7000 miles and 20 states in 58 days.
I'm posting our trip partly for my future reference. The main reason and only reservations during this trip was for the Albuquerque balloon fest in early October. This is probably our 10th trip out We...
Forum Discussion
Sounds like you had a great time. Well done.
I'm kind of a fan of the 2-2-2 rule: drive 200 miles so you can arrive by 2 PM and stay 2 days. I've dragged our TT as far as 450 miles in a day, and find that much over 300 makes it too much like work and too little like a vacation. But to each their own.
I know what you experienced at the North Rim, only it happened to us at the South Rim. On the way into the campground we stopped for fuel while it hailed on us, then a couple days later we were down from the rim about a mile on the Bright Angel Trail when a sudden squall dumped about an inch of hail on our heads. There's no shelter whatever there, so while it was falling all we could do was hunker down with our arms over our heads. My wife has a horrible case of fear of heights, and reports going down is very much worse than going up, so I was really astonished that she wanted to go down the trail at all. But she did, "just a ways" she said. But the hail ended that descent, and the inch of ice on the ground going back up made for a stressful climb for her. Just about a hundred yards from the top there is a bit of shelter in the form of a short tunnel under some rocks, and when we reached it, the sky opened up and there was an icy-cold gulley-washer. We wound up sheltering in that tunnel during the drenching with about 30 of our closest new friends. Among them were some college-age asian folks, Japanese I think, who were clearly not prepared for cold wet weather. There was one girl among them in shorts and tee shirt who was soaked and quite blue from the cold. My wife and I wound up making a cold girl sandwich, wrapping our coats around us and her to keep her from hypothermia. We were there for a good half hour 'till the rain let up enough to make the mad dash up that last hundred yards or so.
I'm kind of a fan of the 2-2-2 rule: drive 200 miles so you can arrive by 2 PM and stay 2 days. I've dragged our TT as far as 450 miles in a day, and find that much over 300 makes it too much like work and too little like a vacation. But to each their own.
I know what you experienced at the North Rim, only it happened to us at the South Rim. On the way into the campground we stopped for fuel while it hailed on us, then a couple days later we were down from the rim about a mile on the Bright Angel Trail when a sudden squall dumped about an inch of hail on our heads. There's no shelter whatever there, so while it was falling all we could do was hunker down with our arms over our heads. My wife has a horrible case of fear of heights, and reports going down is very much worse than going up, so I was really astonished that she wanted to go down the trail at all. But she did, "just a ways" she said. But the hail ended that descent, and the inch of ice on the ground going back up made for a stressful climb for her. Just about a hundred yards from the top there is a bit of shelter in the form of a short tunnel under some rocks, and when we reached it, the sky opened up and there was an icy-cold gulley-washer. We wound up sheltering in that tunnel during the drenching with about 30 of our closest new friends. Among them were some college-age asian folks, Japanese I think, who were clearly not prepared for cold wet weather. There was one girl among them in shorts and tee shirt who was soaked and quite blue from the cold. My wife and I wound up making a cold girl sandwich, wrapping our coats around us and her to keep her from hypothermia. We were there for a good half hour 'till the rain let up enough to make the mad dash up that last hundred yards or so.
