Deep in the Heart of Texas!!!

This seems to be a fairly nice park. It is located on Canyon Lake outside of San Antonio. We arrived at the locked gate and were let in but they let us know we were supposed to arrive before 6 pm. I told them we had driven over from Carlsbad, NM and they said that that was a long distance. I also told them that we had planned our time carefully but had forgotten that we would cross into a new time zone and lost an hour. We were a half hour late which meant that we would have been here a half hour early. No mind, they said they wouldn’t turn us away. They registered us and turned us loose to find our own campsite. Most of the campsites here had water and electricity but no sewer. There were a few with sewer so we walked around checking them out. While we were looking at a site with sewer and 30 amp electricity, a woman came over and introduced herself as the manager. She suggested a site in an area we had been told we couldn’t go. She explained that this site was ok and was tucked in behind another fifth wheel trailer. It had sewer and 50 amp electricity so we grabbed it. The advantage of 50 amp electricity is that we can run both of the Air Conditioners at the same time. With 30 amps, we have to decide which one to run as running both would blow the whole circuit.

The man at the trailer next to us was feeding deer from his hand. There were 8 of them gathered around his site. A buck and several does and fawns (nice harem). They are small deer but seem to be completely tame. There is a lake here but we haven’t checked it out yet. It looks to be a fairly large lake but I don’t hear the sounds of a lot of boats. We passed several developments as we drove around the lake to get here so there is a lot of development. It seems to be a fairly large lake and is near the city so it is bound to be popular.

We fixed supper and watched TV for a little while before hitting the rack. We got up late this morning but had a nice breakfast, made some phone calls and are watching the Olympics. The US women’s water polo team just lost to the Dutch for the Gold. They could not get started and gave up 4 goals in the first 4 minutes to a team that was favored to be second. The US had to expend so much energy to catch up that they had nothing left at the end and gave up a goal in the last minute to lose.

Now they are showing rhythmic gymnastics (?). This goes into the same category as Synchronized swimming and now synchronized diving. If they want to add new sports, where is skateboarding? I noticed that they have added BMX bicycling this time around. That is the first step to upgrading to some more of the new sports. The winter Olympics have done a better job of incorporating the new sports (snowboarding, acrobatic jumping). The girl on now is dancing with a piece of rope! In the old west they used to do pretty much the same sort of thing only they danced at the end of the rope. I am glad they saved this for late in the Olympics when many of have gotten tired of the events. I think I will go take my shower.

Next! We took today off. We slept in and then watched the Olympics much of the morning. Then we wandered around the park and checked it out. There are 2 small pools that look pretty nice but in spite of being on a lake, there is no lake access. You can walk down to it but there is no beach and no place to tie up a boat and no docks. There are a couple of roads/paths that run down to the water but one is barricaded (that one looks like it goes to a small beach). There is another path that runs down the lake in the other direction. We walked along one of them and it stopped short of the lake where there was a half a canoe. We will have to check it out in more detail.

This is the first place I have (ever) been where they meter your electric usage and charge you by the kilowatt hour. I have seen places where there are meters but they are for long term residents (seasonal people) and not for those who are here for a few days or even a week. It will be interesting to see how much this turns out to be.

The deer continue to wander around the park. When we tried to find a beach, we ran into several groups of deer along the way. They all stopped what they were doing (eating mostly) and just stared at us. As we got closer, they turned and walked in the other direction. If we got close to them a second time, they ran away. That seemed funny because when they come to our campsite, they are not spooked by us at all. They stand there as we walk about 3 feet from them and the guy next door feeds them from his hand.

We had kind of a grazing supper. We ate a wedge of lettuce with lite ranch dressing then watched an Olympic event. Later, I cooked a package of Pepperidge Farm apple turnovers and we ate them with whipped cream while watching another event. There were some local peaches thrown in there somewhere too. We were waiting for the BMX and the beach volleyball men’s final (10 pm here). The BMX events were exciting with lots of crashes and the US taking silver and bronze in the men’s and bronze in the women’s. This is the first of the new events that appeal to the younger generation. We will see more of them as the years go on. This year Baseball and softball fade into the past as Olympic events. This will be balanced by the addition of other events (hopefully).

After the late news, we started to watch the men’s volleyball (indoor) but got too sleepy and went to bed. This morning is the semifinal basketball (men’s) so we just might stick around and watch it. Then we will head into San Antonio for some puffy tacos and the Alamo. Tomorrow I think we will go into town in the afternoon and check out River Walk before going to see Gallagher at 10:00 PM.

The Olympics have been good and certainly have been full of surprises and disappointments. My biggest disappointment has been not being able to see as many events as I would like to see. Having only over the air broadcast channels leaves out much of the coverage that is spread over the cable channels. This is the first basketball game I have been able to see and we have seen no boxing whatsoever. We did get one bicycle race, the women’s time trial and hardly a mention of anything else. The women’s marathon was on but I guess the men’s hasn’t been run yet. This has been several Olympics that have happened while I was on the road.

We hit the road in the early afternoon. We planned to stop at the Hacienda los Barrios for Puffy Tacos. We watched Bobby Flay challenge Diana Barrios Trevino to a Puffy Taco Throwdown. We were quite taken with the whole idea of the puffy tacos so when we decided to come to San Antonio, we just had to go to her restaurant and give the puffy tacos a go. After a small faux pas, we found the road to the restaurant and drove into the parking lot. The place looked just like it did on TV and we were given a table and a menu. It took a while to find the puffy ones on the menu but we did. When our waiter came to take our order, we told him that we had come all the way from Maine just to eat there. “Puffy Tacos” he said which we immediately agreed to. “Beef or Chicken?” he asked. We replied an order of each and we were on our way.

Like most any Mexican Restaurant, a pair of puffy tacos arrived with sides of refried beans and Spanish rice. We also got a side of tortillas which seemed a little redundant but who are we to argue. We swapped tacos so we ended up with a beef and a chicken each. There was a container of something on the table that we were not familiar with. Our waiter explained that it was Argentinian chimi chura sauce. It consisted of oil with garlic, parsley and pepper. It was delicious. We put it on our tacos and ended up dipping the tortillas in it also. As much as we were looking forward to the puffy tacos, the (just plain) tortillas were the best part of the meal. They were made fresh and were just phenomenal compared to the store bought ones we buy at home.

We ducked a couple of quick showers and a bunch of acorns dropping into the fans and shooting across the deck (we opted for the outside tables). At one point, we thought we saw Diana go into the restaurant. After we finished and paid the bill, Cheryl asked our waiter if that was Diana we had seen. He said it was and that she was in the back of the restaurant if we wanted to say hi which we did. She took about 20 minutes to talk to us. It was like we had known her all of our lives. It was a time to cherish. She was just like she was on TV; warm, friendly and funny. We compared birthdays, we are both August babies she on the 16th and me on the 30th. She said we should go to the other restaurant; it is her first and has a lot of old tradition built into it where this one is new. She gave us her working schedule and suggested that we go on my birthday as she will be working there that night.

We talked about the Throwdown. The Food Channel people had set her up by telling her she would be hosting a special show (a ruse they have used too many times). Bobby Flay had become a very good friend of hers over the years as they had done several shows together. When he didn’t call her to see how the show was going, she figured out that she would see him at the finale for a Throwdown and she was ready for him.

After we left Diana, we headed for the Alamo. The Alamo is a park maintained and run by an independent organization. They get no outside money and run the park on what they make from donations and the gift shop. The park was really nice and you could tell the people there really grooved on what they do. The people who tell the history of the Alamo really love what they do and enjoy telling the stories. There are a lot of exhibits. They have several items that belonged to Davy Crockett including 2 of his rifles, some books and some handwritten documents. They had some Bowie Knives and many other original items.

You would be surprised how big the Alamo compound was. As large as the area in the park was, it was only a small part of the original mission. The wall on the outside of the mission is actually located across the square underneath the buildings over there.

We managed to find our way out of San Antonio and headed back to camp. We stopped at “HEB” a grocery chain out here. It was a fairly nice store and we got the few things that we needed and a lot of others. There was a Starbucks near there but they didn’t have any decaf brewed so we passed.

Well, that’s today. We got back to camp and have the Olympics on and are filling in the commercials with the Dallas/Houston pre-season football game. Tomorrow is a busy day. I think we will take off in the afternoon and visit River Walk before heading to the Comedy Club to see Gallagher. Good night!

Well, that was exciting. I woke up this morning not feeling too well. I do not know what caused it. When I have a problem based on food, it usually hits me within an hour of eating but this was the next day. I felt really lousy so we just kind of crashed and burned during the day. Instead of leaving around lunch time, we left in the late afternoon. It gave us a chance to watch more Olympics (as much as I like them, I will be glad to see them end.) The day was cloudy and showery but not too bad. At one point, with no warning at all, there was a tremendous clap of thunder that brought us up out of our chairs. It seemed to be isolated. There were no others and no rain and the sky was not particularly dark.

I looked over the maps and we hit the road. I wasn’t sure where the comedy club was but I hoped it was close enough to Riverwalk so that we only had to park the car once. The ride into San Antonio was nice. No traffic but a little rain. That just washed the road dirt off the windshield. We found our street in San Antonio very easily and immediately turned the wrong way (so I thought). As I was moaning, I noticed that we were driving right by the mall that we were heading to. It had a pay parking garage (it cost me $18 to park there for the late afternoon and evening (it reached the max ($18) at the 6 hour mark). Kind of reminds you of Boston doesn’t it? Whatever happened to the parking Las Vegas Style?

As we were turning into the parking garage, we noticed that River Walk was right underneath us. We might have to pay for parking but everything we were looking for was right where we could get at it. We parked the car and found that the comedy club was in the mall so we decided to try to pick up our tickets. That was probably a mistake as we spent the better part of the next hour trying to get them. The box office clerk finally went and got the manager as she couldn’t find us on the Ticketmaster list. As it turned out, she was looking at the 7:00 pm show list (listed as hammer up). The manager said they don’t pull the Ticketmaster 10:00pm list until about 9 so he told her to give us tickets anyway since I had a confirmation number and we weren’t from here (obviously).

