I Visited the Grand Canyon & the Flintstone's Bedrock City Yesterday...and Was Creeped the Fuck Out

I've been in Phoenix for the Thanksgiving holiday. FINALLY, after all these years coming out to Arizona to visit, we decided to take a trip to the Grand Canyon. Since I had never been and neither had my brother-in-law, we were all in on the idea. And it is a pretty fucking magnificent place to experience in person. Photos do it justice, but honestly...to realize that this is the result of millions of years of erosion is pretty amazing.

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BUT...it was the journey home that really stuck with me, specifically our interest in stopping by the Bedrock City attraction on the side of the highway less than an hour away from the Grand Canyon's South Rim entrance. Part "tourist trap," part "this is where you and all your friends die in the horror movie that is your life," this homage to the famous cartoon is like a time capsule that someone forgot to fully close before burying, so all the contents are slowly decaying.

The main building is full of shirts and key rings and coffee mugs and yada yada yada (yabba yabba yabba?). And then we realized there was a whole other part of this place behind the building that we couldn't see from the parking lot. Oh...it's only $5 to get the tour? Yeah, sure, no problem. Sounds like a good way to do an afternoon.

When I stepped through the back door and out onto the grassy back area, I'm pretty sure I felt someone walk over my grave. Back in 1972 when this place was first erected, I imagine it was a sight to behold. 45 years later, it looks like nobody's bothered to do any extra painting or renovating on anything. I wondered if we had just given money over to the people who would soon be murdering us in the basement of the Bedrock City medical office (full of stone medical examination table, oddly formed prehistoric-era nurse, and over-large needles and instruments).

Imagine if you had given money to Captain Spaulding and then immediately found yourself in the middle of a Rob Zombie horror movie (specifically "House of 1,000 Corpses")...this is where my mind went. It was not unlike waking up in a dystopian version of the cartoon gone horribly, horribly wrong. Like all the real characters had been wiped out by some kind of meteoric event, but their buildings and structures remained solidly in place. It was...eerie.

But there had been some love behind the manufacturing of many of the buildings...at least in the beginning.

Truly, the creation of many of the accouterments within each building was done out of love as there was some pretty fantastic detail in damn near every building (though I still don't understand the exhibits found beneath the volcano...that was odd). And we had a good time exploring everything, which took us about an hour of solid walking around and playing.

We could lock each other up in the Bedrock City jail and, yes, I admit...I even had fun while riding down the ass-crack of a brontosaurus. Because honestly, who WOULDN'T want to be just like Fred Flinstone sliding down the back of a prehistoric animal before heading home?