First Traveling Days
July 20-21, 2016
The first part of this trip involved traveling from Texas to Anywhere Else. An all day trip in itself. We packed up the car, threw the dogs (the Tripawd and Little Dog) in, and left ATX. The first stop was Las Cruces, NM (622 miles), to drop off one dog with my grandfolks. My sister who lives there offered us her bed for the night. This is what you get for free in LC:
A gym.
A rustic living room.
A super-soft, super-sweet, super-comfortable awesome queen size mattress (which fits me fine…JA is a little long so he may have not enjoyed it as much).
Rustic decor.
My favorite blue door ever – I want to steal this door when my sister moves. But there you go! Free is pretty awesome as far as accommodations go.
After some wonderful New Mexican food, we took off to Los Lunas (200 miles) to drop off the other dog, and briefly introduce JA to the family. We had lunch with them, but it was rushed for two reasons: a) we were on our way to the Grand Canyon area and b) I figured we’d spend a bit more time with them on the way back to Texas.
The drive from Los Lunas to the Grand Canyon area was pretty uneventful. I love the desert and western NM/Arizona never fail to leave me happy. I missed an opportunity to stand on the corner in Winslow, AZ, but I really just wanted to get to our destination.
I didn’t realize that the town of Tusayan (400 miles) existed solely to cater to Grand Canyon visitors. It’s been there, supposedly, since the early 1900s, but most everything there was built recently – 2010, to be precise, if you look it up. Newer hotels (cheapest a night was about $230), and places to eat. We had planned on camping most of the trip. We knew that by getting there at night, we probably wouldn’t find any camping in the GC park for the first night, but we tried anyway. No luck. So we drove to an RV park in Tusayan, near the entrance to the park, and camped there.
Not a terrible place to camp – a little loud – but otherwise fine for the first night. A few times that night, there was a coyote circling the town, calling. Coyotes are such awesome critters – it’s been a few years since I’ve heard any call, so I enjoyed it, especially when it called from close to our camp. The ravens, however, were awful. People clearly feed the wildlife here and the birds swarmed the campsite, calling loudly, and expecting people to give them food.
I sure as hell didn’t feed them though. Wake me up at 5:30am? No handouts! JA stayed in the tent while I made coffee (super important) and got breakfast ready. From here, we were going to the park – we actually found a walk in campsite a little later at the Desert View campgrounds and came back to pack our tent.