Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Woman Make Fire!

We woke up at Cathedral Gorge and took a hike around the place. The land was amazing, we had a good time checking it all out. I guess I put pictures from there on my last post so see there for a couple pics.

There were free showers, so after breaking camp we both got washed up. Showers are pretty important to living on the road, we take them where we can get them. After doing dishes and refilling our water supply, it was 10 before we got on the road.

We left Cathedral Gorge and shortly thereafter were in Utah. Since we were on a scenic byway, it was long streches of arrow straight road thru pastures seperated by twisty mountain sections over passes. We are getting used to the cycle. Eventually we are making our way into St George. Holy Cow, this place can host an Entrance!! Cruising down a very steep highway trying to stay on the road while you gawk at all the amazing rock formations is hard!! Really hard! Very red.... as we venture into town we see neighborhoods planted on the sides of the hills, and they look pretty fantastic! All the way into town, we were gawking at the  hills around town and all the color.

My house battery hadn't been lasting more than one night. Last year at tanacross, it easily lasted 4 nights so I knew something was up. I managed to loose the reciept, but I decided to wing it and see if I could talk someone into replacing it for me anyways. It had a 12 month warranty and the sticker said I had bought it 12 months ago. I pulled it out and took it into the Walmart and found the automotive section. It's alway at the exact opposite side that I enter from, so I start looking there and finally found it. I tell my story to a tech there named Junior, and he's cool with no reciept, unlike the customer service clerk the last time I tried this. Junior goes into the shop and returns with a battery tester, then quickly confirms my diagnosis of being bad. He also agrees to let me buy up to the 24 month battery for $15. Nice.

We fill up with gas, buy a few supplies (lunch) and hit the road. We took 59 out of town to the East, and are in Arizona shortly thereafter. We'd never been to the North Rim of the Gaand Canyon, and that was on our schedule for today. When we were about 30 miles from the Park we learned that the road was still closed for the winter. Dang. This has happened to us before.


 Fortunately, it was scheduled to open the next day (lucky us). We check out the Campground and decided $18 was to much to pay for dry camping and pit toilets, especially since the day before we were in such a nice campground for $17.

We decided to cruise down the road a bit and see if we can find some dispersed camping. 1/2 mile away I spot a dirt road and we take the Donkey down it. The Donkey rides so nice on these dirt roads, it's a joy to travel on them. We see a couple others people setting up camp in the woods so we venture further down the forest road. About a mile into the forest we see a pretty nice spot, it even has a fire ring already set up. We pull in and check things out. It looks really cool! We're stocked to have found such a cool, private spot.



We decide a fire is in order and start collecting up wood. This area has just finished breakup, there are lots of deadfall laying around ready to provide us with a warm, inviting fire...
I dig through the donkey and find we have very little in the way of paper products to get our fire started. Cara wound up surrendering her 2 day old paper bag of half eaten popcorn. That is to say, half the popcorn was eaten. The butter had soaked into the bag and looked prime for starting something on fire. We build the perfect little pile of kindling and wood over it and light it off. Or, we tried to light it. The lighter we used at lunch time to warm up some food isn't making any flame. Plenty of gas, just no spark. Drat. Thats the moment we both realized we only had one form of fire with us. Well, it's a short drive back to the gas station, they surely have some fire there. Or we could just do without a fire. But it looks so good, and we were so excited about finding this camp spot, we decide we have to have a fire.



Cara suggests lighting the propane stove, it worked at lunch. I can clearly see there is no spark, and surely it would be able to light itself better than a propane stove, right? It's easier to try  than to drive back to the store, so I did. It worked! Cara wanted to try a trick she read on the internet and grabbed a couple pieces of spaghetti and put them in the flame. They lit up and we used them to fire the half eaten popcorn. It went up like a torch! We had a roaring fire in moments, quickly set up our chairs, grabbed some drinks and sat down to enjoy our creation.


Then Cara goes into fire tending mode...  she's running around collecting pinecones to throw in the fire, poking at it, feeding it more wood...   Sit down woman! By now the sun had finally gone down (almost 9pm I think), and a full moon was coming out. The sky was clear and full of stars, it was quickly cooling off but we had quite the awesome fire keeping us warm. Eventually we let the fire die and climbed into bed. It was a good day.


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