Touring the Southern Rim on the Grand Canyon

Making my way from the eastern entrance area and the Desert View Tower, I got to see what that attendant was talking about this place being "Disney Land".  People were everywhere but it wasn't too awful bad.  I made my way to my next campground just outside the southern entrance and as I was passing the gate, I saw the long lines of cars trying to enter the park.  I hadn't seen that much traffic in days, including the North Rim or the eastern entrance.

After getting the camper all setup, which takes me about 20 minutes now since I've had a lot of practice.  I made my way to the main road by foot to wait for the shuttle bus.  This is another similarity of being at Disney.  I'll say it was pretty cool to let someone else drive for a change.  The bus ended up being pretty full and as we drove around all the gate traffic this was already a win.  On the way, I finally got to see a herd of elk in the woods close to the road.  I had seen one huge elk the day before but he seemed to have a following of people with cameras and a park ranger in tow so I didn't stop to add to the madness. 

After I arrived at the visitors center, or the main hub.  I watched an 8 minute video explaining how the canyon was formed over the millions of years and how to distinguish what the lines in the earth show.  It was pretty cool as it was shown on a huge video sphere.
Heading back out, I figured I wanted to go to furthest part of the park that I could go but you couldn't drive there in the summer months.  I boarded the first of 2 buses with ease.  The second one not so much, apparently this was the main attraction so I stood in line for a bit.  As I was standing there it started raining and we could hear thunder in the distance. 

The bus was the way to go, I wanted to go hiking up part of the rims edge along the way but the one time I got off the bus and took a few photos, it started raining again and there was lightning.  I quickly boarded another bus and road to the top to try again.  At the top, known as Hermits Rest, there were many people sitting around not doing much of nothing.  I took a few photos but could feel the weather picking up again.  I found my way back to the same bus I had just gotten off of.  The driver, her name was Mo was very entertaining and sometimes you wondered if she was just talking to herself. 

She would constantly ask what people thought about things but mostly no responses.
After we got back to the interim terminal, I decided to take a walk around the village rim and see what I could see.  If you look in one of these photos, you can see the many people filling the various paths and levels around the cliff side. 
Being such a nasty day, the lighting wasn't what most photographers enjoyed.  I did my best efforts in taking some HDR type photos, multiple shots of the same image at different settings.  I am still learning this technique but I think it has promise.  Hope everyone is enjoying the blog and the photos.  (** By the way, if you didn't know it, you can click on any of the photos to make them larger for viewing)  Tomorrows blog, well I'll just say it won't be much and was the biggest bust of this journey so far, stay tuned...