8/25 - 8/30

We traveled 6 days to the Antelope Canyon, close from Page, AZ, with Johnny who joined us from Los Angeles. On the way, we visited Las Vegas, Zion National Park and Monument Valley which is at the border of Utah and Arizona within Navajo Indian Reservation and several John Wayne western movies have been taken including famous "She wore a Yellow Ribbon".กก

In front of Yoon-Koo's house. 


The first stop was Las Vegas. Upon arrival to Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, we went to Henderson, a new town developed lately at southeast of Las Vegas, where Yoon-Koo, the eldest son of my cousin Dong-Yeol, lives. We stopped at his office and found his wife is working there together. After we look around the company they are working, we went to his house, chat for an hour or so and went back to Las Vegas for dinner together. After the dinner, they went home and we returned to the hotel.

His company is a small software company but what I have surprised was not the size of the company but they have small kids' play room within the company. Yoon-Koo said the owner of the company is very family oriented guy and prepared this play room for moms who have small kids to take care. It has been many years since I saw Yoon-Koo couple and they look very happy living there and working with this family oriented company together.

Mirage Hotel in the night.
We went to this night show of Mirage Hotel - "Cirque Du Soleil (Circus of the Sun)" - but all of us were very disappointed to this show.
I wanted to see a famous Las Vegas show this time as the show I saw last in Las Vegas was many decades ago. 
We expected a great circus show from the name but it was nothing more than a lousy dancing show with some acrobats. 
I would not recommend anyone to waist time and $180/person for a ticket. 
However, fortunately, this was the only place disappointed us during this trip.

Now, It is the time for Antelope Canyon Tour, our destination.
 Antelope Canyon is located at southeast of Page, not far from Page, AZ. We drove paved highway for 6 min., arrived the Navajo Indian Reservation and drove this unpaved dusty road for about 8 min. to arrive Antelope Canyon with this wonderful tour bus(??).  
The inside of the canyon is not that big. However, the scenery was great, beautiful, magnificent, wonderful ...... as expected. Especially, the sun beam showed at right of the above picture was spectacular. This sun beam can be observed only around noon time in summer. To see this sun beam, I waited this trip for almost half year. There are 7 tours a day at : 07:00  08:00  09:30  11:30  13:30  15:30  16:30 but you can see this sun beam only if you take 11:30 departure tour in summer only. (There are few places with sun beams.) To take this 11:30 tour, I had to delay the trip for a week because 11:30 tour a week earlier was fully booked already when I tried to reserve about a month ago. 
You can find details of Antelope Canyon tour from  www.antelopecanyon.com and download their brochure at the bottom of the web site.

Please click the following picture to see 10 min. video of Antelope Canyon.

After the tour of Antelope Canyon, we left Page at 2:00PM and headed to Monument Valley, which is at the border of Utah and Arizona in Navajo Indian Reservation. Johnny was very interested to this Monument Valley because several John Wayne western movies have been taken here including famous "She wore a Yellow Ribbon". You can drive around this Monument Valley paying $5/person to get in to the Indian Reservation and driving about 17 miles of unpaved dusty road. However, since we didn't have enough time and most of good scenery could be observed from Highway 163 without driving 17 miles of dusty road, we didn't go in and took pictures from Highway 163.

We left Monument Valley at around 4:00 PM and arrived Flagstaff at 8:00 PM. We stayed one night in Flagstaff and drove to Los Angeles next day
 (8/29). After one night stay in Johnny's home, we drove back to home on 8/30 completing this great wonderful 6 days' trip with Johnny. All of us really enjoyed the trip except Mirage Hotel show in Las Vegas. However, you visit some place to enjoy there or to find out it is not the place to come again. If you don't visit, you will never know it and will go there at least once sometime in the future anyway just to be disappointed.
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