‘Daddy dropped his car key into the Grand Canyon’

I first realise the car key has disappeared while emptying my pockets into the lockers by the Grand Canyon Skywalk – a semi-circular glass walkway protruding 1.2 kilometres above the Colorado River at the bottom of the canyon.

It’s down there somewhere ...

This leads to a series of photos in which my wife and children are posing gleefully above one of nature’s greatest natural wonders, and I look like I’ve pressed the nuclear button by accident.

Once off the Skywalk, I confess. Then I retrace steps, rifling through everyone’s bag with panicked-yet-pedantic precision.

After begging all the shuttle bus drivers to search their buses, with no joy, the only logical explanation is that I’ve locked the car, then shut the boot on the key.

At times of panic, it’s often best not to ask questions. Particularly when a complete stranger approaches in the car park suggesting he might have something that could “help me out”.

This turns out to be a kit for breaking into locked car doors. Ordinarily, I’d think this was dodgy as hell. But my rental car key has gone missing, I can’t get into the car, and I’m desperate.

Credit: Jamie Brown

My somewhat shady new friend crowbars, jiggles, dangles and shunts his special kit for half an hour, always narrowly failing to hit the button that will unlock the car. At this point, a security guard appears with a fairly pertinent question. “You’re not trying to break into a car, are you?”

After a sheepish, mumbling explanation that I’m trying to break into my own car, the security guard takes over. He, it turns out, has a better kit for breaking into cars and succeeds. The key, of course, is not in the boot at all.

While all this is going on, my wife is in the gift shop with two increasingly antsy-panted children, stoically trying to stop them from breaking things. I succumb to the inevitable, and call the car-hire company for help.

The only solution, alas, is to call out a tow truck, which will tow the car two hours to Las Vegas Airport. That’s $US620. Oh, and as there are four of us plus a whole car full of luggage, I’ll need to organise a taxi from the middle of nowhere to Las Vegas, at the cost of something equally horrendous.

By this stage, we’ve missed the helicopter tour. I start buttering up the security guards and tour guides to see if someone – anyone – might be prepared to drive us to Vegas for cash.

Mid-way through the humiliating pleading and a good 2½ hours after I realise the key is lost, another security guard arrives.

He has a car key in his hands. It had been dropped at Eagle Point, where I took my phone out of my pocket to take a photo. The key obviously came out of the pocket at the same time.

A frantic mission to call off the tow truck and save me a small fortune ensues. Then, amid filthy looks from the family, I drive to Vegas, allowing the kids to have whatever junk food and fizzy drinks they like in the back of the car as my penance.

Even on the day, burned by humiliation, it’s clear that the whole sorry saga will become one of those staple travel anecdotes. Every traveller has one or two – the war-wound stories of when travel goes wrong. They get trotted out in conversation, time and time again, becoming more funny than embarrassing as time passes. These anecdotes also earn a few embellishments over time – the distances grow further, the timings stretch longer, the people involved become more caricatured.

This, it seems, is something my seven-year-old instinctively understands. A few days later in Las Vegas, she has something she wants to tell the taxi driver. “My daddy dropped his car key down the Grand Canyon,” she says with undisguised relish. And, from now on, the key dropping 1200 metres into the Colorado River will become family gospel.

The writer was a guest of the Arizona Office of Tourism. See visitarizona.com