Armed with tickets we headed down into the mall (the street was level B, we were parked on level C and the comedy club was on level D). There was a movie theater complex on the same floor. We considered taking in a movie as the weather was iffy but we are in San Antonio so we headed down to Riverwalk. Now, Riverwalk consists of the San Antonio River. They have taken the river and made a rectangular canal system out of it. They have boats that give tours and a water taxi system. The part of the river making up Riverwalk is a little over a mile around. In parts there are shops, restaurants and hotels along both the inside and outside banks of the river. There are walks along both shores and crossover bridges periodically. Some of the shops are at the street level and the rest at the river level.

In the late afternoon, there were not many people along the river but as darkness came and the dinner hour and clubbing hour approached, the walks got more and more crowded. We walked the complete distance on only one shore but that varied as we crossed the river several times. We read a lot of the menus posted outside the establishments finding that many of them consisted of meals that started at $20+. While we like nice restaurants, we will have to buy food and drink at the show so we wanted a little something not a big meal.

We stopped at a Starbucks and sat by the river with our coffee watching the world go by and watching the sidewalks fill up with families and couples. Across from our vantage point was a restaurant/bar that was quite busy and boisterous. People waiting to get in were waiting on the walkways and the noise was quite entertaining. One gentleman (and I use the word loosely) in a plain white t-shirt and a straw cowboy hat ripped off the t-shirt to the loud approval of the crowd. We couldn’t hear what he said but soon he put the shirt back on and was absorbed back into the crowd.

We finished our coffee and continued our journey. We ended up behind a couple of (shhh – larger women) who were gathering quite a following as they blocked the entire walkway and wouldn’t let anyone by. The tail approached 50 people and we took the next bridge to the other side. That worked out well as we came across “Joe’s Crab Shack”. This is a chain we have seen in several places but not eaten at (we are on a budget and the biggest part of that budget is gasoline). We decided to have a couple of appetizers and some of that famous southern unsweetened ice tea. They were having a special on the appetizers so we picked a couple and ordered. We had something called “Double Dip” which consisted of multicolored corn chips (the big kind) and 2 dips (a standard crab dip and a spinach dip (I think it had some crab in it too) and “Mussels Marinara”. It was a great combination although I think our waiter was disappointed we didn’t get a meal.

We continued our walk along the river. It was much harder going than it had been but soon we were back at the mall. We passed by a couple of restaurants in the mall looking for a clock. We did find a TV in the outer walkway through Hooters that was showing the Olympic Men’s Marathon so we stopped and watched it. A Kenyan won it (there’s a big surprise). Eventually we found a clock in one food court booth. We had about an hour before our show so we headed up the mall to find the theater again.

We got onto one escalator and I found by foot caught in the stairtreads. Before we got to the top, I managed to get my foot free but the sole of my shoe in the toe area was gone. It looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. The shoe was not ruined but it does look funny. It would be humorous if the shoes weren’t so expensive.

We got into line and awaited the opening of the doors. The people around us were all young and partying. Beers and shots seemed to be the weapon of choice. Soon we were let in and placed in our seats. They told us the tickets were general admission but they put us in a specific seat.

One group with reserved seats found themselves placed right down front (we weren’t far from down front. All of the seats in our area were covered with plastic). They didn’t want to be there and asked to be moved. The manager then went around to find people who wanted to move up to the reserved seats so there wouldn’t be any empty seats near the stage. He told everyone that the people with the seats didn’t know what a Gallagher show was like. Do you? He also admitted that when he booked Gallagher, he didn’t know what he was getting into. After the first show, there was such a mess that it took them all day to clean up. That was when he put plastic down on the floor and all of the chairs. He told us that the bags on the chairs were not for us, they were to protect the chairs. He would be back out with plastic for us, his dear audience. He brought out these white plastic bags that were hardly big enough to get over your head.

We were only about 6 seats from the stage which I figured was close enough. There was a column next to our table that had splatter marks all up and down them. If you looked up at the ventilation tubing along the ceiling, you saw a lot of splatter marks on it and the ceiling itself. There was plastic on the floor and a large sheet of industrial plastic along the back of the stage (it too was covered with “stuff”).

When we picked up our tickets, we asked about the posters that said the early shows were “hammer up” and the late shows were “hammer down”. It was explained that the early shows did not contain Gallagher’s traditional ending where he uses a very large oversized hammer to smash things, mostly food, but all messy. We gasped a sigh of relief that we chose the right show as this hammer up or down business was not listed in the Ticketmaster listing and you just haven’t seen Gallagher until you have seen him mashing things and ducking the debris.

We ordered a plate of nachos and a couple of beers and set about getting to know our tablemates. As in everything else, they were all younger than us by a substantial margin. The only person there that approached our age was Gallagher (62). He started out by telling us that he spent years working his way up the comedy ladder and now that he was older and had had a heart attack, he was avoiding stress and playing clubs again and working his way back to the bottom.

We had seen his taped shows several times on TV and of course; this show being the late night show was a little more risqué. He was funny and had the audience falling out of their chairs. He played to individuals in the audience more than he had done in the tapes. There was one gentleman of Spanish origin that went to the bathroom several times during the 90 minute show. He got special attention. At one point, Gallagher began to drag out some of his victims and mix various things together while he told us stories about the first time he smashed them. This drove many people in the audience to start putting on their plastic bags. He told them that wasn’t necessary, he wouldn’t make a mess until the end.

Well, of course, he lied. In the middle of a story about a bear and a rabbit and a tree, he flung canned pumpkin into the audience hitting several unsuspecting people. That began the grand finale. When you reach the grand finale of a Gallagher show, stuff flies everywhere. He took off his shoes and his pants to reveal a Simpson’s Bathing Suit. The first thing he hit was an apple pie. My bag kept my shirt clean but my pants were a different story. The mess was everywhere. I picked pieces of apple off my pants. Cheryl was hiding behind me. During a breather when he was deciding what to demolish next, I turned my chair around to try to protect myself a little. That backfired when I ducked and fell off the chair. He put some red syrup onto an aluminum pie plate and slammed that one. This one backfired and covered him with red liquid. He looked like a refugee from a slasher movie with red spray across his shirt, face and bald head. He pulled out a birthday cake and invited people to come up and gather around the cake. They were pretty much covered with cake and frosting but each got a chance to wield the famous “Sledgamatic” against a formidable herd of watermelon quarters. Then the show was over, Gallagher grabbed the Sledgamatic and headed for the door. After all, when you have demolished a small buffet, what could you possibly do for an encore?

We headed for the door, found the car and headed out of the city. After one wrong turn, we corrected and found the interstate and headed north. We got back close to one and were soon rewarded with the Men’s Olympic Basketball final. That ended about 3:30. Cheryl headed to bed at the end of the first period buy I made it to the end. The ending looked pretty in doubt right to the last few minutes. Foul trouble and a Spanish team that was shooting incredibly well created a great game after their earlier meeting was a rout.

Needless to say, I slept in and didn’t get up until nearly noon. Watched some more Olympics but rhythmic gymnastics are not my bag so now I am watching golf. No racing today; the cup cars ran at Bristol last night (we saw a little of it at Joe’s Crab Shack) and the F-1 race form Valencia was on the Speed Channel (not part of our pathetic over the air offering).

Monday morning and once again we got up late. The Olympics are over. Now we can get back to our trip. Oops, another interruption. When Cheryl did the dishes this morning, she went to put a pan in the cabinet under the sink and found water running from the sink into the cabinet. We have had a bit of water there but it has been intermittent and we have never caught it happening. Well, this morning we caught it red handed so I gathered up my tools and took the whole thing apart. All of the piping is plastic, not the PVC kind of plastic but the “make toys out of” kind of plastic. There is nothing in the joints to create a good seal against leakage.

We figured that we would spend the day catching up on some undone things. We needed some Teflon tape to fix the plumbing. We had gone to the left every time we had gone out of the campground so we hung a big right and headed toward the town of Canyon Lake and eventually New Breunfield. It was a nice ride but we didn’t find a hardware store. We did find Mrs. Bush’s Pie Company but it wasn’t open (darn!). We hit a couple of small towns none of which had a hardware store or anything that would pass for a hardware store. Eventually we came to the end of the road and had to figure out which way to go but not before we passed a Coleman factory (the camping people) and a Simpson’s Race Products factory. It is really neat to trip across these kinds of places whose products we have used for years or in the case of Simpson’s a company that makes the products that all of our race teams use.

We were looking for a Post Office as well as a hardware store and I have been looking for some time for a place to get the oil changed in the Camry. New Breunfield is quite a large town (or a small city) and after driving through the town several times we were about to give up and ask when “There it is!” Right where we have driven by 3 times. We mailed our stuff and continued to look for a hardware store or a Walmart. Soon we found a Jiffy Lube and got the oil changed. I think I have figured out why there are so many of these places. They charge a bundle. I have priced an oil change in several of them and decided it was too much. They all charge the same (about 50% more than we pay at home). I really needed it so we did it. As we turned in, we spied a Cicci’s Pizza right next door. Their pizza is no competition for La Festa but it is a buffet and you can get several types. After the oil, we had pizza and headed for Big Lots (next door) and hoped that we could find the Teflon tape. We didn’t so we headed out in search of.

