Day 8 - Wednesday

Well, I was right about my suspicions – we have been in the middle of a Ponderosa Pine Forest since about Fredonia.

This morning, we drove up to the Grand Canyon National Park (North Rim), and made it to the visitor center around 9:30. The drive was great through the forest with an occasional meadow clearing.

After talking with the ranger about the park, we drove to one of several points. The sky was clear, temperature crisp (about 64F), and was just good all the way around.

The Canyon was rather amazing. What more can I say, photos just don't do justice to its shear size.

Obviously we've taken lots of photos this trip, about 600 in total so far. I think we've done pretty good about keeping ourselves in a lot of them, and not just scenery.

At the moment, I'm sitting outside of a laundromat here at the rim. We've been driving all day (it's almost 4pm). We needed some more clean close to make it home. Unfortunately, I don't have a cell signal, so I can't get on the Internet right now to upload this.

I'm sitting here watching dozens of bees flocking around the front of everyone's vehicles. When I first saw it, I though it might be a coolant leak that they're smelling, but they're at everyone's cars. It appears that they're eating on any of the dead bugs on the grills. So far they haven't been too interested in actually coming inside the vehicle.

Tonight, we'll be staying at a lodge about 20 miles down the road, just at the entrance to the park.

And some other random thoughts....

I noticed this before on a previous trip (I can't remember where), but it's amazing how many Europeans are at places like this. Just taking a guess, but it seems like roughly 25% of the visitors are from across the pond. I'm not sure what that says when we as American's aren't enjoying our own back yard.

The Garmin Nuvi 200 GPS has been wonderful this trip. Other than specific parks, I haven't looked at a map the entire trip. Initially, I noticed that my van's trip odometer and the GPS's trip odometer were dead on (within .1 miles). Later I saw them start to drift apart by a couple hundred miles. As we were leaving Las Vegas, I stopped for gas on the edge of town, and when the GPS turned back on, for about 20 seconds, it showed a map that appeared to be 20 miles away at the hotel. Ever since then, the trip odometer has been WAY off, and I noticed that my average moving speed jumped up to over 80mph. It appears that it temporarily got lost, and as it found itself, it believed that it was moving very fast for an instant.

Other than that oddity, we've had basically 0 issues with the mapping or routing. I also noticed another useful feature last night in the dark on the windy road. By having a moving map right in front of you, it's very easy to anticipate sharp turns. That came in very handy – now if we could just get obstacles like cows to show up on there...

Miles traveled: 1900

Hours in the vehicle: 39