CowKids and Long Boring Drives...

We woke bright & early this morning to the sounds of crows and doves announcing feeding time for the horses on the ranch. Harold went with Bill to do the feeding, and then tagged along with him into town to a Kiwanis Club meeting. The kids and I had breakfast with Lois. When Harold & Bill returned, Bill saddled up two of his horses for the kids to ride while Lois headed for work at the nearby school.

You can’t even imagine how much fun the kids had on those horses. That’s been the highlight of their trip so far, I believe. Enjoy these pictures of our cute (and handsome) cowboys and cowgirls!
The Jeffers’ ranch is very close to The Petrified Forest; in fact, Tiffany had worked there for a couple of summers. They actually have lots of petrified wood on their land, and they let each of the kids pick out a piece to bring home. How cool is that?

Bill & Lois were great hosts! Lois definitely has the gift of hospitality. You feel right at home there.

After the kids fell in love with the horses, it was time for us to get going again. We were headed to The Petrified Forest / Painted Desert. Although it was beautiful, the petrified wood held no mystery for the kids after having seen it and held it at the Jeffers Ranch and even having their very own specimen. So, driving through the park, most of them were pretty underwhelmed with it. In fact, Jared fell asleep and Jonas picked up his Nintendo DS to play. They were obviously not impressed. I actually drove the Beast through the park. That was kind of fun—except when the wind blew hard.
From the Petrified Forest, we headed on to the Grand Canyon, where we had reservations to stay there in the park at the campground. I was a little nervous about that after our Mesa Verde experience with campground reservations.

We got to Flagstaff (about ½ way to the Grand Canyon from The Petrified Forest) where we were going to stop at a laundry mat and get some lunch (at an actual RESTAURANT!!!) and buy groceries for our 3 days at the Grand Canyon. It turned out that the parking lot at the laundry mat wouldn’t allow any vehicles longer than 28’—we’re 36’. At this point, it wasn’t an option to not do laundry. We have 2 contractor-sized trash bags FULL of dirty clothes and another that wasn’t quite full yet. So, Harold went on past it thinking we’d find another laundry mat in town. We didn’t. We ended up on the road another couple of hours before we found a place to eat. We never did find a laundry mat or a grocery store.

We still haven’t done laundry. I hope we can last a couple more days. Lois offered for us to do laundry at her house, but I knew I had so many loads to do that it would take a whole day to get it all done, so I didn’t do any there. Now I’m thinking I probably should have at least done towels and underwear. Good thing we’ll probably never see any of the folks again who smell us the next few days. (Just kidding, we do have a couple day’s worth of clothes left. I just hope that we find a really LARGE laundry mat when we leave Grand Canyon, we’re going to need about 10 washers & dryers to get it all done!)

Anyway, we finally arrived at Grand Canyon, where the campground sign said “No Vacancy,” which really upset me until I saw the words, “Except For Reservations.” What a relief that was! We found our site, then went on to the park grocery store, where I spent about twice as much on 3 days worth of food as I would’ve at a Super Wal-Mart. A gallon of orange juice was $9.99. Needless to say, we went without OJ for the next few days. A can of corn was $2.69

We headed back to the camp site and got settled in. I did some picking up in the camper while the kids unwound from traveling. Harold & the littles sat outside and enjoyed the cool evening weather. Jared asked to come inside and said he was ready for bed, so we all headed that direction.

Everyone’s looking forward to tomorrow. We’ll get to actually see the canyon! I can’t imagine how amazing it’s going to be.