We eventually found an Ace Hardware in the middle of a thunderstorm and found the tape and headed back home. The next morning, I got up and put the sink drains back together. We were slow getting started but eventually we headed out to drive up to Austin. As things usually go, we got into a conversation with our neighbors. He was originally from Boston but moved to Texas when he was fairly young. He was retired and they have been living in their motorhome for 9 years. They move around visiting their relatives but have membership campgrounds where they stay much of the time. This park is one of them. They explained that the campground had gone under many years ago and the campers came up with the money to buy it. They reorganized it and ran it themselves for a while and when they had earned their money back they turned it into a non-profit organization with a board of directors. It runs pretty well to this day. It was odd in a couple of ways. This is the only campground that we have ever been in that charged for the electricity. There are electric meters in each campsite. They read them when you arrive and again when you check out then charge you 10 cents a kilowatt. With the heat, we ran both of the air conditioners so our bill was 13 dollars for the week in the heat.

Eventually we headed for Austin. About half way there, we realized that we were not going to get there in time to do much. At about the same time, we saw a billboard for Cabela’s and a Starbucks off the same exit. We talked briefly and turned off the exit. We spent quite a bit of time at the fish tanks. They had 2 large tanks with a lot of fish and a couple of turtles. We watched the fish for quite a while then exited right into the fishing department. That is something like the amusement park rides that always exit you into the gift shop; here you exit the fish tanks into the fishing department. We played with the fishing rods and reels and then looked through the clothing.

Cheryl picked up a couple of t-shirts and we went upstairs to the camping department. They had a great selection of gear up there. They had some really nice stoves. They had large standing stoves with griddles and box ovens for the tops. A nice gentleman told us all about the stoves and the gear that went with them but we were curious and not in the market so we wandered off. They had some cots with tent coverings built right into them. It reminded me of my old Jungle Hammock that I had as a kid. We lived in one of the Miami Heights capes with the upstairs that were too hot to live in during the heat of the summer. We set our tent up in the back yard and slept out there all summer. Eventually, I got the jungle hammock and strung it up between trees in the back yard. It was a hammock with a roof and netting along both sides. I really enjoyed that hammock and this cot reminded me of it. This cot was also available in a double bed size although they didn’t have them in the store. Cool! Except that there is no where to put your stuff. A major failing.

We headed across the highway to the Starbucks and had a coffee. The staff was having a meeting while we were there so that was interesting to see how these places work. One drawback; they had a rack of cds on sale. We had gotten a little tired of the same 6 or 8 cds so we bought some cds (on sale of course). We picked up a Frank Sinatra, a Carley Simon and a 2 cd Grateful Dead. On the way home we ran into a huge T-storm. It rained so hard the traffic slowed to about 15 mph. Everyone had their flashers and headlights on. You could hardly see the car in front of you. It only lasted about 15 minutes and then the sun came out.

We watched Hillary that night. I thought her speech was excellent. She certainly learned a lot from Bill. She had the people wrapped around her little finger and she made the most of it. She has already started to run for the 2012 nomination.

Well, we move again tomorrow. It seems like we are always moving. One week is not enough time at one place. It seems like we are always moving. Fortunately we are not moving far. I wanted to spend my birthday in San Antonio so I made reservations at the campground we are at because that was the only time I could get in there and then I found another place in Bandera, about 70 miles away form here and the same distance from San Antonio. Bandera claims to be the cowboy capital of the world. It was the jumping off place for cattle drives headed for the Kansas railheads. Should be fun.

Now I know where all those Cavemen come from!

We have landed in Carlsberg, NM. The trip was ok but I seem to have a problem with the truck (another?). It did not seem to shift into high gear after we stopped to rescue the stick on thermometer form the kitchen window. The truck drove great but the RPMs were 3,000 at 60 mph rather than the usual 2,000. I will check it over as much as I can during our time here. I do not expect to be able to do much and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere in town that can help me. Arrgh!

We had hoped to stop in Roswell to visit the UFO Museum and Research Site. Roswell was a much bigger town than we expected. They also have an identity, the whole alien thing. Most business have aliens somehow worked into their logo and their signage. There was parking for motorhomes but none for those with trailers. We hit some of the side roads and still didn’t find anything so we motored on.

After we arrived, met the managers and settled into our site, we had a late lunch, unloaded the car and headed for the park. I wanted to see about tour tickets since I had little luck on the internet. Our campground is about 18 miles north of Carlsbad and the park is another 25 miles south of the town. Once you get there, you have another 8 mile drive up to the caverns. Most of the land around here is flat with tiny rolling hills. Once you get to the park, the road goes up and up to a fairly high altitude. There is a pueblo style visitor’s center and a sprawling parking lot. We found a parking spot right at the visitor’s center end of the parking lot. I have a theory about great parking spaces; when you get a spot right by the door, you can never find what you want. This was no different but the reasons were different.

We got into the line for tickets. Actually there was no line, just 2 people who were together. In just a few seconds, one of the two clerks finished with their customers and took the people in front of us. In another minute the remaining clerk took us. That was when things started to go down hill. I gave her the big old Maine Howdy, "how are you today?” To which I received a “what can I do for you?” With no smile or anything even close to a friendly greeting.

I told her that I was going to be there for 3 days and wanted to get tickets. She told me to go see the information desk and they would help me plan out my visit. I replied that I knew exactly what I wanted. She again repeated that I should see the info desk, that she had to get all of these people into the park so they could catch the elevator into the caverns. She then took my National Park Pass and gave me an entry ticket to the park (which I didn’t yet want) and called the next couple from the line (actually they were the only people in the line so it was hard to tell where these herds of people she had to help were located…maybe they were hiding outside the door waiting for us to leave). I stood there but when she finished with them and there were no other people, she left her desk and went out back. More rude national park personnel! I left. I was so mad that I was afraid to go back to talk to her because I might just tell her off.

It was a quiet ride back to camp. A wasted trip of 40 or more miles (one way) and pretty much a ruined day. I just couldn’t imagine why she would treat me that way. I am not a child abuser and I didn’t kick any old ladies to the curb to get into the line before them. I was wearing my Red Sox shirt….maybe she is a Yankees fan. I was nice, friendly and clean (more or less). Maybe it was her problem but she appeared to be nice to the other people she dealt with (although I only saw 2). She wore a ranger’s uniform but I know she was not a ranger. All of the rangers I have met were customer friendly and nice. It is always the clerks and bus drivers that are nasty. I just don’t know.

I went back to camp and built a fire (yea, we have a fire pit!). I was still mumbling to myself but the fire cheered me up. I got it going well and then fortified it with charcoal and sat in the smoke. This is only the third fire we have had since we left home. We are still burning the wood we brought with us. I cut up some potatoes, onions, zucchini and cauliflower with some oil, water, salt pepper and basil, wrapped it in aluminum foil and tossed the packets into the fire. I put a rub on a couple of steaks and put them in my cooking basket and threw it on the fire when I thought the veggies were done. Yum!

The next morning, we slept late (up late watching the Olympics) and got a late morning start to the caves. Upon arrival, we noticed the same woman selling tickets so we decided to do the 2 self guided tours. The first is the Natural Entrance Tour. This basically gets you down into the caves. It is 1 ½ miles long and you descend 800 feet. You spend a lot of your time winding down into the earth. There is a large opening where they also have the bat program amphitheater and the trail starts to wind down into an opening that looks like the Hatch Shell upside down going down into the earth. After a large descent, you come into a large room. The signs pointed out into a dark corridor in the back and says that the bats are living in there. At dusk, they come out of the cave by the millions. They migrate up to the caverns in March of each year and live there until October when they go back to Mexico (they are just doing a job that Americans don’t want to do). The park does a program each evening about the bats and then everyone just sits there and watches them come out. They leave the caves each evening to go hunting for insects. Each bat eats about half its body weight in insects each night.

I wonder if they give each person a garlic necklace and a crucifex.

This cave is magnificent! Every room we saw was huge. No one with claustrophobia should be bothered by this cave. The rooms are as big as Boston Garden and there is no feeling of closeness anywhere along the way. There are lots of features and things to see and you can set your own pace for the tour. There are even benches in various places so you can just sit and contemplate. For probably 90% of the tour, the trail winds back and forth as you go deeper into the earth. You end up in “The Big Room” at around 800 feet of depth. There are rest rooms there and a small place to buy refreshments.

I came out of the men’s room and there were dozens of football players in uniform wandering around. While I was staring at them, a man dressed in the same colors came over and said hello. Knowing he was one of the coaches, I asked him what kind of an advantage did practicing in the caves give them. He laughed and said they were the local high school known as the Cavemen. They were down here taking their team picture (like they did every year). He said that he thought that they were the only school in the country known as the Cavemen.

There is a second self guided tour in the cave. It is the tour of the Big Room. A 1 ¼ mile walk around the room. There are a lot of features in the room and entrances to at least one of the other tours (lower cave). There are several formal guided tours in the caverns, most of which are not for the weak at heart. They involve crawling through small holes and along dirt pathways with helmets, gloves, kneepads and headlamps. Not my cup of tea. There is one other general guided tour that I would like to take and one of the marginal wild tours that I would consider but (fortunately) that one is booked solid (they only take a dozen people a day.

We came out of the caves a little before 5 (having absolutely no idea what the time was). We headed home figuring we would catch the bats another day. We were hungry and a little tired. We drove back and had Chinese food on the way home.

We watched the Olympics but the TV was full of warnings for Tornados, Severe thunderstorms and flash floods. We could hear something headed our way and watched it approach across the range. It looked ugly. At about 10:30, the TV gave its warning blast and we looked up to see Eddy County specifically Carlsbad get a warning for Severe T-storms and big hail and heavy rain. We both looked out the window and said “I guess we know where that one is”.

We stayed up until nearly one watching the storm(s) roll across the campground. We felt sorry for the people next to us in a popup camper. Their canvass was just blowing badly. It poured for more than an hour. There was standing water everywhere in the park but by the time we got up this morning, the ground was bare and dry (and the popup was gone).

We are having a kind of slow day, catching up on some things we need to do and relaxing. We will probably head to the park later at least to see the bats.
Later!

