Oh-my-gosh! It just keeps getting better and better! The further south we go the more things change! The scenery is sooo incredible. We left Kanab and headed south towards the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. There is a turn at Jacob Lake in case the road is closed. I think that there are so few visitors that the park isn’t worth opening before May. It was closed. The traffic is very light however, which suits me just fine. At Jacob Lake there were a lot of pines and it was quite beautiful. There was fuel for less than we pay at home way out that far (30 miles from anywhere). Just to play it safe, we fueled up and headed south on alternate 87. We came down from almost 8,000 feet to around 6,000 near the bottom of the grade which opened up onto the most amazing plateau we’ve ever seen. It is so much more when you are really there! We crossed the upper end of the Grand Canyon where it begins at Marble Canyon. The Colorado River is very calm at this point. It is where the float trips begin because there is almost nowhere else to get the boats into the river. While we were standing on the bridge a young lady was waving an antenna slowly around and I, of course, wondered what she was looking for. “Condors”, says she! “In fact there are two coming right now. There are three in the area today, but I am only seeing these two”. Sho-nuff, there they came, bigger’n you know what! They were huge! 7’ wing span and circling like they were looking to lite. They landed down the canyon about 1/8 of a mile together and it was hard to see them against the rocks. The camera didn’t get a good shot of them, but whoa! It was cool! The far side of the canyon which is only a couple hundred feet across is the Navajo Indian reservation. Man is it desolate! We wondered if the people were content or suffering. I don’t know. They have little booths set up along the road to sell blankets and beaded stuff, but we wonder…the busy season will be there soon. We noticed that the closer we got to Flagstaff, the warmer the temperature was getting! Yahoo! Thea has been cold most of the trip so far. We rolled into Flagstaff around 3 PM looking for food. We came into town from the east on Route 66! Strangely, it felt really cool to be re-tracing the Mother Road. We were going to spend some time there looking at property with an eye for a place to get away from the dreary Northwest, when it’s dreary up there. I looked it up on Wikipediea and found that there is a large meth population and there is an unusually high property crime rate resulting from that. We looked at a real estate pamphlet and were shocked at the prices they are asking. We decided to keep-a-going and let them keep their stupid properties. Right out of Flagstaff, the land becomes flat, flat, flat! It seems like you can see the curvature of the earth in the distance! The black asphalt ribbon stretches out in front of you and tapers to the horizon maybe 10 miles away. That’s what it seemed like anyway. Here and there out on the landscape you see little mesas in the distant haze, but that’s all. It’s really very cool! We saw a sign for “The Meteor Crater” and were intrigued. If you tune to 1610 on the FM dial they give you some info about it. We wanted to see it, so we exited and headed out into seemingly no-where. Then in the distance you can see a raised area about a quarter mile across and as you approach you see the visitor’s center. It is privately owned by the family of the discoverer and they have developed it into quite a museum with a theater and paved paths to get a good look into the huge hole. Long ago, a meteor about 150 feet across hit the ground at around 26,000 miles an hour and disintegrated except for a couple pieces that they found about the size of a football and one about the size of a large water melon. They are very dense and therefore very heavy. It was cool to see. Arizona doesn’t observe day light savings time, so it wasn’t as last as we thought, we needed to find a room so we skedaddled down the road. The speed is posted at 75, but you get run over under 85, so we made good time. We went more like 90-95. Even so, my car averaged almost 29 miles per gallon. The roads are so straight and smooth, it was comfortable and traffic was fairly light. We found a nice room in Holbrook which is about 50 miles from the New Mexico border. Tomorrow, we plan to visit the Petrified Forest National Park. It’s only a couple miles from where we are right now. There must be a lot of the stuff because many of the buildings are actually made from big chunks mortared together like huge bricks. You can see the wood grain and the life rings; it’s pretty unique. Not sure how far we’ll make it tomorrow, but we’ll stay in touch.
