Day 9 is another story. Can you imagine 0% humidity and 110 degree weather? Well to give you an idea of what that feels like, get your 1800 watt hair blow dryer, point it at your face and turn it on at it’s highest heat setting. Now just leave it there… for as long as you live! It is outrageously hot dude! OMG! No wonder everything out here is dust! It all gets baked to a crisp… day or night! Crazy!

In the video we start at Huntington Beach (awesome!) and work our way west. After we pass Anaheim it is desert, desert and more desert. Check it out.

This morning we went to church. We went to Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside. Its just such a cool church to visit. Harvest is one of those churches that you walk into and you feel like you’ve been a part of the church since the beginning. Pastor Greg Laurie is a great teacher of the Word of God, and he has an incredible way of relating to his congregation. Its just a really awesome church to visit, and it was refreshing since we haven’t attended a church service in a week.

After that, it was heading to Tucson, Arizona. This is very different than Williams, Arizona, which is where we stayed on the way to Cali. Williams, being in the mountains, was cool… actually, cold. In Williams, its hard to believe its summer. However, the direct contrast would be Tucson. Its incredibly hot. You think 90 degrees in Miami is hot? Well, 110 degrees (literally… not exaggerating) is even hotter. And then the fact that its really dry makes you feel like you stepped in the direct aim of a giant blow dryer. Needless to say, the AC in the car, and now the hotel room, is cranked all the way. Believe me, its hot.

Tomorrow we have a very long journey ahead of us. Its 12 hours to San Antonio, Texas. Plus, we lose an hour once we get to Texas, so its 13 hours in the car. We plan to spend a little bit of time in Las Cruces, New Mexico with some good friends of ours, which is going to be fun. And when we finally arrive at San Antonio, we’ll spend another day there, just like we did in San Francisco. Its going to be awesome!

Pray for us, as we need safety, and patience, to arrive in San Antonio. Believe me, we need it big time.

with much love,
aimee nicole 

I didn’t have much expectations about the “Grand Canyon”… after all it is a big crack in the earth. But when you get there, and you come up to the ledge… barrier or no barrier, your stomach gets that roller-coaster drop sensation and your mind goes dizzy trying to take in a picture that is difficult to fathom. A landscape so large that it goes beyond your peripheral vision. Your eyeballs cannot possibly take in so much info and your brain cannot process the wonder, beauty and absolute fear of a one mile vertical drop onto the bottom of the canyon.

Was it worth it? Take a look at the pictures and you decide.

Glory be to God, who in His infinite wisdom and love for us gave us such beauty to behold.

blessings,
george
<{{{><

Click on the image below to see some pictures:)

Then we finally hit Williams, Arizona. The Grand Canyon was basically our list to do. It took us an hour to get there from the hotel. When we finally did, it was quite a sight to behold. Its pretty scary looking over the edge of the cliff, especially in the parts without guardrails. Some people made me extremely nervous because they sat or stood on the teetering edge of the canyon. If you look down, its hard to perceive how deep the canyon really is. And dimensions are hard to figure out to. How so? Well you can’t really tell if the ridge on your left is flat or just the edge of a plateau or something. Apparently, the canyon is a mile deep which constitutes for a 5,280 foot fall… if you happen to somehow fall off the edge. Or decide to take a helicopter ride. I’m sure the latter is much more pleasant.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that the several hours that we were at the Grand Canyon National Park were incredibly enjoyable. After a while, I got tired of seeing the same rocks. But on the flip side, as the sun starts to set, it looks like a totally different canyon. Everything starts to turn different colors. On top of that, there was a fire on the North Ridge, if I’m not completely mistaken, so there was this blue haze looming over the canyon. When sunset hit, it was definitely one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen… despite my complaining.

At any rate, I realized that, though the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon are just a bunch of rocks piled on top of one another in a bunch of different colors, its way more than that. I think God had a whole lot of fun when He decided to make it. The vastness of it kinda makes you realize how big God really is, and how powerful He is too. Its just an extent of his creativity, and I’m sure that I would love to rewind time and see how He did everything.

A bunch of rocks? Maybe. Evidence of God’s attributes? Most definitely.

with much love
aimee nicole