While we were in Vegas we did a helicopter tour to the grand canyon. I’ve only been on a helicopter once before. It was a while ago and this tour was very different and was amazing, I think everyone should come over here to do it! It was without doubt a highlight and I know Kylie and I will remember it for a long time, Jackson might not because he’s obviously not going to recall a lot of the stuff we’re doing now – but we took lots of photos and videos of this.

The tour picked us up at 110pm or so and took us out to their base for a briefing on the tour. The company we went with is Maverick helicopters and they run an excellent operation – right from the pick up from the hotel to the touchdown inside the Grand Canyon and the trip back. They were running 7 or 8 helicopters, with 7 passengers on each flight and they are apparently fully booked for months. This same company runs tours out of a few different cities to the Canyon and they will have 50 helicopters running by this time next year. Talk about demand for a product!

The tour was actually 3 flights. One from Vegas to the Grand Canyon of 40 minutes, another to their re-fuelling station (10 minutes) and then another back into Vegas (30 minutes). We were lucky to sit in the front on the flight out from Vegas to the Grand Canyon and we had a great view out the front of the cockpit and the viewing panel in the front lower section of the cockpit. We flew over the Lake Mead and Hoover Dam area on the way to the Grand Canyon, past (lower than) the Native American owned sky walkway and then landed on the Canyon floor, for some champa’s and cheese and crackers.

On the way out to the canyon Jackson even managed to doze off for about 10 minutes! He was very excited about the flight and was enjoying it and was definitely mesmerised by the view below and around us, then he just dropped off to sleep. unbelievable…. anyways, it turned out this quick power nap recharged his batteries and he was ready to rock again once we landed and he had his energy back.

The size of the Grand Canyon is near impossible to describe – it is miles deep and miles wide. The river which flows through the canyon seemed as wide as the Brisbane River near Friday’s / Riverside and looked to be moving very quickly.

The spot we landed in was pretty quiet, in that we were one of four or five choppers landed in the one section of the canyon we landed at. The canyon is a bit like a helicopter highway, the number of chopper tours going out there, just from Vegas, on a per day basis must exceed 100. There were many, many flights which flew over us while we were there.

The scenery is fantastic – with massive cliff faces, rock formations and colours, as well as many different shaped cacti (all very spiky) and of course the river too (which was as Brown as the Brisbane River).

We all had our own individual headsets and microphones and on the way back Jackson started to feel a bit more comfortable about the people and being on the helicopter and rattled off a few “5 – 4 – 3- 2 – 1, blastoff!” and some other phrases from the thunderbirds, even an “FAB Scott” – which in Thunderbirds talk is “Fully Acknowledge Broadcast” and Scott is one of the characters from the show.

Our flight back was timed to co-incide with sunset and we flew basically right over the strip. The lights coming on and all the traffic and looking at the casino’s light up was a great way to end the tour. The handy cam ran out of battery power right as we were coming in to land, that means I had the camera turned on for 3 hours of a just over 4 hour trip….

This trip was amazing and I would definitely do it again when /if we come back to Vegas. At the end of the day I asked Jackson which he liked most – the stretch hummer or the helicopter. He answered “Both!”. No amount of re-phrasing the question could get him to pick one, he enjoyed both so much! I would take the chopper tour in a heart beat – this was a great day out. The company we went with is Maverick helicopters, their website is: http://www.maverickhelicopter.com/