We awoke today to pack and drive our second shortest distance of the trip, 350 miles from Moab to the Grand Canyon – this after the two longest driving days, of 560 miles a piece (our average is 450). The clouds took the brunt of the sun’s heat, blessing us with shade as we stowed, folded and secured everything. The WiFi at the campsite was spotty, and Vicki needed to pay our monthly bills online, so we drove the 10 miles south into Moab and set up shop in the parking lot of the Daily Grind, enjoying coffee and smoothies while Vicki made sure our bill collectors were satisfied. After she finished, I uploaded a few of our pictures and we got away at 11.
I asked the woman at the coffee shop how she got to Moab. She said it was a long story involving an ex, and that she was originally from Canada, but that she had some great friends and had gotten used to the heat. She also told me that early October wasn’t a bad time to visit – with highs merely in the 80’s. From what we saw, the heat of August did not seem to deter many people from hiking, taking pictures, and seeing the Arches.
One thing I haven’t included much about in this blog is the all-star international cast of tourists from Europe and Asia we have seen since crossing the Mississippi – both at the parks and in the campgrounds. Lots of French, British, Italian, German, Swiss, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Indian, and some other languages we can’t place. Many of them fly to the west coast and rent Class C RV’s, then make a three-week odyssey through the signature national parks in the west. It’s fun to hear all of the different languages as we hike and sightsee.
Joy read the travel blogs and has decreed them boring beyond belief. I will, in deference to her, forego the usual tallying of the altitudes and statistics of this trip, although her opinion in this matter smacks of someone who watches more movies than engine temps and fuel gages while traveling. I will say that we climbed from 4500 to 7500 feet on this trip, and that we have no more high mountain passes to navigate from here on out.
We drove today through the usual road construction, one-lane sections and dirt roads, but take those little snags in stride by now as part of the package. At the border of Utah and Arizona, we passed through Monument Valley – littered with more buttes (tall and narrow) and mesas (short and wider) than you could shake a stick at, as well as a lot of flea market looking roadside stands offering trinkets for tourists passing though on desolate 163, where the closest thing to civilization for a hundred miles was a town called Mexican Hat on the San Juan River, named after a rock formation nearby.
In Arizona, the landscape turned to rolling, grey desert as we drove through collections of dwellings with names like Kayenta, Tsegi, Cow Springs, Rare Metals, and Tuba City (State 3A Football Champs a few years back, the faded sign proclaimed), where we filled up. Along the way, we drove through a couple of combination sandstorm/rainstorms – and I can’t explain them other than using those words (but there was more sand than rain). We also saw lots of poverty along the road. We made a bathroom pit stop at a McD’s in Kayenta and saw a couple of dogs herding a dozen sheep through the parking lot (filled with beat up pickup trucks and Escalades (with out of state tags). We saw few trees and even less grass. And most rivers and creeks in this area of the country are called “washes” because the only time water flows in them is after a rare rain.
We arrived at the park entrance around 5:30 and took our first look at the vast, hazy canyon a couple of hours before sunset, as a thunderstorm rolled in from the west. We learned that the park sticks with Pacific Standard Time when Daylight Savings Time is in effect, so we gained yet another hour on this leg of the trip, the farthest west we will travel. We drove 30 miles or so along the rim, stopping once more for pictures, before finding the campsite in Grand Canyon Village and setting up in a hurry moments before the rainstorm hit - driven sideways by the wind! We also learned that our reefer is not working – so we transferred everything to the cooler.
The rain didn’t last for long, and we enjoyed a good supper and the sound of the crickets as we relaxed, caught up on reading and planned our next day. We hadn’t yet adjusted to the new time zone, so we climbed into our bags early - the low got down to the mid-60s, a veritable ice age after the fires of Moab.
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