One morning at the Grand Canyon, my son and I were walking to the Canyon Cafe for breakfast when we saw a big elk near Yavapai Lodge.

“How big was it?” my wife asked later, when the boy was telling her the story.

“Big enough to CHOMP MY HEAD OFF!” he said. “If he wasn’t an herbivore.”

We stayed on Route 66 as much as we could on a recent family drive to Arizona. The Mother Road has long since been bypassed by the interstate highway system, but long stretches of it are still driveable, including hundreds of miles in California and Arizona.

We just got back from a family drive to the Grand Canyon . . .

Have you ever tried to introduce family members to things that have made a deep impression on you personally? It’s often disheartening, isn’t it?

For example, here’s what my son got out of the sea of sage and grasslands that make up the Kaibab Plateau:

“I’d put an amusement park over here,” he said, pointing to the right. “And over here,” — pointing to the left now — “a shopping center and a sports arena.”

“Look at the mountains,” I said to my wife, indicating with a sweep of my hand the silent, austere beauty of the East Mojave, where desert mountains rise dramatically from the sloping terrain.

“I’ve been looking at them for five hours,” she said.

“You know,” I said, “you guys just don’t appreciate the grandeur –”

“HEY, LOOK!” my son yells. “IT’S A BUSH!“

“– of the American Southwest.”