The weather after Mojave was much nicer and I was less concerned about finding a cool place to stop. Good thing because there isn't a lot to see between the preserve and Williams, the cutoff to the Grand Canyon. There is no overnight parking in the National Park so the plan was to leave early, spend the day and find a place to park in the forest on the way out. That was the plan anyway.
The leaving early part worked fine and was a good idea for finding a place to park. Even this late in the season the park is packed and campers were two deep in the long spaces by the time I got back to the rig. Maybe the incredible weather played a part but based on the number of rental RVs I suspect that the canyon is always packed.
Here's the deal with the Grand Canyon: Go. Just go.
I could post a zillion pictures and it would never capture the majesty of the canyon. I seem to have taken about a zillion pictures so I will post a few.
The North Rim closes for the winter (The North Rim is higher in elevation) but the South is open all year barring road closures for bad weather. The Rim Trail connects view points, information centers and the village and there are free shuttle buses that stop multiple places if you don't want to walk the whole way.
I walked to the village and saw a sign for a ranger talk starting shortly about the California Condor. Ranger talks are pretty interesting so I grabbed a rock and stuck around for the talk. This is where the plan fell apart. It seems that the best time to see these (four foot tall!!!) birds is at sunset when they return to the rocks to roost for the night so instead of leaving early I decided to drive along the rim and pick a handy spot to wait for sunset.
It was gorgeous even as the sun went down and it started to get cold but alas, I saw no condors.
Now I'm stuck driving back in the dark down a different road that leads to Flagstaff instead of Williams. No problem - I'll still be in the National Forest and can find a place to stop. Yeah, no. Way, way dark, roads are unclear and there is a forest fire burning somewhere.
OK, no biggie, I'll just head to Flagstaff. Google Terrain tells me that there is minimal elevation change along this road so I shouldn't need to worry about stressing the transmission.
Google Terrain sucks.
There are two huge and I mean Huge hills to climb before you get to Flagstaff and they look even worse when your vehicle has started running rough and you have no idea why.
I'll skip all the whining and just say it took me almost an hour to find the Sam's club and the hunt was made worse by the raging headache I had and Rigadoon stalling every single time I stopped. Bo was so concerned that we'd never stop that he kept coming up to the front to remind me that he had to pee and would need Friskies very soon.
I was never so happy to turn off the truck and go to bed.
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