Kenji, who is normally a late riser, woke us up at 7am saying he was ready to go to the Grand Canyon. I made coffee and we drove a couple miles to the visitor's center while my kids were still in bed. I dragged them out, and we saw the Grand Canyon:
Then we hurried to get on the road and get back to cell phone service so Sonya could get into her class at 9:30 Mountain time.
The directions about road closures were very unclear and we didn't have cell service so we couldn't check them, so we probably added more than an hour onto our trip by driving all the way back to Flagstaff when we didn't have to. The shorter road was closed Westbound, but we didn't realize till it was too late that it was not closed Eastbound, so we could have taken it. Oh well.
We drove all morning, then in the afternoon, we stopped at Horseshoe Bend. I had never heard of it, but we saw a sign on the side of the road, and this picture made me want to stop:
It was pretty spectacular:
Then we stopped at Lake Powell to go swimming. I remember having an amazing swim in Lake Powell in 1999 when it was 120 degrees out, but the only places we could find to swim during covid was kind of muddy and weird, and it's not quite the same when it's only in the 50s. The Osunas weren't interested, but the McKagans went anyway:
Then we drove to Bryce Canyon. We were originally going to stop at Zion National Park first, but since we had left Silver City so late, we skipped that. The only campground in Bryce that is open in the winter is first come first serve, and with all our stops we weren't going to make it till after 8pm, so it wasn't at all clear we were going to get a spot, but we decided to try it anyway, with the backup plan that we could just camp in the Subway parking lot outside of the park if we couldn't get a spot. (I never get over how awesome it is that if we can't find a nice place to stay or get stuck, we can stay on the side of the road or in a parking lot, and it is still perfectly cozy and nice inside.)
Since I don't know whether there will be signal wherever we are camping tonight, I'll go ahead and post this from the road before we stop. UPDATE: We made it to the Bryce Canyon campground and the first spot we saw was available! There is also excellent cell service here. Settling in for the night with homemade chili!
Today's route:
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