A Tribute to Prepositional Phrases

Today for some reason I kept thinking about prepositional phrases and how difficult it would be to explain today's walk without them.  This must be an English teacher phenomena.  There's just no other way to explain walking down about 900 stairs than using the prepositional phrase, "down the stairs."  I have this idea that prepositional phrases really don't get the credit they deserve, and my students have always had a difficult time recognizing them.  They don't add amazing descriptors to nouns and verbs like adverbs and adjectives do.  They're there for logistical reasons - more to serve a purpose than to make something beautiful.  When I think about it, if I had to pick a part of speech to be, I'd be either an adjective because of the sheer power of being able to help someone see, hear, smell, taste, or feel something OR an adverb because they help know EXACTLY how something is done, and I like the action of that.

Anyway...so today, I walked down the stairs (900 by the time I was done).....

...across the suspension bridge....back up the stairs (what goes down must of course go back up).....

...and looked over the gorge at the overlook on the other side of the trail (which, although I've been on this trail numerous times over the past 20 years, I've never done.)

Once on the South Rim of the trail, I crossed under this structure (and wondered what it was before now....)

...and around this bend to see a stone bench someone had carved under the tunnel.  

In summary, I walked down the stairs, across the suspension bridge, up the stairs, around the rim while looking across the gorge, back down the stairs and across the suspension bridge, back up the stairs to the beginning of the trail.  

NEXT TIME, I will get a pass so that I can hike into the gorge and swim in the river at the bottom of the gorge.  

Thanks, prepositional phrases.  I couldn't have written this post without you.