Monday, July 09: Grand Canyon
Rest and Reorg
This is a rest/reorg day. We want to reorganize our stuff and clean out the car. Halfway through the morning, our phone rang, and it was from housekeeping. I found that the purpose of the note was that the lock on our room door didn’t work (it didn’t lock), so they wanted to move us to the neighboring room.
One annoyance about the new room is that there seems to be a small leak in the toilet tank. It looks like the water level drops just enough to open the valve a crack, so it whines as it fills the tank. Eventually, the valve closes, the whine stops, and the process repeats. This could get annoying tonight.
Our tasks for today are to move everything from the car up to the room, reorganize things, pack for the camping trip, repack the car, and get an early night. We should be starting around 5 or 6am tomorrow morning to try to avoid the heat. We’ll hike down the first day (with a chance of showers), and spend the night. The second day we’ll hike the rest of the way down along/through the falls, and eventually return to spend a second night there. On the third day we’ll be helicoptered out.
We might also today check out the pool / hot tub, do laundry, and maybe buy groceries (as we’ll be leaving before breakfast begins tomorrow morning).
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It’s now just after dinner. We decided to skip lunch and have an early dinner instead. We snoozed a bit and then repacked. We walked about a block to the local grocery store for a few supplies. Then when we came out, there was a strong gusty wind for about a minute. For a while we were being literally sand-blasted. On the plus side, I got to see an actual tumble weed tumbling across Rt 66.
After dinner, we checked out their pool and hot tub. Mike kept bouncing between the two, but I felt like Goldilocks. The pool was too cool for my taste, and the hot tub was too hot. One neat thing we saw was a flight of 4-6 Barn Swallows who flew around, and then one at a time made a skimming pass over the pool. At the bottom of their arc, they would open their mouths, dip them into the water, and get a quick drink on the wing.
We still need to finish organizing stuff and load up the car. They are picking us up at 5:15 tomorrow morning, so we need to get almost everything packed up tonight. It will be even worse on the third day. The goal (both on the first and third day) is to get the hike over by noon because of the temperature. So on the third day we’ll be heading out at 4:30am. That aspect is really reminding me of Bolivia. On Tarija, we probably started around 5 or so, and on Huayna Potosi, we probably started around 1am.
However it shapes up, the next few days should be a real adventure.