Oh-my-gosh! It just keeps getting better and better! The further south we go the more things change! The scenery is sooo incredible. We left Kanab and headed south towards the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. There is a turn at Jacob Lake in case the road is closed. I think that there are so few visitors that the park isn’t worth opening before May. It was closed. The traffic is very light however, which suits me just fine. At Jacob Lake there were a lot of pines and it was quite beautiful. There was fuel for less than we pay at home way out that far (30 miles from anywhere). Just to play it safe, we fueled up and headed south on alternate 87. We came down from almost 8,000 feet to around 6,000 near the bottom of the grade which opened up onto the most amazing plateau we’ve ever seen. It is so much more when you are really there! We crossed the upper end of the Grand Canyon where it begins at Marble Canyon. The Colorado River is very calm at this point. It is where the float trips begin because there is almost nowhere else to get the boats into the river. While we were standing on the bridge a young lady was waving an antenna slowly around and I, of course, wondered what she was looking for. “Condors”, says she! “In fact there are two coming right now. There are three in the area today, but I am only seeing these two”. Sho-nuff, there they came, bigger’n you know what! They were huge! 7’ wing span and circling like they were looking to lite. They landed down the canyon about 1/8 of a mile together and it was hard to see them against the rocks. The camera didn’t get a good shot of them, but whoa! It was cool! The far side of the canyon which is only a couple hundred feet across is the Navajo Indian reservation. Man is it desolate! We wondered if the people were content or suffering. I don’t know. They have little booths set up along the road to sell blankets and beaded stuff, but we wonder…the busy season will be there soon. We noticed that the closer we got to Flagstaff, the warmer the temperature was getting! Yahoo! Thea has been cold most of the trip so far. We rolled into Flagstaff around 3 PM looking for food. We came into town from the east on Route 66! Strangely, it felt really cool to be re-tracing the Mother Road. We were going to spend some time there looking at property with an eye for a place to get away from the dreary Northwest, when it’s dreary up there. I looked it up on Wikipediea and found that there is a large meth population and there is an unusually high property crime rate resulting from that. We looked at a real estate pamphlet and were shocked at the prices they are asking. We decided to keep-a-going and let them keep their stupid properties. Right out of Flagstaff, the land becomes flat, flat, flat! It seems like you can see the curvature of the earth in the distance! The black asphalt ribbon stretches out in front of you and tapers to the horizon maybe 10 miles away. That’s what it seemed like anyway. Here and there out on the landscape you see little mesas in the distant haze, but that’s all. It’s really very cool! We saw a sign for “The Meteor Crater” and were intrigued. If you tune to 1610 on the FM dial they give you some info about it. We wanted to see it, so we exited and headed out into seemingly no-where. Then in the distance you can see a raised area about a quarter mile across and as you approach you see the visitor’s center. It is privately owned by the family of the discoverer and they have developed it into quite a museum with a theater and paved paths to get a good look into the huge hole. Long ago, a meteor about 150 feet across hit the ground at around 26,000 miles an hour and disintegrated except for a couple pieces that they found about the size of a football and one about the size of a large water melon. They are very dense and therefore very heavy. It was cool to see. Arizona doesn’t observe day light savings time, so it wasn’t as last as we thought, we needed to find a room so we skedaddled down the road. The speed is posted at 75, but you get run over under 85, so we made good time. We went more like 90-95. Even so, my car averaged almost 29 miles per gallon. The roads are so straight and smooth, it was comfortable and traffic was fairly light. We found a nice room in Holbrook which is about 50 miles from the New Mexico border. Tomorrow, we plan to visit the Petrified Forest National Park. It’s only a couple miles from where we are right now. There must be a lot of the stuff because many of the buildings are actually made from big chunks mortared together like huge bricks. You can see the wood grain and the life rings; it’s pretty unique. Not sure how far we’ll make it tomorrow, but we’ll stay in touch.
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