A few of the stops on our roadtrip were pretty brief. No hours spent wandering through national parks, no extensive hikes or day-long excursions, just a few moments to snap some photos, look around, and drink it all in. Stop, snap, marvel, move on.

I’m going to sprinkle a few of these mini-posts among the rest of the roadtrip fun, with just two or three photos each. Imagine they’re postcards I sent to you from the road and that this is the writing on the back (plus, then I get credit for sending mail).

Horseshoe Bend was a last minute stop. The evening before we visited Antelope Canyon, we reached Page, Arizona with an hour or so of daylight left. After a quick search on Roadtrippers to see what was around, we realized that this exciting spot was just a few miles away. A brief hike over the sandy hill, and we reached the overlook right at sunset.

I’d seen plenty of Pinterest photos of Horseshoe Bend – I won’t link to them here because it would only draw unfair comparison to my own, but people have done some pretty incredible things with a wide-angle lens here – but they did not prepare me for the sheer magnitude of this spot. Even in these photos, you can’t quite get a sense of how truly gigantic it is. It’s a 1000-foot drop from our vantage point to the Colorado River below. That’s about three St Paul’s Cathedrals stacked on top of each other.

Basically, imagine standing on top of the Chrysler Building with no guard rails or barriers. Gulp.

I used to delight in making my poor mother shriek by jumping hard on frozen lakes or dangling my feet over crazy cliffs (sorry, Mum), but I’m losing that in my old age and becoming terribly practical instead. Needless to say, I inched up pretty close, but didn’t go all the way to the edge.

A few intrepid explorers were more fearless than I, and clambered up and over the rocks to our right to get a different view of the bend. I loved the sight of these two solitary figures standing in front of this wild rocky backdrop and silhouetted against the dusky sky.

The fiery sunset was casting colors over the red rocks and sand, and made the whole landscape look like the saturation was turned up to eleven (anyone?).

Horseshoe Bend was one of my favorite bits of the trip for many reasons – one among them being that it was our only sighting of the Colorado River, and what western roadtrip would be complete without that?

Check your mailbox soon – more roadtrip postcards will be coming your way!