Hookups and Beer!

Saturday, June 23

Well, yesterday we set off for the Grand Canyon. We provisioned up at the country store just outside the entrance to the park. Advice to self for the future – never go into a country store hungry, because all the weird stuff starts looking really good. We bought a whole bunch of stuff, readying ourselves for a Mad Max-like siege without hookups, if we were lucky enough to get one of the coveted cancellations at the north rim campground.

Turns out that the north rim campground is something of a misnomer – while there are probably campsites on the north rim, an honest realtor would definitely call that place “north rim adjacent.” For the most part, the campsites are gathered in a big circle in the trees. Not bad, but not rim either.

We’d take one if we could get one, though, and ever the optimists, we turned up at the campsite hoping for a cancellation, and struck up a conversation with a volunteer ranger, who gave us the golden tip of the day. Just outside the park there is Forest Service land with primitive campsites (no firepits, no picnic table, but cleared and some are even flat) that sit along the canyon’s edge.

She told us to just head out there by mid afternoon and claim a spot – no national reservation line, no nothin’ – and best of all, it’s free! She even gave us a map of forest roads and even pulled out a yellow highlighter showing us the best spots.

Really? Campsites on the rim? No reservations? Free?

How’s that for service? Perhaps we just seemed nice in comparison to the true nutburger who was hounding the ranger working the reservation booth. “Eighteen bucks to camp here? What a rip-off!” she complained to the unfailingly patient ranger. “Do you have any cancellations? Do you? Huh? Do you? I’ll wait.” And she waited. That was when the volunteer sauntered over to help us out.

Then we spent the morning wandering around the Lodge, which is this spectacular log building with glorious views of the canyon, and hiked the short distance to Bright Angel Point, which was astonishingly beautiful.

I now know what all the fuss is about. The Grand Canyon is just crazy – there are these sheer cliffs caused by erosion, and deep fissures created by faults. There’s geology everywhere. And the colors – the cliché orange, of course, but lots of white stone and green cliffs, and a bajillion trees. This place is all it’s cracked up to be.

After a surprisingly good and cheap lunch at the lodge restaurant, which could charge a hefty cover just for the view, our little intrepid group decided to seek out our spot on the rim.

So we exited the park, and after a few loop-de-loops, located the forest road – a rutted dirt track that went on for miles. Finally, things started looking good. We started to see some canyon through the trees, and then there were a few promising places to camp, but the best one was taken, so we pressed on.

Finally, we saw the perfect spot – in a little clearing, surrounded by trees, near the rim. I backed the RV in delicately, and there we were. Sadly, we are an unsatisfied people, we Paver/Browns, and the view was sort of obscured by trees, and the ranger had told us that we should keep going, even if we thought we found the perfect spot – so, unable to leave well enough alone, I jogged ahead to see if we could improve our hand.

I ran down this little side road that would just fit our rig to see if there was something better, and I came upon what I thought was even better – a huge space with a much clearer line of sight to the canyon. So I loaded everyone back in the RV for our better parking spot.

Except Janine really didn’t think it was better. She was nice about it, though, and then we set about to put the RV in the perfect spot in this spot. I swear the Marx Brothers would have been more efficient. We put it on one place, but then maybe it would be better back in the trees more, so we moved it again. Then we thought we had left the rest of the site too inviting to others, so we moved it AGAIN. On the third or fourth move, we declared ourselves satisfied, but not before Maggie, who had preferred one of the earlier orientations, marched off in the woods, pissed as hell.

I tell ya, we are a spirited bunch, and I’m an idiot for ruining the moment of discovering our first little bit of heaven, perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

It is nice, here, though. Almost comically nice.

It’s dead quiet up here, except for the wind. Unlike the RV park, which was just fine, but full of people, there’s not a soul in sight here. A few people hiked through last night, but for the most part, we have this mountain, and this canyon all to ourselves, or so it seems.

Today we’ll back into the park for another look from another vantage point, and then we’ll head up to Zion in southern Utah.

Unless we don’t.

Thursday, June 21

So today we woke up, looked at each other, shuffled around for a few minutes, very briefly considered getting ourselves moving, and then, almost simultaneously, issued a collective “nah,” and decided not to move a muscle all day. Hell, we had hookups! And beer!

In the RV world, hookups and beer are it, and we had ‘em, and that was that. Being a guest is hard work, even if you’re totally self contained, and after several days of being someone’s guest, there was something just dandy about sitting around and doing nothing. It’s funny, I work with a number of people (and you know who you are) who spend nearly every waking second either working or thinking about work. RV people are to us like Spam is to Thomas Keller, or bloomers are to Paris Hilton.

Take our next door neighbors here at the campground – Jack and Carol from Alabama. He’s a former professional bass fisherman and a scratch golfer. (Or so he says – maybe he sells insurance and can’t break a hundred, but I doubt it.) The man used to fish for a living! You wander around these campsites and you run into people whose goal in life is to drive in a big truck and then stop and then sit around. True, I did encounter a man who was cataloging his wine collection, but I suspect he needed a few days off to relax after that.

For the most part, these are recreation junkies. Perhaps that’s the attraction for me – while I will never be of that world, it’s nevertheless mysterious and seductive, like maybe running off with the carnival. In any event, this sitting around can’t last – tomorrow, we are determined to pull up stakes, bid our hookup a fond farewell, and make for the Grand Canyon for sure.