Goin' Home

It's our last morning as RVers. We're all experiencing a wistfulness that comes from getting attached to a strange friend and then saying goodbye.

We won't miss her quirks - the shades that have to be propped up with a piece of firewood, the fact that you can set your watch to the minute by when the "black water" tank needs to be dumped.

Oh, and the tale of the gas station tape is more or less in - with one short leg of the journey to go, we've traveled 2,074 miles, spent $682 on gas, and used 210 gallons of gas, for a hideous 9.87 miles to the gallon. That sound you hear is Al Gore hunched over in the corner somewhere, puking his guts out. Our Prius uses that amount of gas in a YEAR. Oy.

The all time nasty boy I saw on this trip, though, had to be the guy driving the 45 foot converted bus, and he was towing - and here's the photo to prove it - a HUMMER! My guess is he just drains his oil into the ground and as a hobby throws six pack rings into the ocean.


An Inconvenient Ride

For our last night, we stopped at the 49er RV Village in Columbia, California. On the way out of Tonopah, we spotted the least appealing RV park yet:





Er, nope.

After escaping Tonopah as early as humanly possible yesterday morning, we came over the Sierras past the east side of Yosemite. (Favorite highway sign: "This road sponsored by one of them June Lake liberals") The drive over the summit is crazy beautiful, but also a little crazy. You quickly climb to about 9500 feet and just a quickly descend. According to a road sign, the steepest grade is 26%, and by flooring the RV, I could get it up to about 15 miles per hour.

On the other hand, the scenery rivaled some of the best Arizona and Utah had to offer, and it was pretty much deserted. There are tons of campgrounds, and most of the land is forest service or state park anyway, so you can pretty much camp wherever you want. This would have made a great place to make an impromptu stop, but we had reservations in gold country.

Coming down the mountain was a white-knuckler - trying to find a decent low gear and pumping the breaks was the best I could do, but I had a feeling that at any time the thing could get away from me. I was happy to finally make it to flat-ish ground.

We finally made it to civilization, sort of, when a man on a horse trotted down the middle of the road. He motioned like he wanted to say something, so I rolled down the window. "There's cow's comin,'" he said, and trotted off.

He wasn't kidding.

At about three, we pulled into the 49er RV Ranch, which turned out not to be nearly at kitchy as you'd think. We had a nice shady spot to park the RV, and we were a ten minute walk from the Columbia State Historic Park, this old west gold rush town that has been remarkably well preserved.

We love this kind of stuff. There are a bunch of old shops, a few saloons, two surviving old hotels, and lots of exhibits on how gold was discovered, mined, and the settlement that supported the operation.

One saloon, the St. George, starts filling with locals at around five, and if you put them in old timey clothes, you might think you were time traveling. First person with a full set of teeth gets a free drink.

While we're on the subject, we paid a visit to the dentist's office exhibit, which displayed a set of turnkeys, a diabolical device used to pull teeth.


Never forget to floss

It was a great way to end the trip - like a Cartalk puzzler, it was historic and folkloric, and it reminded us (here's where the patriotic music swells in the background) how interesting and beautiful this country is.

Hop in a car, or a large hunk of steel with sloshing raw sewage, and tootle around for a while, and you'll see that there is almost no limit to the epic vistas, the historic side streets and the weirdly apocalyptic strangeness out there.

I may not want to head out in an RV for months at a time, like many of the people I met, but we'll definitely do this again.

Considering the close quarters, and the constant contact, we got along remarkably well. We're also good travelers, by and large - we like the same kind of stuff, we enjoy each other's company, and we have a taste for the unexpected, the weird, and the unknown, which served us very, very well.

Hope you've enjoyed this little travelogue.

Cheers,
Eric

June 25 - Terrible, Terrible, Tonopah

We're winding down. I compose these words from a glorified parking lot behind a casino in Tonopah, Nevada, the worst place on earth (although we do have hookups and beer, and I'm freeriding someone's wireless internet connection, so there's that). Okay, maybe it's not the worst place on earth, but we're a long way from our little bit of east rim heaven of just a few days ago.


After lingering as long as we possibly could this morning at our little riverside spot, we eventually swallowed hard for the long trip across Nevada today. I actually really like driving across Nevada, because it's wide open, there's almost no traffic, and it sort of frees the mind. It seemed like we were the only ones choosing to traverse Nevada today, at least on the Extraterrestrial Highway (you could look it up - Nevada 375, which cuts across the famed Area 51, is know as the Extraterrestrial Highway). There were a few hokey alien-related shops in the extremely downtrodden town of Rachel, NV, but no actual aliens, as far as I could tell.





By the time we made it to the first real town in six hours, Terrible, Terrible, Tonopah. We were pooped, so we decided to cut our losses and moor at the Tonopah Station Hotel, Casino, RV Park and Laundromat. Instead of cooking, we splurged on what appears to be the only restaurant in town, conveniently located steps from the casino floor. Janine ordered the cardiologist's special, chicken fried steak. "What's chicken fried steak, dad?," Maggie asked. "Deep fried hamburger with gravy," I told her. She was aghast. But it was good.


Tomorrow, our last stop is Columbia, California - in the heart of gold country.

June 24 - Trusting your child's life to a cowboy with braces

After a few failed attempts at finding an RV site close to Bryce, we opted for a KOA Kampground (one can only wonder whether it’s Klan-owned), which was a serviceable option. On the one hand, we were able to plug in, and recharge computers and cell phones, and hook up water, and we were even able to get cell phone service! On the other hand, they have a little work to do on their sewer system, and let’s just leave it at that.

So it was off to Bryce Canyon National Park, which is not really a canyon, but a series of tall stone outcroppings (I suppose they should call it Bryce Kanyon or some such, but maybe the KOA people would sue for appropriating their disquieting use of the K).

In any event, these stone outcroppings (known, and I’m not making this up, as “hoodoos”) are Krazy Kool. They’re white limestone cliffs which have eroded so much that all that are left are what look like totem poles of rock. Millions of years ago, the whole place was ocean, and the iron deposits left behind have oxidized, so the whole place is literally rusted, thus the cliché orange color.


Hoodoos

It looks to me like an ancient civilization, and all that’s left of it is a sprawling network of eroding foundations. And some Krazy nut painted the whole think orange.

After minimal debate, we decided to take a trail ride into the Kanyon. For those who think we should be written up by PETA, I assure you that these animals were in really good shape, so don’t worry.

Our guide was a cowpoke-in-training named Stetson (I swear he introduced himself as “Stetson.” I had half a mind to say, “well, in that case I’m Tam O’Shanter.”) “Stetson” was all of fifteen or sixteen, with a face full of braces, but otherwise he played the part of the grizzled ranch hand, waxing laconic about his mule and the vistas, and cracking the occasional corny joke. I have a sneaking suspicion that, like the guides at Universal Studios, there’s a thick manual that they have to memorize, because some of our juvenile guide’s bon mots seemed a wee bit canned.

Janine, Maggie, and "Stetson" (damn, I wish I had a closeup)

No matter – young “Stetson” showed promise. He was reassuringly confident and genial, and he led us down to the bottom of the canyon, working our way around narrow rims with deep drop offs. Janine initially nearly gave birth to kittens on the horse in front of me, before she eased into the experience, but Maggie loved every minute.


This was actually an astonishingly good way to experience this amazing place. The horses do most of the work, there’s a charming apprentice cowboy providing play by play (“that there’s manzanilla – mean’s ‘little apple’ in Spanish because it makes little berries that look like apples but taste like wood”), and you don’t have to stop in order to take a picture. Very efficient.

