DAY 21 Grand Canyon
David left early this morning to do a ranger-led hike partway down the canyon. We decided he will try it today and see if it’s something I can do the next day. So the kids and I had a quiet morning. Michael had a bit of a tough time, getting both legs stuck in one side of his Pjs, and then peeing on himself when I had his diaper off for a second. But after that, he took a good long nap that lasted most of the morning. Nora and I had breakfast together, colored, played with her shape-sorting snail, baked cookies together, and were playing outside and giving the dogs treats when David got back. He said he had broken off from the group to do the hike faster, and he was still gone 5.5 hours, so I probably won’t end up doing the hike tomorrow. Michael can’t really go that long without eating, and I didn’t bring my pump with me, figuring I wouldn’t really have a chance to be separated from him anyway.
On his way back to the campsite, David was able to extend our stay one extra day. Remarkably, we won’t even have to change campsites. We had it on our itinerary to take two days to get from here to Phoenix, but we can do it in one day and we’d rather stay here longer. It’s been really nice not being on the road.
We aren’t going to do another leg of our hike today, because David is beat from doing his morning hike. We are thinking about attending some sort of ranger program this evening. Now that we are staying another day, we have plenty of time to finish the rim trail. We are drinking so much water here, it seems like all we do in the evenings is run the sink water through our Brita filter pitcher and keep refilling our drinking water jug. We also have a 5 gallon collapsible jug in the outside storage area for times when we don’t have a water hookup.
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We hung out in the camper this afternoon, taking naps and such. At one point, Nora climbed up on the dinette bench, sat down, folded her hands and announced, “Look at pictures, please, Mama.“ She likes to watch the laptop as it cycles through all the photos we have saved on it. We haven’t had the computer out in a while, and I guess she missed seeing the pictures. She also decided for some reason that she and I should jump in the bathroom. “Jump! Bathroom, Mama!“ So we went in there and jumped. She can’t get both feet off the floor at the same time yet, but it’s fun to watch her try. One night she wanted all of us to go in there. We learned that you can fit two adults, a baby and a toddler in an RV bathroom David shut the door behind us just for fun. When I can’t pay attention to her, she has started talking to her black doggie. She pretends to get him drinks of water from her sippie cup, brushes his teeth, etc. “Look, black doggie! Star shape!” “Black doggie, jump!” “Black doggie, stretch!” (This is where she pulls his legs and stretches him.)
She has also been making us read her the text on a postcard we bought her to play with at Yellowstone. It’s of Old Faithful. At first she would just look at it and say, “Old Faithful.” Then she started making us read the little paragraph of text on the back. Now she has parts of it memorized. I’ll put the parts she says in all caps: “Yellowstone NATIONAL PARK. Old faithful GEYSER. Old FAITHFUL GEYSER was named in 1870 [Nora says this, but she says 1817] by surveyor Gen. H.D. WASHBURN, leader of the EXPEDITION OF THAT YEAR.” It goes on to talk about the amount of water that comes out, and temperature. If you leave the word out, Nora can also fill in “eruption.”
We met some ladies down the road from us who are from Columbus. They are driving a big Class A they just bought recently, and they gave us a tour. It’s really nice. We left at 3:15 p.m. to catch a ranger program at 4 p.m. and of course we were still late. It was about the California condor, an endangered species that lives in the park. The people trying to help them have gone to great lengths to propagate the species, such as making condor puppets to feed regurgitated food to the babies hatched in captivity, and erecting fake electric poles rigged with a shock mechanism to train them not to land on the poles and get electrocuted. They are even passing out free copper bullets to hunters in this area, because the condors are scavengers and eat deer and elk that have been shot with lead bullets and they are dying of lead poisoning. There are three pair of condors in the park currently. We came back and had foil dinners in the oven. Then we all showered in the camper. (Yes, all four of us.) And there was still enough hot water for dishes!