We left the big city and entered the desert:

We ended up racing the sunset trying to get to the Canyon before it was gone.  Unfortunately, we didn’t make it, but we did get up for sunrise the following day (pics to come in Day 8!):

We arrived at the Canyon only to find that all the campsites were completely FULL!  In April!  With temperatures plummeting below freezing at night.  We drove around and around weighing our options.  We were told that there was a service road about 15 minutes from the Canyon’s edge where we could camp for free.  The only downside was that a fire ban was put in place only 4 days prior.  We pulled in, in the dark and decided to make a bed in the back of our car and cook over the camp stove.  I kept looking for scorpions the entire time, but didn’t see any.  I may have screamed when I was standing in the dark field away from the car waiting for my camera to finish taking a shot on a stump and it clicked.  Nick laughed at me, but I swear the noise of a camera shutter going off three feet from you in the grass is similar to a noise a scorpion might make….

I have to tell you, IT WAS COLD!  When we woke up around 5:15am the next morning to get to the Canyon for sunrise it was -5 Celsius so I have no idea how cold it got during the night.  It was a definite adventure though.  We barely fit in the back of our Matrix.  There was LOTS of laughing, and smacking each other with flying elbows, and it was not the greatest of sleeps.  A couple of hours after we climbed in, when we were ready to turn off our story-on-tape and sleep, I knew I had to go retrieve the camera from the stump I left it on for a time lapse.  That was a very cold dash!  But worth it: