Grand Canyon National Park

I think our stay in Grand Canyon was the first time on this trip that we took full advantage of our campsite. The temperatures were perfect for hanging around and cooking outside. The site itself was beautiful and an elk or two often meandered by. A bike path situated immediately behind our campsite gave us access to all of the areas of the park. We “leaned in” to the camping experience here, for sure.

I loved the canyon itself. I had never seen it before and really found it to be an astonishing natural wonder. The kids humored me, but at one point as I encouraged them to take another look, Ben sarcastically replied, “Oh sure, another viewpoint of the same exact thing.”

We did a few notable things during our stay here.

We caught the sunset at Mather Point.

We rode our bikes to the South Kaibab trailhead and then hiked into the canyon, going about a mile down to the aptly named “Ooh Aah Point.” Then, of course, we walked a mile back up to the rim.

Eli and I took a bike ride along Hermit’s Rest Road, a seven mile section of the canyon accessible only by shuttle buses or bikes.

We had planned to do this with the kids, but decided, at the last minute, to leave them at the campsite for a while. It worked out better this way. The ride would have been too demanding for them. We wouldn’t have made it the full distance and I’m sure we would have bailed on the whole plan and ended up on a shuttle bus back to the village. I thought some of the rides offered the very best views of the canyon, which I got to enjoy without impatient children making sarcastic comments along the way.

Also, I am very pleased to share, that with absolutely no cell service and 3+ weeks of traveling together, Ben and Norah became buddies again. They have been paling around together again in a way that we haven’t seen since we were in Amsterdam.

 They spent a whole afternoon playing together. They have developed their own secret handshake. Ben told me they had no choice but to form an alliance against their crazy parents. We don’t mind one bit. It has been really, really nice, and we’re hopeful it continues.

We also got to test a bunch of more intermediate/advanced RV maintenance skills this week. We managed to run out our battery while camping (which was not anticipated – and which a tech is going to diagnose while in Vegas). Plan B (part 1) if we lost power was to plug the trailer into the car and use the car’s battery to pull in the slide and bring up the hitch. That didn’t work. Plan B (part 2) – or Plan C – was to manually crank both up. We were prepared for this and Eli was able to do both.

Then, of course, we realized that we didn’t bring the awning in either when we still had power. No worries…according to the owner’s manual, all we had to do was take off the cover, attach jumper cables to the awning motor, and use the car to retract it. The only problem with that was (1) we had no jumper cables – we borrowed them from a neighbor. We will be buying a set tomorrow. (2) We had to drive the car through another campsite to get close enough that we could connect the battery to the motor. (3) We had never opened the hood of the car before and it outsmarted us until we could look up how to do it in the manual. But, like magic, once we put all this together, the awning rolled in and we were able to get on our way.

Now, it’s on to Las Vegas, our ‘vacation from our vacation,’ as Norah termed it, where we will roll in like the Beverly Hillbillies for a two night respite from camping out.