When it was all over, we limped back to the RV for the two hour drive to our next destination - Zion National Park. Now, on this score, a little research would have gone a long way. First, our RV park was on the west side of the park, and we were coming in from the east. As it turns out, the only way to get from the east side to the west side is to pay your entrance fee and pass through. Since we'd be coming back the next day, this wouldn't be a problem, but you have to take a shuttle around the park, except to pass through (if this is getting boring, feel free to skip to the part about the hippie freak grocery store in the middle of Mormon Utah in a paragraph or two).

As you might imagine, they don't let dogs on the shuttle, and especially not our dogs, so seeing much of Zion was out. So we paid our twenty five bucks (plus fifteen for an "escort" through one of the tunnels - RVs don't fit in a single lane, so they have to close the tunnel so we can drive down the middle) and pretty much drove straight through the park to the other side. It's pretty spectacular, but we'll have to come back some day to get a real sense of the place.

RESUME READING HERE
On the far side of the park, however, rose an apparition - an oasis, really. Literally at the west gate of Zion is a gourmet organic health food market, staffed by hippies. Selling such blasphemy as Polygamy Porter (our checkout person had a button on that said "I've Tried Polygamy," as well as granola, goat cheese, and actual fresh fruit and vegetables, you'd think this place would have been burned to the ground years ago. You just never know where you'll find hippies, thank goodness.

So we were off to the Zion River RV Park, a Disneylandish place complete with swimming pool, game room, wireless internet, and flat sites (we spend nearly every night of our life sleeping on a relatively flat bed, and to be honest I don't think we appreciate this nearly enough). We scored a dandy little spot next to the Virgin River, and settled in for the night.

June 23 - The Hannukah Onion

Apologies for the bulk postings, but with intermittent internet connections and a deep sense of ennui at the end of the day, my discipline in filing dispatches isn’t what it could be.

Friday night on the mountaintop was just spectacular. If I do say so myself, I was able to pull together a pretty good dinner, considering that we were “dry camping” (that’s RV lingo for no hookups – pretty soon I’ll be complaining about imm’grunts and sending a check in to the Fred Thompson for President campaign because them other guys is just too lib’rul).

I made rib eye steaks; red, white and blue United We Stand potatoes; and a dandy succotash that I teased from some old corn on the cob, a wilty carrot and what I am now calling my hannukah onion (which I’ve used in spaghetti sauce, steak hash, and now succotash – and there’s still some left!). This onion will literally last us through the desert, as we are soon to cross Nevada. Let my people go, I say.

Anyway, there something magical about pulling together a good meal in weird places, like the top of a mountain on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Our little spot on the rim.

After dinner, Maggie and I took a walk to the end of the dirt road we’d come in on, and realized that we were standing on a point that jutted out into the canyon, which provided a 270 degree view of the canyon, with the Navajo reservation to the east, and the national park to the south. Not too damn bad, I tell you.

Then we watched the stars blink on almost one by one, and we spotted the big dipper, Cygnus the Swan (I think), and saw a bunch of shooting stars and a satellite.

The next morning we headed back to the Grand Canyon and set out for Cape Royal, in search of more cliché views of the canyon. We got ‘em. This canyon is so frigging big and red and canyon-y that I just can’t do it justice. Photographs don’t either, although here’s one.

Requisite Grand Canyon Shot

You just have to stand there and look out at this big damn hole and shake your head in amazement.

Maggie and I stand there and look in amazement.

We finally headed out, pointed toward Bryce and Zion national parks, pleased that we had given the canyon a reasonably good treatment – lunch in the lodge, a night on the rim, and two-ish days of exploring.

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.

Booze, Bows, and Bullets

Mike's Spread in Chino Valley, AZ

So, family dynamics are about what you’d expect.

Janine’s mother’s ex-husband Mike and his wife, with whom we’re staying (it’s complicated) are terrific people. They’re amazingly hospitable – generous to a fault, kind, caring, and very conservative. Mike is much more conservative, than his wife Susan. He was an L.A. cop, and he served a tour as a Navy Ceebee (they built stuff) in Vietnam, I’d say he came back to the states radicalized, and I can’t say that I blame him.

He went over there to protect us, and came back to a round of indifference at best and hostility at worst.

