Saturday, March 8, 2014

Grand Canyon Day 1: Driving to Caballo State Park

And we are off! We arrived at Gregory Gym at 6am (thanks for the ride JT!), and departed in 2 Suburbans and a rental Tahoe at 6:45am.  It rained and was cloudy until around Harper, and then the sun came out.  I rode in Tommy's car with Cole, Anna, and Celia until Junction where I moved to drive the rental Tahoe.

I drove from Junction to Fort Stockton, where we got food at Sonic and Subway, as well as gas.  The line at Subway was really long, and the employees worked really slowly and sloppily. Then I drove through El Paso before stopping for gas and a Target run in Las Cruces. Then I drove one more hour to Caballo Lake State Park.  On the way, we went through a border patrol station. I had two non-US citizens in my car, and said so when asked, and we ended up getting detained when Malika only had her driver's license (instead of her passport).  We pulled over for 10 minutes while they went and looked her up in their database.  The three girls in my car slept and read most of the ride, while Juan and I chatted.  He's a visiting professor from Portugal, and generally a neat person.  I was surprised how comfortable I felt driving for so long (544 miles).  The heated seat back might have helped. :)

We had reserved 2 RV sites, which were really rocky.  I helped some people set up their tents, while Emily set up our tent and Tommy, Cole, and Sebastian worked on dinner. Due to the rocky site, the tents were difficult to stake. Being by the lake was scenic though.

Dinner consisted of chicken noodle soup, non-vegetarian vegetable soup, and avocado. It was pretty delicious.

It's pretty windy tonight - I'm starting to doubt whether I'll have enough warm clothing for the nights that are actually really cold.

After washing dinner dishes, we noticed that lots of water had run from the water spigot to under Emily and my tent. We unstaked and moved the tent - and the ground cloth had done its job, as everything was dry! We went to bed around 9pm.

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