OK, we went to the park but didn’t stay for the bats. The last tour of the day had already left so we planned to buy tickets for the next day. As it worked out, they had 2 tickets for the Left Hand Tunnel Tour left. They had 1 ticket but they didn’t seem to be able to sell one ticket so they approved an extra ticket. That made 2 and we got there just as they released the tickets so we bought them. We also got tickets for the King’s Palace Tour later in he same day.

Our Left Hand Tour was early in the morning so we set the alarm clock for 6:15. I woke up about 20 minutes early and was immediately struck with nervousness about the tour. I have been in lots of caves and never had a problem but there is this coal mine up in Nova Scotia that gives me fits. I have been there twice and left before the tour was over both times. The coal mine is short requiring me to walk around bent over all the time. It is dark (coal of course) and very very wet. I had asthma problems both times as well as feeling very uncomfortable. I woke up dreading the whole cave experience.

Of course, I ignored it and we proceeded forth. I guess I didn’t tell you about the Left Hand Tunnel Tour. It is an off the beaten track tour. It is intended to be an old time tour. There are no lights in the tunnel, no paved path and no handrails (to balance yourself with as you look up and around). It shows you what it was like to view the cave in the old days. It is eerie to wander around a cave with just a candle to see by. It was nice to have a ranger explaining things and talking about the cave. He showed us fossils and some cave crickets and talked to us about the other denizens of the cave. We saw some mummified bat remains and some small deposits of bat guano (in some of the caves, the guano is 40 feet deep and was mined in olden times). We saw some amazing things by the lights of our candles.

The trail through the cave was unimproved so you were constantly looking out for rocks and holes in the path. They ran tape along the edges of the path to give you lines to stay within. There were deep holes along the sides of the trail that you could easily fall into if you weren’t paying attention. He told us how the caves were formed. It was much clearer than the written stuff we had already seen. This cave complex was formed not by running water within the limestone layers but by acid formed by water within the limestone and the Sulphur Dioxide leaching up from the oil and gas deposits beneath the caves. The Sulphur dioxide absorbs into the water and forms sulphuric acid which then dissolves the limestone creating the voids that eventually became the caves. As time went on, the layers rose from geologic action along various faults pushing the caves above the water table draining out the acid solution and leaving the caves.

After all that, water seeping down from the surface mixes with carbon dioxide to create carbolic acid. This dissolves the limestone too but much slower. It flows slowly enough to create the stalactites and stalagmites, soda straws, columns, draperies and other decorations. These caves are huge and some highly decorated.

Once we finished with the Left Hand Tour, we got ready to head back to the surface to await our afternoon tour. It was then that I noticed that a tour was getting their preliminary briefing before heading out on the King’s Palace Tour. There weren’t very many people there so I asked the ranger if we could join their tour. I explained that we had been placed on the afternoon tour because of potential problems meeting up with the ll: 00 am tour as our tour was scheduled to end at ll: 00. She agreed and off we went with no break.

This tour was the biggest surprise since we saw our first huge room. There were more decorations here than we had run into in all of our tours. It was magnificent. There were 4 rooms that we visited: King’s Palace, Papoose Room, Queen’s Palace and the green lake room. The rooms were loaded with all of the various types of decorations of various sizes and huge quantities. We saw some of the biggest draperies I have ever seen and literally thousands of soda straws, stalactites and whole formations of stalactites that looked like great huge arrays of organ pipes.

If you ever get a chance to visit Carlsberg Caverns, take it! If you are nervous about small spaces, don’t worry here. You can walk down the natural entrance and visit the “Big Room” with no worries about small tight spaces. Being in this cave area is like being in the Boston Garden (or whatever they call it these days). It is a huge space with no closed in feeling at all (of course, I have been comfortable in caves all over the country (except for that darned coal mine)).

I guess I was tired after all that cave exploration. I fell asleep early in the evening, during the time I had planned to get the car loaded and clean up the campsite in preparation for leaving early. We still left early but not nearly as early as we had planned. The drive is a long one, nearly 500 miles or 10 hours so an early start was imperative. We did get out near 7:30 (which is early for us) but it was a far cry from 6:00. I didn’t have enough gas to get to the Flying J in Pecos so I stopped locally to buy enough gas to guarantee that we would make it. I let the pump go to the max it would allow on my card (on the way out, most of the stations would force you to reprocess your card at $75 forcing me to take my card inside and leave it to get a full tank on one input). IT seems that many of the stations have updated their limits to $125 so I ended up with plenty of gas and some sausage biscuits to munch on.

Along the way, we picked up a Texas (rock of course) radio station. While we were able to keep them on the dial, they had an energy report. They reported that there were more than 900 drilling rigs in TX alone drilling new wells up one from last week. At this time last year there were 125 wells being drilled. There were nearly 2,000 new wells being drilled across the US. Good signs for the future I hope. We saw quite a few drilling rigs in the last couple of weeks (didn’t see any gushers).

Soon we crossed into Texas and the terrain which had been building up into a rolling hills kind of geography immediately went flat. We began seeing more and more pumping rigs bringing up the oil from down under and wondered how long it would take for it to get to market.

In Pecos, we stopped at the Flying J and topped off the tank. Surprisingly enough, the price was 3 cents a gallon more than we had paid in Carlsberg. Go Figure! Soon we stopped for a few minutes and Cheryl took up the driving. I have been downloading songs off my computer onto cds so we have something to listen to when there are no or few radio stations. We got tired of the 6 or 7 disks that we brought with us. At one point, we did get a radio station for a few minutes, just long enough to hear that the price of gas around San Antonio is $3.57. Well, our next tank should be cheaper.

The day is pretty nice although the temperature outside has been climbing steadily (partly because we have been going pretty much southeast. It is comfortable inside. We haven’t hit high on the A/C yet. When we hit the Texas border we came to a shocking realization: we had changed time zones and lost an hour so all of our planning to get to San Antonio at a reasonable hour had just taken a hit by one hour. One minute it was 11:03, the next it was 12:04. That is not the first time we have not put time zones in our planning. Unfortunately, this time we are headed east and are losing time whereas before, we were headed west and gaining time.

Well, it is time for me to take back the reins and drive this stagecoach for a while so I will finish up and try to upload it to the net. Stay safe!

C&C - emails to estabrke@gmail.com

Can you spell Albuquerque??

So not every day can be Christmas, neither can every day be a great one. Today was one of those days we dread. This was not nearly as bad as that evil day in Las Vegas when the A/C compressor blew up and the slide ran into an immovable object but it certainly was a frustrating time. I had made an appointment at Camper World to change the oil in the camper and to hook up the satellite dish that came on the camper. I also asked them to check the air pressure in all of the tires (6). Sounds simple enough doesn’t it?

We left in plenty of time to get there for our appointment. It was a good thing because the directions on the Camper World web site were wrong. They had built a new store and had not updated the web site. Instead of arriving a half hour early, we pulled into the driveway 1 minute early. The store is beautiful but we had a problem finding where we should be. First, we went to the service door (seems logical doesn’t it?)….wrong! The service door was for warranty work on campers that had been bought there. We then wandered up to the main door and went to the visitor’s desk. Also not right. “Who was our appointment with?” we were asked.

“Camper World” says we. There is a service desk inside the store we were told. By now, we are late. We found the desk discussed the work we needed and turned over the keys. I asked for the numbers from the satellite receiver so I could set up the program with Direct TV. Steve (the repair desk guru) directed us to the waiting area and off we went. The people at the front door desk told us that the cooler behind us had bottles of water should we want one. Grabbing a couple of bottles, we stepped into the show room and walked amongst the giants. There were some huge bus campers there including one beautiful green bus. While we were there, this one was sold. An older couple was measuring things and checking out everything. The woman was really excited and her husband was methodically checking everything out.

The waiting area was truly nice. They had coffee, tea, cocoa, cappuccino (3 kinds) and a selection of pastries as well as bags of freshly popped corn (not the wimpy kind but with lots of butter and salt). My cousin Jan had called from Michigan while I was dealing with Steve so I took this moment to call her back. We had made tentative plans to meet in Memphis. She and Dave were going to Nashville and Memphis before meeting some friends in Branson. We wanted to go to Memphis so that seemed to be a good plan.

They were leaving next week for 2 weeks in Hawaii visiting the Big Island (Hawaii) and Kauai (SP?) so they wanted to touch base with us to let us know when they would be in Memphis so we could plan around it.

After talking with my favorite cousin, I called Direct TV and thus started the trouble. The first person I talked to demanded that I activate my subscription before they even talk to me. I agreed then discussed what I wanted to do. They asked for the information regarding the receiver and then said that the card had to be replaced because it was (first they said it was no good then said it was already in use) no good. They transferred me to the new card department and I went through the story all over again. I gave him the numbers and he said there was a problem. The numbers related to high definition hardware and he doubted that high def would work in my camper. After some additional discussion I decided to hang up and go talk to the people in the store. I have an older dish that only has one LNB (signal receiver node) and for High Def, you need 5. When I got to the store, there was a mechanic talking to them about a high def receiver and the wrong dish. I asked if they were talking about me behind my back and they agreed. I suggested that they use the correct receiver and the mechanic said that the dish I had was a real problem. It was not reliable. After some additional talking I decided that I didn’t need any more problems so I cancelled the work order. Think the problems are over? Not a chance.

I called Direct TV back and explained what had happened and what the final decision was. I asked that my system be put on hold once again and was told that they couldn’t. There was a charge for the work they had done and that bill had to be paid before they could put it on hiatus again. “How much?” says I

“$102+” says Direct TV. A proration for the rest of this month and the entire bill for next month…
Needless to say, I was not a happy camper (I really didn’t mean that). I said I didn’t think it was exactly fair to make me pay more than a hundred dollars for time I wouldn’t use. I was told those were the rules and I had to pay it.

