Today is our last day in the Zion area, and holy guacamole, summer is here! Every single RV spot at this campground is filled with mega busses and uber fifth wheels, we think we even saw a sixth wheel in there somewhere. And it is one toasty mofo outside today. It’s 103 ° in the shade and not a single cloud in the sky. Even at 4% humidity, there is very little going on outside the various campers, trailers, busses, Jeeps, and whatever else is in this place. The AC units are going full blast and thankfully, there is a gentle breeze coming from the vicinity of the electric meters, whose needles must be spinning at 30,000 rpm. We would not want the utility bill here with 190 RV’s sucking down power as fast as they can.
And the AC unit on our little airstream is absolutely not able to keep up with this outside temperature.
We had planned to use this last day in Zion for laundry, a bit of cleanup and organization, and maybe visit a couple of the local shops, looking for T-shirts etc. We did all that and we even shamelessly stopped at a bike rental place to get educated on which e-bikes are best because they had a wonderful misting fan.
So what to do next?
A nap is out since it’s 93 degrees inside the airstream. Do we go to a museum or to the visitor center, just to casually soak in the cooler temps? That would involve mingling with more sweaty people and their armpits, so no. Do we go wedge ourselves in to the little campground pool, along with all of our other camper friends? With as many kids that are hopping around in there and undeniably peeing it up, nope. Or do we sit down at the laptop and bitch about the heat and stupid people in our daily blog?
We’ll give you one guess as to which one we did.
As a matter of fact, our plan for tomorrow was to head down to Las Vegas for a night before continuing on to the Grand Canyon. The forecast for Vegas? 110 degrees and 3% humidity. This is the first time I’ve looked at a weather forecast and have seen a negative chance of precipitation. Like, there is so little chance of rain, that they took the possibility to negative territory. But, as they say, it certainly is a dry heat. As we were walking to the local stores, we were careful to keep our thighs from rubbing together and unwittingly sparking a forest fire… yeah, it’s that dry and dangerous.
It’s one thing to be all set up at a campground, in the shade, with the air on overnight so that the airstream has a fighting chance of staying cool during the day. It is another thing entirely to shut the power down, and drag the closed off metal tube through the desert for four to five hours, only to plug in at the Vegas campground and try to fight what is now probably 120 degree temps just soaked into every metal panel and structural component inside the camper.
Plus, no offense, but we’ve never done anything but lose money in Vegas, so we used our time between griping about how hot it is in here to find a campground somewhere cooler. Anywhere cooler.
That is how we ended up cancelling Vegas and instead, we are going to head down to the south rim of the Grand Canyon a day earlier than planned. Thank God, when we called, they had an RV spot open up, so we are good to go.
The weather forecast at Grand Canyon calls for highs in the mid 80’s and lows in the mid 40’s. If you had asked us if Ann would have ever been excited about heading in to a forecast like that, we would have said, nope, not excited.
But today, we’re both very much looking forward to some 40’s at night!
Ironically, one of the things we organized this morning was putting away all of our cold weather gear haha. Think we will need it again? Nah. Guess we were a bit premature on that. Luckily, everything we have with us is pretty much within an arms length or two, so a little rustling around and shifting of various totes and bags and we will be able to fish out our cold weather stuff whenever we need it.
But that day is NOT today. Today, I don’t want to even look at a pair of pants or a sweatshirt.
We did need to shift camping spots this morning because we extended our stay by a day and the spot we were in was booked for the last day. So we said goodbye to the mega-bus, inconsiderate buttholes next to us. We won’t say what state they were from, but Nosy Nora in the Colorado campground was nothing compared to these folks. About 5 minutes after they backed their bus to within an inch of the wall that ran behind our line of camping spots, we had all five of their kids’ e-bikes parked on our site and behind our Airstream.
Our Airstream isn’t a behemoth, so we felt ok about the 5 ft of space we left behind us so we wouldn’t have to look out our dining window directly into a huge wall and fence. Instead, we got to watch five children come and go on their bikes about 100 times a day. One of their boys even entertained us during our dinner on their first night by peeing on the block wall behind our camper. Guess he didn’t see us eating right there. 🙄 Boys! Plus we found out on the morning we moved spots that they were charging their bikes using OUR electrical panel. To add to our misery, their pudgy chocolate lab kept laying out doggy snicker bars by our truck and the kids kept walking in front of our starlink, breaking the signal so we couldn’t work on the blog. UGH!
So this morning, we hauled the camper a couple hundred feet over to the only spot available in the campground. We miss the tree we were parked under but not the assholes lol. The shade, or lack thereof, makes a massive difference in this direct sun. The positive is that we did get our view back of the Zion peaks.
So, no Vegas for us this time, which means that we have now driven as far west as we are going to on this trip. Our travels start taking us back east and ultimately towards Florida, but we still have three weeks left on this trip.
Next stop, Grand Canyon! And cooler nights!
We are headed out to cook dinner as we speak. The grill is so hot from being in the direct sun all day, I doubt we will even need to turn it on to cook the chicken tonight!
TaterTotTales 