Mike saw heavy combat – his unit was attacked, and a lot of his mates were killed in a single day. He lost a lot of his hearing that day, and he told me that he still has nightmares. That’s a lot of baggage to carry around.

And, as you might expect, from time to time the conversation turned to politics. Without getting into too many specifics, I think that Mike is angry at “liberals” without knowing much about what these so-called “liberals” want to achieve. Conversely, I’d suspect that many liberals would indeed discount Mike’s contribution to our society. Hell, I would have found a way to stay out of Da Nang, and I sure as hell would not have spent seventeen years patrolling the streets as a cop.

So I’d say we have a fair amount of coming together to do if we want to create something lasting with our politics. And that’s a lot of what we talked about.

A good guy, very bound up in what has come before, and who can blame him? And very much a part of a different generation.

Interesting side note – the only Democrat he can stand at all is Obama.

Enough of politics. This morning Susan took Maggie out on a trail ride, and while I know Janine was shitting bricks, it was obvious that Maggie was going to have the time of her life – off on a horse, without fences. They were gone for nearly an hour, and when Maggie got back she was glowing. “The best forty minutes of my life,” she announced.

It was also great to spend time with Janine’s half sister Tina, Tina’s husband Phil, and our nephew Xander. We always have a great time together, and gathering at Tina’s dad’s house was the perfect excuse for a get together.

We made our goodbyes around noon, and we were now on our own.

There is something very cliché and Easy Rider-ish about hitting the open road, but in our family, we tend to devolve into schtick. Our little clan has any number of in jokes, including a character based on Harvey Fierstein, the gravelly voiced gay New York playwright, who sounds like cross between Selma Diamond, Tom Waits, that coffee talk lady played by Mike Myers, and, well, Harvey Fierstein. We take turns doing the Harvey thing until it’s not funny anymore, but it’s good for fifty miles of schtick, which works for me.

We stopped for provisions in William, Arizona, where I espied the iconic image of the trip so far – a liquor store that also sold ammo. Or maybe it was an ammo store that sold liquor. (In Arizona, by the way, you can carry a gun on your hip without a permit, so long as it’s visible – comforting).

The sign in the window read “booze, bows and bullets.” We never had such a sign in Queens. I believe our signs read “pigeons, rats, and subway tokens.”

Booze, Bows, Bullets - The American Way

As we pushed up through Navajo country to the east side of the Grand Canyon, it started getting very Grand Canyon-y – red striated cliffs, great big vistas, the stuff you see on postcards.

We pulled into a lovely campground nestled among the lodgepole pines and it’s got that crazy good sweet pine smell that nobody has been able to capture in a bottle.

Last night, we grilled steaks and drank Russian River Pinot, and you just couldn’t beat it.

This campground is the last one with full hookups before the Grand Canyon. This hookups business becomes something of a thing. When you’re RVing, you spend a fair amount of time thinking about your tanks, and full hookups means emptying the bad full ones and filling the good empty ones. There’s something deeply cleansing about this process.

Without making too much of a deal of it, the order in which you empty your tanks is very important. Hook the hose up to the sewer, and dump the “black” water tank first, then the “grey” water tank. Do not get this backwards. Fortunately, I have not made this error yet, but I wouldn’t put it past me.

Today, we’re off to the north rim of the Grand Canyon – it’s said to be much quieter, a lot cooler, and just plain better than the crappy old south rim. Word on the street is that the visibility is excellent right now, and if we get really, really lucky, we just might find a campsite down there.

Very unfunny day

Nothing funny happened today, and I did not make any trenchant or arch observations about the human condition, or crashing an RV, or sewage.

On the other hand, my nephew did take all his clothes off and run around the room at dinner tonight. Fortunately he's only two, and we were on private property.

Tomorrow it's off to the Grand Canyon, which none of us has ever seen.

That and we'll be bidding a fond farewell to any and all family members, and the trip will begin in earnest. Hijinks are bound to ensue, so stay tuned.