I thought about it for about 5 seconds and pointed out that I have been a good customer over many years and didn’t deserve this. I had tried my best to employ their service in my camper and was told that I wouldn’t have to pay for the rest of the system until I got home and actually used it. It didn’t work out so I want to put it back the way it was 2 hours ago. You have to pay the bill before we can do that. “OK, then cancel my service.”

“You will have to do that in another office. I will transfer you.”

Soon another voice came on the line and asked (for about the fifth time) how my day was going. Boy, did I give her an earful. Without going into all of the details, the anger and the crying (sort of), she said that all that I had been told was not true. First of all, the first person I talked to should not have forced me to turn my system back on before we discussed what we were doing and second, the bill was not mandatory and she could straighten it out if I would agree to stay with them. After another half hour, all was back where it started and I was once again a happy camper except that I will be required to watch over the air TV unless my campground has cable. I can live with that.

Eventually, they finished the oil change (3 hours is a little excessive), we finished our shopping and we returned to camp. We parked the camper and headed right out to a great little pizza place we heard about from our neighbor from Boston. It was a little hole in the wall and we ordered. While we waited, we met a couple that came in asking if we were the ones with the Maine plates. They were both from New Hampshire. She was visiting him for 6 weeks over the summer. She was a teacher in Manchester. He had moved out there 18 years ago from NH. We had a great visit and the pizza was great too. The crust was fairly thin and very crispy.

We headed down to Best Buy and got Cheryl a computer of her own. We have been sharing this one but it was time we got a second. This one is getting full and we don’t have any of Cheryl’s video on the computer. That took the rest of the afternoon but we finally escaped with our lives and a computer.

We hooked up the camper, got it settled in and started to get the computer set up. Cheryl immediately found a whole new suite of games on her computer and after loading her software, set out to check them out.

We are watching the Olympics. This is one of the great shows on earth. Amazing talents these athletes.

Another day has dawned. We had dreadful thunderstorms last night. I sat in the cab to watch the lightning and noticed that the windshield had a lot of hail on it. It poured and the lightning put on quite a show. We watched the men’s gymnastics team competition. That was pretty exciting to watch all of these people who were alternates get a chance to contribute because of injuries. Winning a bronze medal was way more than was expected from them and it made the evening quite exciting. The today show is broadcasting from Beijing and they covered some Olympic things. Once that ended, we watched some more Olympic coverage and then got dressed. That showed us that it was time to do laundry. We gathered it up and headed for the laundry room here at the campground. They didn’t have many machines and about a third of them were broken and all but one were already in use. We loaded back up and headed out to find a Laundromat. We found one with a Starbucks next door so life was good.

On the way back, we saw a sign for fresh corn so we took the back road and stopped at the stand and picked up a half dozen ears. We had a nice talk with the people from the farm and were soon back on the road headed for home. Once back I cut the corn off half the ears and sautéed it in butter and boiled the other 3 to give us an honest trial. Both versions were delicious. It was white corn, a version called Snow Queen. Tomorrow they will have new potatoes to go with the corn so we will most likely visit them again.

It is closing in on 5 PM and the TV is already flashing severe thunderstorm warnings for the counties around us and flash flood warnings. We are sitting high up on a hill so we don’t have to worry about flash floods but the T-storms are in the next 2 counties (we are right on the edge of one of them).

We seem to be about out of propane. The inside gauge board says we are out but the mechanical gauge on the tank says we still have a quarter tank. I don’t know which to believe but I tend to rely more on the gauge on the tank. I have little faith in the gauge board on the wall. They don’t have propane in this campground but there is a place about 5 miles down the road. I think we will head out on the night before we leave and fill the tank then hook up the trailer and load the car before parking in our space (which is big enough to hold everything as long as the car is on the trailer. Then we can get an early morning start. We have a fairly long ways to go and want to spend a few hours in Roswell when we get there. We are planning to stay in Carlsbad which is about an hour past Roswell. The Carlsbad Caverns are huge. There are several tours that hit different parts of the cave and a couple of tours that are self guided. We also hope to hit El Paso while we are there before heading off to Austen and San Antonio.

It was heartbreaking to watch the American women’s gymnastic team give in to the pressure and make all those mistakes. Of course the pressure is understandable as the Chinese were certainly a great team. The change to the process was interesting putting the Americans and the Chinese in the same rotation and forcing them to basically go head to head. Perhaps that is what caused the pressure. The Americans may not have been so pressured if the Chinese were on the other side of the arena and not under their scrutiny all the time. You have to admit that it did make for an exciting event although the cameras followed the two teams and no one else. How many other girls did you see?

Well, we are off to Santa Fe up the turquoise trail (route 14). We’ll check in with you later.

On our way out of town, we stopped to visit our local corn dealer and bought more corn and some new potatoes. Then we were off. The drive up route 14 (Turquoise Trail) was pretty. It is listed as a Scenic Byway and is the area where turquoise was mined first by the Indians and later by the settlers. The road has some dwellings on it but is mostly wilderness, that kind of wilderness that is open range with slightly rolling hills and bigger hills in the distance dotted with small green shrubs. In the middle, there is a ghost town that, like Jerome, has been taken over by craftsmen. There is an old steam train there and a mining museum but mostly artisans and a few houses that look lived in. There were several buildings for sale and a lot of tourists.

We checked out a few places but were soon back on the road. The end of the road is Santa Fe. We wanted to see what Santa Fe was like. Albuquerque is pretty much like other cities with high rise buildings and a city like atmosphere. The surrounding area is certainly different but it is a real city. Santa Fe is not. The drive into Santa Fe is like miles and miles of strip malls all built in the southwest pueblo style. It is striking and interesting to see. I am not sure just when we got into the city. We went through a less nice section of the city and then were greeted with signs pointing to the capital area of the city and the museums but we never did find it. The traffic got heavier and slower and after crossing several major streets we found ourselves in “Old Santa Fe”. This is the historic section full of historic buildings and shop areas. The puebloan style of building is evident here. We went by rows of open stall shops selling Indian and Spanish jewelry and other items. There is a large park that was full of people sitting and enjoying the day and eating from food carts. There are a lot of shops and the place was mobbed. A very popular area.

We looked and looked for parking and found none. We followed signs for public parking and private parking and just about any kind of parking you could imagine and were totally shut out. The lots were full. We could not find a crevice in which to make our own creative parking spaces. That had already been done. There was no space at the inn and we were not in the mood for trinket shopping anyway. If we were going to shop, Cheryl saw a couple of places she wanted to check out along the road coming into the city. Our first stop was the “Hobby Lobby”. My best description is that it is like Michaels but way bigger (not better just more of the same). There were some neat things in there and Cheryl picked up a few things.

Our next stop was Joanne’s to pick up some more nylon net. It seems that Cheryl has used up most of what she brought. She makes these things by the dozens by she also spreads them across the countryside. Everyone she meets and likes gets a sampling. She is a modern day Johnnie ScrubySeed. If they could reproduce on their own, we would find forests of the things as we wend our way home.

Just as we got near to our campsite, we came across another farm stand. This one had mostly fruit and some tomatoes. We bought cantaloupe and peaches. Like the produce in most farm stands, they had ripened on the vines and been picked at their best. Absolutely delicious!

Another night of Olympics. Need I say more? I just can’t imagine the pressure that all of these people are under, yet they are still able to compete. It is just amazing.

I had trouble sleeping (back at 7,000 ft) so I got up early and looked through the internet to see what there is to do here in Albuquerque. One of the first things that I saw buried down the list was the Unser Racing Museum. There is also an historic “Old Albuquerque”. The Unsers moved here from Colorado when Bobby and Al were small boys. They have a street named after them and are prominently mentioned in Albuquerque’s history.

The museum was small but had some nice exhibits. They had several of the cars that Bobby, Al and Al jr. won the Indy 500 (9 500 wins between the 3 of them). There was a room dedicated to Pike’s Peak; a racing venue dominated by the Unser family over at least 4 generations. The race up Pike’s Peak is the second oldest race in the US, the first being the Indy 500.

The Unser’s early exploits in racing were in cars that they built themselves. Racing was like that back then. Race cars were usually hand built in the garage and the builders also built the engines that powered them. That was back when racing was a much less controlled sport than it is now. One of the early Unsers was killed in a fiery crash during Indy 500 practice. This spurred some early changes to improve safety in the cars. The early cars carried 60 gallons of gasoline and the early drivers wore leather helmets and t-shirts. The quantity of fuel was reduced and the fuel itself was changed from gasoline to alcohol which is much less explosive and easier to control.

They had one of Little Al’s IROC cars (the pink one of course) and a Pike’s Peak car that Al won in that was completely made from Titanium. It was the lightest car to race there and was a handful because of its lightness. They had a NASCAR simulator and an Indy Car simulator. The NASCAR simulator had the hood that you watched in and the Indy Car simulator had a big screen TV. Those were fun but the stock car simulator’s hood was pretty worn and had little contrast making it hard to see. It was still fun because you sat in an actual car mock up.

They had a mock up of an Indy car in the parking lot that you could sit in. You understand why so many of these people are small when someone my size tries to climb into the car. It was a tight fit but the picture looks pretty good. They also had a model of one of the early Pike’s Peak cars. You wonder how anyone would survive an accident in a car like that. The people there were friendly and wanted to make sure you had a good time there. There was a “greeter” named “Hub” that talked to you a little about the museum and the Unsers and showed you the layout of the building. Great place to spend a couple of hours.

We left there and immediately got lost. The map showed us how to get to the Old City but the roads showing on the map didn’t seem to be there. We drove back and forth a couple of times and couldn’t find the road so we took off cross country. It took a while but soon we were looking for a parking place. We looked through an old puebloan style church. Then we wandered through some of the shops and got a bite to eat. The Mexican food here is quite good but soon we will be hitting the bbq areas. We wandered through some additional shops and checked out some of the outdoor vendors that display their wares on blankets along the sidewalks. It was a very pretty area and certainly much like Santa Fe mostly in the style of the pueblos.

We talked a little about the places we have been with relation to living here. The summer is certainly not a time we would want to spend here but the area is certainly beautiful. They get snow here but not the continually cold time that we have. Cottonwood had the feeling of a small town and we were taken by Santa Fe even if we couldn’t find a parking space to look into it a little closer. Albuquerque is a large modern city but only minutes out of the city, you are in the desert with rolling hills and ghost towns that are not as ghostly as they could be. They have residents and neighbors.

There are hills with houses on them and most everyone has a long dirt road driveway and a lot of room with little traffic (even John McCain). We still have a long ways to go but we have spent the time allotted in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado (still lots to see in all those places on another trip) and one last area in New Mexico (Carlsbad & Roswell), before venturing into Texas.

Today is kind of a catch-up day. We did some things around the camper and then went off to do some grocery shopping. We headed down the road the other way first to find the place where we can get propane for the camper. The wall gauge has said the tank was empty for several days now but the gage on the tank itself still says we have a quarter tank so we didn’t worry too much. On our way, we found a Schwann’s truck sitting on the side of the road with a truckload sale sign. We stopped to see just what they had for sale and the guy handed us a catalog. We have seen these trucks all over the country even at home and just figured that they were an ice cream company.

The catalog told us something completely different. They have all kinds of frozen food as well as ice cream and other desserts. While we were talking to him (I don’t know whether to refer to him as a driver or a salesman) I realized that this is the same company that I used to buy frozen food from years (and years and years) ago. The name is the same but the trucks look completely different and it has been so long that I never connected the trucks to the company I used to buy things from.

We talked to him for quite a while. He was not busy at that time and was glad for the company. We said we would look at the catalog and would be back later in the day to get propane for the camper. We found the propane company, got their hours and headed off for the grocery store. Of course, I got confused between east and west (we have gone in both directions several times) and got onto the interstate going in the wrong direction. The next exit was Edgewood and it looked like a fair sized town so we got off there and shopped at the Smiths there instead of the one back towards Albuquerque (I certainly am proud that I learned to spell that word). Afterwards, we headed back to camp.

We broke camp and headed back down the road. The propane place saw me coming and had a man waiting for me as I turned around at the tank. Soon, we were full, paid and headed back down the road. We pulled into the turnout that housed the Swann’s truck and bought a couple of boxes of ice cream bars. Then we headed back to camp, hooked up the trailer, loaded the car and pulled back into our campsite. We hooked back up and were immediately hit by a huge thunderstorm complete with lightening, thunder, huge rain drops and ball bearing sized hail. That went on for about 20 minutes during which time we found a leak around one corner of skylight (great! Something else to fix). Oh, well, can’t deal with it now. Fortunately, it is leaking into the shower.

We are now ready to leave in the morning. Wee have a fairly long trip tomorrow so we want to get an early start. We hope to spend a couple of hours in Roswell and still get to Carlsbad in the late afternoon. I have been putting off making reservations in Carlsbad. I wasn’t happy with the options. The national park has no campground and Coast to Coast doesn’t have any place near there either so we have to find an alternative place. It seems that KOA has a place there that sounds really nice so we made reservations there.

We have been watching the Olympics again. That race with Michael Phelps was a great drama. He was behind all the way and then out touched the Czech. They both ended up a half stroke from the end and the Czech coasted into the touch while Phelps took one additional stroke and ended up beating him by 1/100th of a second. It was just amazing.

Guess who our neighbor is??

Another day, another campground. We left the Grand Canyon in the middle of this morning. We headed south from the Canyon and took a scenic route that took us to Flagstaff through the Kaibab National Forest. In Flagstaff, we caught the beginning of Interstate 17 and headed into the Coconino National Forest. It was all pretty but more of the same. As we headed south, we first gained altitude to a little more than 8,000 feet and then started to lose altitude. By the time we turned off 17, we were down to 3,200 feet. The campground we thought was in Cornville turned out to be in Page Springs. We found the campground down this rather small crude road. The entrance was off a corner and down a steep driveway into an even smaller open space. This is not as small a campground as Torrey Utah but not a whole lot bigger. There is a pretty good sized stream running along the edge of the CG that was full of red silt which had washed into the stream from a lot of rain that they have had over the last few days.

They didn’t know we were coming and claimed they had checked the Coast to Coast reservation system just this morning. They logged back in and did find us there. They were surprised that we had made our reservations 3 weeks ago because they check it every other day and haven’t seen us. We eventually checked in. Since the campground is so small, there wasn’t a space we could put the trailer but they had us put it in another campsite they didn’t think they would need while we were there. Soon we had the car unloaded (we are getting pretty good at it) and had moved the trailer to its designated spot, backed it in and unhooked it. Getting into our campsite was a little more difficult as everyone had parked their car in the road. The gentleman next door came out and moved his car giving us just enough room to squeeze into the space.

Then we headed downtown and had lunch. As we left Cottonwood, we were driving through the desert and could see 4 thunderstorms scattered across the desert. It was really weird to see these storms with lightning and rain moving across the desert. The space between the storms was blue sky and fluffy white clouds. We had seen a sign for apples, peaches and blackberries so we turned down the road. Immediately the road turned to dirt and the next sign we saw said the orchard was 3 ½ miles. We drove carefully along the dirt road and passed through a cattleguard that had water flowing through and around it. I hesitated a bit there due to the signs we had seen everywhere warning against driving through flooded places in roads during storms. I did continue on and finished the drive. The road got worse the further we went but it never got bad enough to turn back.

Soon we passed a school and arrived at the orchard after passing a line of willow trees lining the road. The orchard turned out to be someone’s back yard project. The spaces between the trees had not been mowed and were waist high and the trees seemed to have no order whatsoever. It also turned out to be a pick your own. The fruit looked quite small and the road took us up someone’s driveway where we were greeted by a large dog that looked hungrily at us. There was a piece of handwritten paper that said “Blow Horn” but we looked at each other and turned around and left. As we climbed out of the valley, we noticed a storm headed directly for us. I drove as fast as I could to get by the flooded road before the storm reached us. Upon reaching the flooded area, there was a young woman in a bikini and her small son playing in the water.

We made it back to camp and never did get any rain at camp. We are back in the hot desert. The temperature was 100 degrees when we returned and the camper was hot. We hooked up the connections and turned on the air conditioner. Several hours went by before the camper cooled down. There are several things to do here. There are a couple of National Monuments and some Indian museums. We will see what tomorrow brings. Sometime, I also have to plan our next few stops.

We slept in. I slept well for a change. I think it is the change to a lower altitude. I woke up a couple of times but went right back to sleep. In the morning, we went in search of somewhere for Cheryl to get her hair fixed. We drove around and finally found a place that looked busy. We went in and Cheryl got an appointment for tomorrow afternoon.

We then looked for a drug store to pick up some medicine that I have been out of for a few days. I have had trouble finding it. I can find low doses (50 mg) but I need 600 mg/day so the smaller pills don’t work. Not only did I find the bigger pills but they were on sale. I paid less for a 6 month supply than I do at home for 6 weeks. I bought every bottle they had.

Buoyed by our dual successes, we headed off to find a winery/vineyard and Montezuma’s Castle National Monument. We happened upon the winery first. Like everything else around here, all you see is a sign telling you about the winery pointing down a dirt road. After a considerable drive, you go down into a valley between high points of land and there is the winery/vineyard. A green oasis in the middle of a desert. There were rows of grapevines radiating out in every direction. The sign had said that tours were available only on Fridays and Saturdays so we were expecting only a tasting room. We were surprised when we happened upon a tour going on. We stopped around its periphery and listened. The tour giver invited us to join the tour so we jumped at the chance.

She was explaining about how the new vines were planted and how they grew. She said that most of the vines that they made the wine out of were 10 to 15 years old and that “old” vines were usually around 40 years old. She was using vines of grapes used to make Pinot Grigio. The grapes were nearly ripe and she handed out some to taste. They were very tasty although small with seeds. She showed us another grape that was new and just growing. They were not in the vineyard yet but just growing in a side bed. She was trying them out to see how they grew in this environment.

Then she took us into the aging room and talked about the oak barrels and the stainless steel barrels. They use oak for the reds but only use stainless for the whites. She said that the oak imparts too heavy a flavor to the whites. When we hit the tasting room, we noticed the light crispy flavor of the Chardonnay rather than the heavier oak flavor you usually find.

The tasting room was a bit of a different experience too. They charge for the tasting. There was a special rate because we were with the tour group. It was $10 for 8 wines and they provided a cheese and cracker plate and a bowl of dried fruit and nuts and you got to keep the glass. They had a cellar of about 15 wines. It was a fine cellar of small volume wines. They were made without the large amounts of sulphites and preservatives found in large volume wines distributed in grocery stores (required by the stores to increase the longevity of the wines during wide distribution and storage). Their wines ran from $26 to $46 a bottle. The highest price was for a Petite Syrah the total production for a year was 18 cases.

Cheryl and I each picked 8 wines. We both picked our favorites and split the others so we could try most everything. There were 3 whites (chardonnay, pinot Grigio and a moscat sweet dessert wine). There was a wide variety of reds starting with some lighter reds and working towards the Petite Syrah which was the darkest and strongest flavored wine. I am more of a red wine person but my favorite of the bunch was the Chardonnay. It had a light crisp fruity flavor (without the oaks) and was by far my favorite. My second favorite was the Petite Syrah (of course, it was the most expensive).

We bought a bottle of Chardonnay, packed up our glasses, said goodbye to all of our new friends and headed for the car. We got out to the road and headed towards Montezuma’s Castle. We stopped at a farmer’s stand, the first we had seen since Julian, California but left because we didn’t see anything we were interested in. Soon we passed another bigger one but said we would catch it on the way back.

