CuRVWander

After anticipating this moment since February, we are here.   The campground here on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is nestled amongst a mix of Pinon Pines and Aspen.   It is truly beautiful.   The altitude is high, 8,800 feet and the temperatures low, in the mid-70’s today with overnight lows expected to be in the 40’s. Ashley, if you are still keeping up with us you will not have to read about hot temperatures or sticky humidity again until next summer.   However, it is going to be more difficult to read anything about us for the next three months.   This place is remote, and old.   The National Park Service has not brought civilization to this neck of the woods.   Phone service is going to be a pay phone down by the camp store, so no Verizon Jetpack connection to the internet.   Our power is a 30 amp connection instead of the 50 amp we normally get; we’ll have to run only one major appliance at a time.   It is a good thing that we’...

The last couple of days have been kind of quiet.  I had to chase down some hard to find screws to put braces back in place on the truck bed side step.  This past year has seen a lot of screws and bolts worked loose by the always present vibration that a diesel generates.  Big Gulp is seven years old now and has nearly 100,000 miles on the odometer.  He is beginning to feel the time and miles. But so far it is just small things.  Staying on top of them and fixing them before they turn into bigger things will assure a much better chance of many more years and miles of reliable transportation. One of the last couple of days neither one of us even got out of our pajamas until almost four in the afternoon.  We would not have even done it then were it not for me getting a wild hair and telling Cyndee to get herself together so I could take her out to dinner. We went into Winslow and stopped in at an historic landmark, the La Posada Inn.  It was one of ...

A full day of sightseeing today.  From a little after sunup to just before sundown we were winding our way through 56 miles of national park.  The Petrified Forest and Painted Desert share a common, long, winding road that get you up to or on top of some amazing geological wonders.  But while we were filling the cooler with ice and snacks and a picnic lunch we had a visitor. I never knew hummingbirds were everywhere.  Or at least they seem to be as they show up at the feeder everywhere we have been for the last four thousand miles. I took over a 150 pictures today, narrowing it down to just a few for this post was tough but there were a few that stood out.  We took I-40 back to the east from our campground in Homolovi Ruins for about 15 miles until we got to Holbrook, AZ.  The route once again got us on a preserved section of Route 66 and as soon as we hit town it looked as though we had stepped back in time 60 or 70 years.  I had seen pictures ...

I'm sorry to have to report that we have had little mayhem in the campground.  A couple of large dogs, one a cow-dog and the other a retriever wandered into the campground.  At first they appeared to be just knocking around and enjoying the evening like us.  But things changed quickly. We have more critters here in the campground than just the lizards I have been posting.  In fact, Cyndee's geranium that has made the transcontinental trip with us has been showing signs of being grazed on, probably by this guy: But it was not long before the grazer became prey.  I was standing in our campsite fiddling with the awning when all of a sudden a streak of black and grey passed right under me.  I looked up to see the cow-dog in hot pursuit of a cotton tail rabbit with the black retriever close behind, just along for the run.  Everybody disappeared behind the bath house and I expected that the rabbit had made it to a safe hole under the building or ...

I am going to preface this post with the suggestion that if you have access to a large monitor this post will be a lot more enjoyable to read.  My 22.5" monitor makes the photos far more entertaining than my 15" laptop.  You can double-click on any picture and view it full screen. It is a warm morning here in the Arizona desert.  We are off to a location about 15 miles west of Winslow, it is the first confirmed and best preserved impact crater on earth.  Meteor Crater lies just a few miles south of I-40 after you get west of Winslow in the desert valley.  The San Francisco Mountains are another 43 miles to the west with Flagstaff spread out on their foothills. As we pull into the parking lot of the Meteor Crater visitor center we can see that they have a major expansion project underway.  It would seem that the attraction is doing well and they are executing on a ten year improvement/expansion program.  Even at this early stage of construction we c...

Winslow is a genuine old west town with a lot of history.  But most people know the name of the town because of the Eagles song Take it Easy .  The song paints a pretty vivid picture as Glenn Fry sings about a girl in a flat-bed Ford slowing down to take a look at him.  The city has capitalized on this little diddy and put together a pretty impressive tourist attraction. Look closely at the wall, that's a reflection in the store window of a girl in a flat-bed Ford slowing down to take a look at me Cyndee and I shamelessly did the tourist thing and snapped photos of each other standing on the corner in Winslow, AZ. Part of today was also dedicated to getting prepped for the move to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Since trips to buy food are going to be widely spaced because of the 170 mile round trip to the nearest grocery store we are trying to stock up on the things we can.  When inventorying what was in the freezer we discovered that we w...