Day 16 Tuesday May 21: Canyon de Chelly AZ – Jacob Lake AZ

Do you ever have “one of those days”? This day, scheduled as a relatively easy, 300 mile travel day turned into “one of those days” for us. Looking at the map, we decided to take the shortest route northwest through the Navajo reservation and pick up Hwy 98.

Haunting desert scenery surrounded us once again along with interesting rock formations seemingly rising out of nowhere:

We arrived in Page AZ around noon without incident and then had 2 incidents. Incident 1: Thomas checked the tires when we stopped for gas as one tire had been leaking; he discovered the tires had started to dry rot, really not good. The nice owner of the station let us unhook and park the RV there and sent us to a Big O Tire Store where the diagnosis was confirmed. Dummy us hadn’t realized the tires had been on the truck for 3 years and had 50,000+ miles on them. Bad news: a chunk of change we hadn’t counted on; Good news: the prevention of a possible blowout on the trip. After later reading about a motor home that had a blow-out and crashed off the interstate into a subdivision was disastrous results, we were very glad we noticed this and had it fixed. A new set of tires, beer run and good lunch at a local BBQ place later we hooked up to get back on the road.

The issue now turned into Incident 2: What road?!! It appears that our road, Hwy 89 S, literally fell off the mountain! At least it happened back in February and not while we were on it! We now have a new challenging day standard: “Has the road fallen off the mountain yet?”

We re-routed into a much longer route to Jacobs Lake near the north rim of the Grand Canyon and the Kaibab Campground. We did cross the Lake Powell Dam, a very controversial environmental action in Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire”:

This lovely site is located in the towering, red-barked Ponderosa pine trees:

Elizabeth doing a fine job relaxing in her chair: