We made it twenty days on the groceries we came in to the North Rim with. We still have quite a bit of frozen meat and vegetables but we have run out of all fresh food like the 25 pounds of apples and 40 pounds of oranges that are a steady part of our diet. And then there were odds and ends like sweetener and light mayo. This little list may sound kind of short to make it worth six hours of driving and almost a 100 bucks of fuel but when we were all said and done, we tallied up around $700 on our little shopping trip. Yikes!
But boy, what a drive. One hundred fifty miles to the west and nearly a five thousand foot drop in elevation. We oohed and aahed our way down off the plateau and across the southern entrance of Zion National Park. Even from twenty miles away it looked amazing. St. George was only a little further. As we left the North Rim around sunrise the temperature was a chilly 51 degrees. Pulling into St. George, Utah at mid-morning it was 90 degrees and before the day was done it hit 107 degrees. Sorry Ashley, I had to talk about miserable hot day again.
We made the most of being in a community large enough, about 75,000 people, to have a little bit of everything. A sit-down restaurant for lunch, The Home Depot, Camping World, the biggest Ace Hardware I have ever seen, the mall, the Verizon store, a Walmart Supercenter and Costco. Whew! No wonder my wallet was moaning in agony.
The drive home started a little later than we planned. It was 9:00 pm and completely dark. That scenic ride on a narrow two-lane, shoulder less road was not going to be the same leisurely drive out as it was in. But it turned out to be not so bad and we made good time, arriving home about 10:30pm. Now, for those of you doing the math on the time, remember that we changed time zones going back and forth between AZ and UT. While the road itself was not a difficult drive in the dark, there was a huge jump in the number of animals on the road between Jacob Lake and the North Rim. In that short, 45 mile stretch we dodged 11 mule deer, a really large owl and a herd of buffalo strung out on the road for several hundred yards. Since the rule of thumb is that for every one deer you see, there are ten that you didn't, we figure there were a lot of deer lurking just outside the throw of our headlights.
To further illustrate the hazards of night driving on the stretch from the park entrance to the campground, we hear on the radio volunteers that do traffic control and search and rescue get called out at night for deer/car collisions. Last night they were called out for a buffalo/car collision. The driver managed to almost get stopped. The front end damage did not get into their radiator so they were able to drive away. And after more than an hour of walking through a buffalo herd at midnight (with shotgun loaded with slugs) looking for an injured one, they decided that the buffalo must have made out better than the car and everybody went home.
As we pulled into our campsite our co-host, Don was just finishing a walk-around and he came over to help carry the groceries in. We take a load from the truck and set it inside the door where Cyndee then takes it and starts putting it away. I filled his arms full with one load and then another. As he and I had finished our third trip and were beginning the fourth, he leaned in the door and told Cyndee that she was going to need a bigger camper. After I finished my last load and stepped inside to find the counter tops and most of the floor covered with piles food I was beginning to wonder about what we had done.
It took us another day and a half but we finally found a nook and cranny for everything. I'm pretty sure it is going to be like when I was a kid and we would find Easter eggs that we had hidden a little too well some months later.
It is time for me to do the 10:00 pm "quiet check" walk around. We'll just be running the traps for the next few days.
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