Sunday, March 27, 2011

El Tovar + a Tip for Visiting the Grand Canyon

A few shots from the El Tovar Hotel at Grand Canyon Village. If I were going to come back to the Grand Canyon, this would be my dream trip -- I'd take a rafting trip down the Colorado to the canyon, camp for a few nights so I could hike the bottom, and then come back up and pamper myself at the El Tovar. It is the nicest hotel in the village, and it has some pretty quality garlic parmesan fries at the cocktail lounge! I'd love to try their main dining room.

PS: Here's a really good tip about eating at the Grand Canyon. There's only 3, maybe 4 restaurants in the village (depending on renovations/seasonal closures). And there are way more people who want to eat at those restaurants than there are seats. We tried to go to dinner around 7 and got turned away from 2 restaurants and cocktail lounge before finally getting at a seat at the El Tovar cocktail lounge after waiting 15 minutes. The lesson is, if you don't make a reservation somewhere, you need to eat really early or really late. Otherwise you are going to wind up at one of the less than stellar cafeterias.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where did you stay? Looks like you got a nice meal. When we went we stayed in a tent and ate from a cook stove.
Love,
Mom

The Search for J Street said...

We stayed at the Yavapai lodges, which is kind of like a cabin-looking motel. Aside from the stiff mattress, it was actually much nicer than I was expecting! But if I had to do it again, I'd love to upgrade to the El Tovar.