Phone Service

We opted for the ATT “Go Phone” (pre paid) for the trip as we did not want to get a two year contract with anyone. The Go Phone was a cheap solution – and as it shows, a bad one. ATT has almost no service west of Chicago and today, in a tiny town called Gunnison in Colorado we had service for the first time since we left Yosemite more than three weeks ago! As it happens ATT relies a lot of “partners” in the west, but Go Phone customers cannot use them. Unfortunately Gunnison is just a small town on the road (two supermarkets) and besides shopping for gas and food we didn’t expect to be in town long.

 

The phone should be more useful when we reach Chicago – I’m glad that we have not had any meltdown with the bus so far as we would not have been able to call anyone!

Zion and Bryce

Zion was mostly a place to hang out and rest – and so we did. The first day we took the shuttle, there are no cares in Zion Canyon, to the lodge and got our lunch at the lodge under a huge cottonwood tree. The second day we ran from the end of the canyon (The Temple of Sinavawa down to the campground – about 8 miles (13km) – as our only preparation for the Bryce Canyon Half Marathon.

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Arrived in Mesa Verde

The last tank of gas was for the drive from Bryce Canon to Capitol Reef and again to Mesa Verde (or at least mostly). Since both went quite a bit uphill (to Capitol Reef we had a 45 minute uphill to 2900 m/9670 feet) we expcted the fuel economy to tank, but we still stayed above 15.5MPG/6,5km/L.

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Drive to Zion and Bryce

As you might have understood from the post about leaving Grand Canyon, then we have now moved on to first Zion National Park and now Bryce Canyon National Park. There might be more about that later, but here is or driving map ano yesterday.

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Out of Grand Canyon

On our way out of Grand Canyon many things didn’t go as we planned them. Firstly it was raining all afternoon the day before and we thought we would visit the “Tourist Trap” at the rim that day. In the morning we packed, not too early, and went down to dump and fill fresh water on the bus. When we were done we noticed that the holding tank was still not empty – no matter what we did it didn’t want to empty.
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Just the beginning

At present we are in Grand Canyon National Park and expect to continue to Zion NP the 13th. We have driven almost 1100 miles (1760km) and so far our gas mileage is better than expected. The first three tanks of gas have brought us over the Sierras and through the heat and still we have done 16.2 MPG (6,8 km/L) – this is pretty good, but we also tried to drive carefully pretty much all the way.

 

Below is a map of where we have driven so far. A bit of driving is missing because a) I forgot to turn on the GPS logger and b) it went out of power while driving.

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Gadget bag

It is fun to plan such a trip and it is fun to play with thing you can use for such a trip – so we naturally have a number of gadgets with us for good use and for fun. First of all I wanted a good computer, with a fairly large screen for picture viewing and editing with us. It needed a big screen, so a 17” would be a natural choice, but we also wanted something reasonably handy around the bus and other places. Since I had a Lenovo T60p at work, with a 15” wide screen, I ended up with the same one (well, a T61p), with the extra large battery, for the trip. We did also consider getting an extra large, external, hard disk for picture backup, but ended up with just using DVDs to have a copy of the images.

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Bryce Canyon Half Marathon

The other day we started to look for races (runs) at the places we expect to be on our trip – thinking maybe we can find a 10k somewhere we could run while on the road. The first major city we are at is Denver .. nothing was found there, but just for fun we searched for all the smaller places as well and we found, to our suprise, a half marathon in Bryce Canyon. Now I’m the one who always says that you can always run a half marathon, but over the last 8-9 months I’ve run no more than once a week and I do not think I’ve run more than 7 miles (11km) - so no more than half the distance – and this one startes up in 7652ft (2332m)! Ok, granted it does drop with 1852ft (564m).

I’ve just registered us for the race – Sabine does not know yet, but I’m sure she will be very happy. They do not say anything about strollers, so we’ll just assume what is not forbitten directly is allowed and expect to be able to run with Felix. Training you would ask? I do not think we’ll be able to train, but we will have two really hard hikes in the weeks before, so let us hope this will prepare us for the run 🙂