Monthly Archives: April 2018

Homolovi State Park

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Williams through Flagstaff and on to Winslow?  We have been on this path before.  It was during the 2009 Albuquerque Baloon fiesta and we did these same towns but a bit differently.  Last time we drove through Williams, stayed overnight in Flagstaff and just stopped for lunch in Winslow.

We left Williams and briefly stopped in Flagstaff for lunch and to stop at REI for a part for my roof rack.  Our actual destination was Homolovi State Park.  They have a campground there and it seemed like a good place to stop off.  Their campground is reservation only as many others now are.  We drove around to see what spots were open for one night and we liked.  We then got online to see which of THOSE spots would be available for 3 more nights.  We reserved the below spot for 3 nights, plus the one night we paid for at the kiosk.

You can see our satellite dish out there and it worked wonderfully as there were about 2 Spanish channels in the area.

Homolovi SP is dedicated to preserving some of the old structures that were used by early Hopi people.  There are a couple of easy walks here so we looked around a bit:

We noticed that many people must be on the lookout for pieces of pottery (see the first 2 photos) as there is a LOT of it that has been aggregated along the trails.  We also saw this sign:

I thought they had misspelled the word ‘shards’ but it turns out the word ‘sherds’ is to be used for pieces of pottery.  I am always am interested in learning new things.

Winslow, as a town, does not have that much to offer.   It has a Walmart and a couple of truck stops.  It also has that corner made famous by the Eagles.  We didn’t check out the corner since we did in 2009 but had a dinner one evening right across the street from it.  Another negative is that the AT&T signal was very unusable as it only got to 4G and seemed to be only one tower somewhere.

On the morning we were to leave the wind picked up something fierce!  It was forecast so we knew we were going to hit it and we knew NOT to stay any longer.  Right before we left the camp host said the wind had hit 61 that morning.  Let’s get out of here!

Grand Canyon

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It was almost the same situation as last July.  Then we were in NE Pennsylvania and Roxie wondered how far it was to Niagara Falls.  The philosophy was, since we were so close we might as well go!

That was how it was leaving Prescott.  We were so close to the Grand Canyon we might as well go!

The last time we were at the Grand Canyon was in 1999.  We had our two kids with us (10 and 16) and our SOB (24′ Nomad).  We had some big problems with our door latch on the trailer.  One morning Roxie and I woke up with the front door wide open!  We had another time where we could not get INTO the trailer.  Our son had to enter through the emergency window to open the door.  We also had refrigerator problems and found our ice cream melted!

This time, however, we could not get a spot around the south rim.  We stayed at a KOA in Williams:

This KOA reminded me a lot of the one my parent’s owned in Redding.  I remembered working there, showing campers their spot with the golf cart.  Also, the owners of this KOA were part of the family that my parents knew from Chula Vista.

The first day we were there we drove up to the canyon.  The Grand Canyon is misnamed in my opinion but what other superlative would you use?  Fantastic Canyon, Tremendous Canyon, Huge Canyon?  The weather turned out to be very nice and we did a bit of walking and took some shuttles.  We also took some photos:

One thing that I found walking around was this:

It appears that years ago they ran a phone line across the canyon.  You can see one of the poles just a bit down the canyon.

The next day we took the train up to the canyon.  It was an experience that we thought we would do this time.  The trip up was enjoyable but they sure do go slow!  We were able to walk a different part of the canyon.  We even toyed with the idea of coming up the third day and walking down the canyon a bit on this trail:

We took the slow train back and got in the kid’s car with a very talkative train employee which made it seem even slower.

The first day we also researched some NFS locations to boondock for free that were very close to the park.  We thought that would be a good place to stay for the third day.  However, Roxie fell each day that we were there so she did not feel up to walking around much more.  She was having one of her bad days…

Off to the next stop, trying to avoid the heat!