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Showing posts from November, 2017

Camping in Arizona

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We spent a couple of weeks in Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon in early October, and I've been horribly delinquent in blogging about it. Needless to say, it was terrific. The Grand Canyon is beautiful beyond words, and there's lots of cool things to do around the Flagstaff area, including the Meteor Crater, the Petrified Forest, and the Lowell Observatory (which was an absolutely fantastic surprise). So here's a bunch of almost literally randomly chosen photos. Because I don't have hours to properly sort through them, and because everything we saw was spectacular.

Goodbye car camping

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Our car camping adventures have come to an end. As fun as it was to sleep in the back of our Toyota RAV4 in campgrounds, KOAs and national parks on both sides of the border, our October trip to Arizona showed us the limitations of this method of camping. For starters, we were refused entry to our first, week-long reservation due to the campground’s rules against car camping. That they hid on their website. And that their own telephone reservation desk was unaware of. That forced us to relocate and find a new place to stay for a week. It was unpleasant. It was also cold, particularly in Grand Canyon at night. Too cold for our comfort and to the point we abandoned an overnight campground reservation at the end of our trip to get a hotel. And not having an onboard bathroom meant dehydrating ourselves after supper so we wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night. Finally, taking a loaded down 4-cylinder vehicle with a roof carrier full of gear was too hard on the engine an