As we turned into the road to the park, we passed a tent selling Indian Fry Bread. We also said we would catch it on the way back because we knew we haven’t been able to get by one yet. The museum at the castle was small and simple and we were soon off to the ruins. The park had a paved path in a loop. There were a lot of signs to explain the ruins and the lives of the Indians that had built them. A major difference here was that the rock that the dwellings were built in was the soft white layer near the top of the hill. There were a lot of caves that were incorporated into the cliff houses and the dwelling was 4 stories high.

The signs showed us how the Indians built the first dwelling and then began a long program of enlarging it. They built the upper layers first and then built down the side of the cliff. There were several smaller shelves that held storage rooms and their farming was done on a river bed below the buildings. Like the Mesa Verdeans, they started with pit houses and a basket economy. As time went on, they began to make pottery and started building stone dwellings later moving them up into the cliffs.

The main buildings were in good shape but the outbuildings were not. There were pieces of walls near the ground that were only a couple of layers of stone and there were caves with only a few stones left. There were signs all over warning of the dangerous inhabitants of the desert: rattle snakes, tarantulas, scorpions ET. Al. There were also a lot of signs warning about the squirrels. The claim was that the squirrels carried some kind of plague and that people should avoid them no matter how cute they are. I didn’t see anyone feeding them but there were a couple of crowds around squirrels with people taking their pictures.

We finished up with a few more pictures of moths and headed for the gate. There was a pot luck supper back at camp and we wanted to meet some of the people staying there. We thought it was at 6 but as we were making biscuits to take, we noticed people headed for the club house and discovered that the starting time was 5:30. We finished the biscuits and got there just as everyone was finishing up. That didn’t stop them from eating the biscuits though.

I tried to make some reservations over the computer but the signal was not strong enough and it kept cutting out without making the final reservation (I think). I will have to take the computer elsewhere to try again. It seemed like the time was moving slowly but all of a sudden, I am looking at reservations in late August and September with October in the back of my mind to make the final connections to get home. Wow! We are closing in on half way.

We didn’t get up very early and headed for the Sizzler again for lunch. This time we only got the salad bar as a meal and the salad bar was just too much. Of course, the salad bar included onion rings and chicken wings. One interesting thing was that the salad bar had several different things on it that weren’t there the last time we went. On the negative side, there were no onions on the salad bar! Can you imagine that? When the waitress brought our drinks, I commented that I had never seen a salad bar without onions. She asked if they were out and I told her that they were never there to start with (there were no empty containers). She said she would get me some but as things work out, it took so long, I was eating onion rings and chicken wings when she finally came and said there were onions on the salad bar. She commented that people that are hired to work there should at least be able to speak English. She said she could not make the woman understand that there were no onions on the salad bar. It took so long to make her understand that it was too late when they finally arrived.

One of the residents of the area we are in grew up on the same street as Cheryl and I. We called them and invited them over for dinner and tonight is the night. Cheryl made a veggie platter with an avocado ranch dip for munchies. The first course was a fresh bread and EVOO with pepper as a dipping oil. Then we had Arroyo con Pollo (a Puerto Rican chicken with rice). We had a really nice visit and did some serious catching up. It was late when they left so we cleaned up and went to bed.

One very interesting piece of information came to light during this visit. It seems that we have a very famous neighbor near our campground….John McCain. He lives just up the road down a long dirt road out in the back on 40 or 50 acres of desert. He claims his residence as Cottonwood (the large town about 8 miles down the road) but actually lives out here in Cornville. It must be that his mailing address is a post office box in Cottonwood. How ‘bout that?

We got up late again this morning, grabbed a quick bite for breakfast and headed out. We headed down 89A and first came to Tuzigoot; another puebloan village. This one is not a cliff dwelling but sits on top of a hill and consists of a “Condo”. There were 110 rooms in this dwelling. Most of them were connected but there were some separated dwelling groups. The dwelling was 3 stories high and one section of the high building is still there. It has a rooftop open area where the residents could work in the sunshine and also had a grassy area between 2 sections of the buildings. It is well preserved and has a recreation of a housing unit in the visitor’s center.

This area is famous for copper mining. There is a large copper mine just down the road from Tuzigoot. In the early years the mine was operating, the tailings were made into a slurry and piped into the valley. This has made an extremely flat valley floor. That is no longer done and the valley floor has been stabilized.

We drove up by the mine and headed up to Jerome. Jerome is a town that was originally a mining town. It is up on a very tall mountain at 7,000 feet and is built into the side of the mountain. When the mines closed it pretty much became a ghost town but it was eventually brought back by hippies (so we were told) because the properties could be had for peanuts. They used the community to build their craft and artistic business and made an artistic community. Once the popularity began to grow, other business came in and now there are several restaurants and bars and a lot of shops. Every step you take in Jerome is either up hill or down hill (steeply). The view from here is spectacular.

We had lunch in a place called the “Haunted Burger”. We had a table right by the window looking out over the whole valley. We watched a half dozen thunderstorms roll down the valley, lightning reaching out in all directions. While we were waiting, we met a family from California. Based on our accents, they asked us where we were from. When we answered Maine, they asked where our car was parked. They were playing the license plate game and didn’t have Maine. When we got to our table, we could see our car 2 streets down (hill). They were sitting near us so we called them over and pointed out our car. They were thrilled to get Maine. It was funny because of the lay of the real estate made our car the only car (or should I say ca’) visible from that window.

We visited a really neat yarn shop. Cheryl had a great time in there. She looked at everything in the store, spent considerable time talking to the proprietor, met a couple from Connecticut and talked to another customer from Phoenix who had come all the way up here to get help on some project she was working on.

We soon tired of the tourist trap scene and headed back to camp. On the way we decided to drive up to Sedona. Sedona was one of our reasons for coming here and we were into the last day and still hadn’t gotten there. We drove by our road (and John McCain’s road) and drove up to Sedona. As we got closer, the sky closed; the lightening flashed, the thunder boomed and soon the rain pelted down so hard traffic almost came to a standstill. The rain fell so hard that as the wipers (on high) passed over the windshield, it was completely obliterated as soon as the wiper went by.

There are 2 lanes in the road going into Sedona. The rain was falling so hard that you couldn’t see. At some point, I noticed that there was a line of cones between the two lanes. Then there was a sign that said the right lane must turn right and to emphasize the point, there was a policeman standing between the lanes forcing the right lane to go right. OK, I get the message so right goes I. I will just pull a u-turn and head back into Sedona. There turns out to be a solid lane of traffic going out of town and another solid line of traffic for 3 miles trying to get back into town.

This road runs out to I 17 which will connect up with the road back to our camp so we write off Sedona and head home. It is still raining pretty hard but we can see the red rocks through the rain so the trip to Sedona is not a total loss.

When we got off the interstate, we found a Starbucks and took a break for coffee. Then we went home and started getting ready for moving day. We watched the Olympics until late. We got up early and prepared to break camp. The slide worked again. I worry about it every time I put it out or try to put it back in. We……Whoa! We just had a huge thunderstorm with lightning, thunder, rain and hail. I turned everything off and took a break while the Americans beat the French in the 4 X 100 rely in a fun upset.

We spent some time visiting with our neighbors and then loaded up the car and headed out. We headed back up onto the Colorado Plateau and worked our way from 3,000 feet to more than 6,000 feet. We drove a little more than 7 hours and were a little ahead of our planned schedule until we realized that we changed time zones and lost an hour and then realized that our campground was 20 miles past Albuquerque. It didn’t matter as the office in the campground closed at 4. They left us a note telling us where to camp.

We didn’t totally set up as we will be leaving early in the morning to get some work done on the camper. The Camping World of Albuquerque is on the western side of the city and we are on the eastern side of the city about 25 miles away. Figures!

Well, I guess I will send this off and start fresh with the Albuquerque chapter.

See ya

It really is the Grand Canyon

We have been on the road since June 10th and have covered more than 5,000 miles and have been more than a dozen states and untold National Parks. It is August 2nd and for the first time, we sat around last night talking about some of the things we miss about home. I think the conversation was started because of a conversation with my mother. She said she had had her first corn from Dave Tuttle’s Riverside Farm. Tuttle’s Corn, whether from the Red Barn over in Dover of from Dave’s farm in North Berwick is the pinnacle of the fresh corn circuit and is something we have always looked forward to each and every summer. The other Tuttle forte is their strawberries but we had fresh ripened on the vine strawberries in California that were close to the Tuttle grade A but corn is another matter.

2 years ago, we went to Alaska and during corn season, we were in Alaska, several Canadian Provinces and the middle northern US states. They all had corn but nowhere is there such a fervor over corn as there is in New England. I know people who believe strongly in the old adage that you get the pot of water boiling before you even think about picking the corn, and others who won’t even look at corn from anywhere else in the world out of season because no matter how good it looks, it fails miserably to please the eater (who of course uses the Tuttle grading system (Tuttle is the top rung on the scale) to determine its quality).

We talked about the people at church and our friends. I enjoy mowing my lawn and being one with the little creatures that dwell in my yard. I rather enjoy the wealth of grocery stores that we have at our disposal and the vast variety of foods at our fingertips (I guess that says that we are running out of the foods that we brought with us and are relying more on the local economy which in the places we have been is very restricting). At home, I have 6 or 8 kinds of low carb bread to choose from….out here I am lucky to find any low carb bread at all (although western farms does have low carb bagels, something that I can’t find at home). Instead of 4 large grocery stores within a mile of each other and several specialty markets within 5 miles, I find a single store about the size of Janetos (without the great meat counter). We miss the long hot showers at home compared to the “wet your hair, turn off the water, rinse your hair and wet your body, turn off the water, wash yourself, rinse off, turn off the water” type of shower you need to take when you have a 4 gallon water heater. Oh, yeah, I miss my satellite TV. We are not out here to watch TV but it would be nice to have more than 4 channels and also it is nice to drive through 4 towns in 12 miles whereas out here it can be 100 miles between towns if you call a gas station and a convenience store a town. One more thing, I can breathe much better at sea level at home than I can at 5,000 to 10,000 feet where we have been for the last 6 weeks.

