they had no record of my reservation...Their systems only get a daily transfer of transactions from Orbitz :) They still gave me the car at the rate I quoted as having received online, just great!

Time was passing slowly, sleep was getting a hold fast of my eyes, drove back to the terminal only to wait 15 more minutes in agony for my backpack to eventually show up - it was literally the last bag to come on the belt :)

I finally made it to the hotel by 7 pm - pretty good room and decor for all of $58 that I paid for the 11 hours I stayed there!

More fun stuff happenned during the day but it will need to wait for another time....Including a quick hike on Bright Angel trail with the team... TO BE UPDATED

Very sleepy after a hot hot shower at the Mather campground showers ($2 for 8 minutes) and good pasta at the Yuvapai Lodge cafe....Need to get up at 5:30 am tomorrow so I can pack the tent, get ready, have breakfast and reach the GCFI building by 6:45 am...