OK, I’m over it. Home is nice but it doesn’t have the alien landscape that we see out here and home will be there in November when we get back. It has to be more than 40 years since I have had a tan like the one I now sport (and that takes into account using sunscreen).

We spent another morning chasing the elusive package of Insulin. When the post office opened, we were there waiting. They still didn’t have the package. I gave them the information that I got from UPS and they told me that no one by that name worked at the post office. They suggested that perhaps UPS had dropped the package off at the Xanterra (they run all of the concessions in the park) warehouse and proceeded to dismiss me. I didn’t let that happen and they finally gave me an address (that I am sure I never would have found on my own). Finally, they softened a little and went out back and made a phone call finding that my package was indeed in the hands of Xanterra. After giving me some directions, Cheryl and I set out to find the Xanterra warehouse in a building marked 10 Albright across the street for the Albright Training Center.

We drove and drove and drove and finally saw the training center. Across the street was a fenced in compound with trucks and dumpsters and several buildings. We drove in and there on the front of the building was “10 Albright”. After going in the wrong door, we were directed to the UPS shipping and warehouse door (that wasn’t marked). We went into the warehouse and announced who we were. That brought a spark of recognition in the warehouseman’s eyes and he immediately headed out back returning with a package that was cold as it had been refrigerated since they had received it. Yea!!!

We had taken a cooler with some ice and several bottles of cold water into which we deposited the package. We then drove back to the market plaza, parked the car, gathered up our hiking stuff and headed for the shuttlebus stop. We had decided to give the shuttle system one more chance. Once again, the bus closed its doors when we were 20 feet away and drove off requiring us to wait 20 minutes for the next bus. Eventually, we boarded a shuttlebus and headed into the park.

We disembarked at the El Tovar Hotel, an old log style hotel built on the rim of the canyon. I am sure there was a better way to get to the hotel but the bus driver told us there were some stairs up on the banking (loose gravel) which you had to climb and which put you in the rear of the hotel. We walked around and checked out the building. It was a log structure inside with dark stain on the log surfaces making the lobby very dark and not at all cheery. Stephen King would relish this lobby.

Across the street, was Hopi House, a large gift shop specializing in Indian Crafts and other tourist worthy items. Returning to the rim trail, I found a place on the wall to sit in the shade and visit with a gentleman from Phoenix Arizona. He had worked in Alaska in the 50s on a radar installation and had lots of stories about getting to Alaska when the roads were all gravel.

We checked out the lodges along the rim and spent long periods of time staring into the canyon. We eventually worked our way down to the Outlook Studio (maybe once a studio but now just another gift shop). The studio had several levels of terraces that overlooked Bright Angel Trail. From there, you can follow much of the trail down to the plateau, one last flat respite before it plunges that last pitch down to the Colorado and Phantom Ranch.

We had seen a poster telling us that at 3:30, there would be a ranger presentation regarding the California Condors which live in the canyon and are an endangered species. While we were on the terraces, we saw a couple of the Condors circling in the air currents of the canyon. They are the biggest bird in the world with a 9 ½ foot wingspan. Not too many years ago, the total population of California Condors in the world had reached 22. Worried that they would soon be extinct, they were all captured. A Condor lays one egg every 2 years and raises the young for 2 years before throwing him/her out and starting over again. The scientists found a way to fool the birds into laying 3 eggs by removing the first two and raising them separately. The pair was allowed to raise the 3rd egg as they discovered that 3 was the limit and the condors gave up after the 3rd egg. This greatly increased the numbers of the new birds and soon they were depositing them back into the wild. The population after only 20 years has risen to 375 with 65 in Grand Canyon. They keep a close track on them and are now finding several birds that have been born and raised in the wild.

To see these birds in the air is magnificent. They don’t flap their wings but use their huge wingspan to glide on the thermals of the canyon. When they fly overhead, you can see the feathers on their wings move to adjust their flight. They make large turns by curving their wings differently but minor adjustments are made just by moving a couple of feathers.

After about an hour of watching the condors, ravens and turkey vultures, we still had a half hour before the lecture so we wandered down to the Bright Angel Trailhead to check it out. We are considering hiking down to the 1 ½ mile resthouse. That is a recommended hike for newbie’s at the canyon. It is strenuous as is pretty much anything at 7,000 feet and is fairly steep. It takes about 45 minutes to walk down and 2 to 3 hours to walk back up. The elevation change is 1,100 feet in a mile and a half. Most of our hikes have had less elevation change but if we get an early start, we should be in the shade much of the trip.

I have already given you much of the information we got from the ranger talk so we will return to camp. Another bus driving off when we are 100 feet (this time) away so we waited for 20 minutes for the next one. We returned to the market plaza, picked up our car and easily beat the bus back to Tusayan lounging in the relative comfort of our Toyota with no pushing and shoving and no one standing on our feet.

Today is moving day but it is a short move. We move from Tusayan into the park into Trailer Village, the parks RV park. That should be easy and almost effortless. Our shortest move, about 20 miles.

I wonder how many motorhomes that CruiseAmerica has. Every place we go, they outnumber privately owned coaches by a wide margin. They are colorful with their murals on every wall and you cannot mistake them for anything but a CruiseAmerica rental motorhome. Most of the ones we have seen have had Europeans driving them. It seems that Europe must be empty because everyone is over here. The fact that our economy is in the tank has made it a very good opportunity for the Europeans to come here for a visit.

Well, time to get breakfast and head into the park. We will have this afternoon and 2 full days before we move on. See ya.

This is the last afternoon of our time at the big ditch. We have had a great time. We have toured all around the South Rim of the canyon. After we moved into the park, we used the park shuttle system although we were not happy with it. Several times we had the door slammed in our faces forcing us to wait 20 minutes for the next one. Most times the bus we were denied was nearly empty (wonder why) and the bus that followed picking up all those denied (we were not the only ones) caused the bus to be bulging at the seams. A couple of times the bus driver opened the door just long enough to say the bus was full and we would have to wait as he headed for the exit. I think that the shuttle system could have been run a lot better and the drivers could have been a lot more polite (this is not to say that all drivers were jerks, just some (and we saw them over and over)).

We spent an afternoon checking out the rim where most of the lodges were. We went into each of the lodges on the rim (El Tovar Hotel, Bright Angel Lodge and the Thunderbird Lodge). There are a couple more but they are not perched on the rim. We checked out the two trails into the canyon. In the early days, there was a legal battle over the Bright Angel Trail and the park service built the Kaibab trail as a free alternative. Each of them is a difficult steep long trail hanging off the side of the canyon. The Kaibab trail has little shade and no water. Bright Angel has a couple of resthouses with water and some shade. The trail is about 9 miles long and meets up with the Kaibab trail near the bottom.

There is a suspension bridge over the Colorado that allows the hikers of both trails to gain access to Phantom Ranch, a lodge and set of cabins in the bottom of the canyon. The top sections of both trails are the steepest and the Bright Angel trail is the most popular. Lots of tourists set out on the trail to gain a taste of the inside of the canyon. We decided to try the Bright Angel Trail. We set no goals as I have been having a problem with the altitude. We packed a lunch and some water and made an early start down into the canyon.

There are several problems hiking in the canyon. The most significant is that it is a backwards mountain…you hike down before you hike up. When the hike is difficult, this can be a great problem because it is easy to go down and very difficult to go up. They tell you that for scheduling purposes, you should plan on 2 to 3 times as long to go up as down. Another problem is people who are not prepared to hike in the canyon. They do not realize that the temperature rises significantly as you descend. It is often 30 degrees or more hotter in the bottom. The altitude is another problem. The rim of the canyon is over 7,000 feet. This increases the difficulty of everything you do because there is significantly less oxygen at this altitude.

The first rest house is 1 ½ miles into the canyon and 1,100 feet of elevation change. The top of the trail was crowded with tourists of many nationalities. Many were hiking in the canyon in sandals and sneakers and some even with flip-flops. We saw people without water. The trail is spectacular. It is built right into the side of the canyon. The crowd thins as you descend and soon you have more room to walk. After several days of looking down, you start to look up to gauge how deep you have gone. There is a lot of sign of the mules that have descended before we got there. That has to be a thrill; however it is not for me. There is a 200 lb limit (including your stuff) and I do not fit that requirement. There are 2 trips you can take. The first is a one day trip that goes down to Indian Gardens, breaks for lunch and then climbs back to the rim. The second goes all the way to Phantom Ranch and stays overnight before returning the next morning via the Kaibab trial. After hiking part of the trial, I can honestly say that it looks scary. The trail is fairly wide for people but these mules are a lot bigger than I expected them to be. There are signs warning the hikers about the mules and telling them what to do when the mules approach. I hope these people pay more attention to those signs than they do to any of the others!

This is a big busy park. They claim between 4 and 5 million visitors a year and it seemed like they were all trying to get on the same busses that we were trying to get on. You hear more people speaking other languages than ours but that is partly due to the economy. Europe and South America has come to see America. Everywhere we have been has had a high proportion of foreign visitors. I think there were more rude people here than we have run into anywhere else and that includes the staff of the park. In 25,000 miles of motorhoming, this is the first time I have had anything stolen. We met a lot of people who did not seem concerned about the visitors. These were not a large portion of the people we dealt with. We certainly met a lot more nice people than rude ones but the rude ones were there and certainly stood out. In the short term, you notice the rude people but the long term memory of Grand Canyon will be of the nice people you met, the people who handled the crowds with grace and diplomacy and the people who smiled when they tried to help you.

Well, today is once again a travel day. This will be 5 nights just outside of Sedona and will be kind of a low key break after a couple of weeks of full time tourism. The car is already loaded (we never unhooked it) so all we have to do is pick up all the loose stuff and put it away and unhook our connections to the park and head out. Talk to ya all in a couple of days.

C&C