We got up earlier than usual and there was some nice color on the clouds. We decided to head out to a point overlooking the Grand Canyon, but not Crazy Jug Point. I made a mug of coffee to go and J started a mug of tea steeping, and we left in the Jeep around 6:45.

I had Clif Bars for breakfast while driving.

We went to Parissawampits Point around 7:20. There was no real view from the parking area because of all of the trees. There was a trail that headed out to the rim, but it looked like it would be quite a hike to get to a view, so we left.

On our way to the next point, I spotted some solar-electric panels out in the woods. We drove down the access road to it, and there was a WildBlue satellite-internet dish affixed to the same post as the solar-electric panels — things were getting even more interesting. J got out her iPhone and discovered an open Wi-Fi network that was connected to the internet! Who'd of thought there'd be free Wi-Fi out in the middle of the Kaibab National Forest?! I got out and looked at the installation, and there was something about it being part of an earthquake monitoring system. Cool!

We went to Fence Point around 8:10. After a short walk to the rim, there was a nice view and it would be good for photography too. Well, not photography right then because there was a dark cloud layer that wasn't good for landscape photography. Before we left, J started cleaning out the black hole in the back seat of the Jeep because it had become hard to close the door after I put things back after changing the tire yesterday. We decided to stop hauling around some things that hadn't been used since we started full-timing, so it was a good exercise. After cleaning it up, the things we decided to hang onto fit much better into the black hole and the door closed with no problems.

On our way to Locust Point, it started to rain. We came across a Kaibab Squirrel! They're similar to the Abert Squirrel that's found on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and in other parts of the country, and have the same dark gray body and tasseled ears. However, the Kaibab Squirrel is only found near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and it has a white tail. We watched it for a while in the light rain then moved on.

We went to Locust Point at 9:20, and it was still raining lightly. There was a nice view out on the rim, and I liked it better than the view from Fence Point for photography.

We went to Timp Point at 10:10. There was a long walk out to the rim, and I didn't like the view as much as from Locust Point or even Fence Point.

We returned to the RV around 11:15, and it was still only 55°F (13°C) outside with light rain. I downloaded the data from our Garmin eTrex Venture HC GPS, then set up two routes for me to explore to get the RV out of here.

I had lunch around noon and processed some images for a stock submission. I left in the Jeep by myself around 2:00 to look for an easy way to get the RV out of our current boondocking spot.

I continued heading down the hill from where we were boondocked because that section of road was better than trying to head back up the hill from where we had come. The road from the bottom of the hill heading north was nice. Unfortunately, the first road to the east wasn't suitable for the RV, and I ended up going several miles north before a good road headed east. I hadn't prepared to go this far north, so I didn't pay much attention to the map on my laptop, and reading the map on the small GPS screen is difficult because the roads disappear when you zoom out. So, with my myopic view of the world, I missed a good turn to the south and took two roads that looked promising initially but then became impassible for the RV. I ended up going all the way to where we had left the RV temporarily yesterday. On my way back to the RV, I saw a good road that headed up to where I had been way to the north, so I followed it. Sure enough, it was a much more direct way to get to where we wanted to take the RV.

I returned to the RV around 4:25. I synced the Garmin eTrex Venture HC GPS so I could annotate the correct route to take. We left around 4:55 with J in the Jeep to head to a convenient rendezvous point and me in the RV to take the round-about route to the rendezvous point.

I reached the rendezvous point around 5:50 and J was nowhere to be found. She had been using Bossy, our Garmin nüvi 350 GPS, to get there, and I was worried that she had gotten lost because Bossy didn't know about most of the dirt roads in the area. To make matters worse, J didn't answer her radio when I tried to contact her. When I tried a few minutes later, she replied and let me know that everything was OK — she was just taking her time and looking for Kaibab Squirrels along the way. J arrived around 5:57 and ...

We left to look for a good boondocking spot near Locust Point. We drove mostly along a road we hadn't been on earlier today, and I didn't see any great boondocking spots before we reached a spot we saw earlier today.

We dropped off the RV around 6:15 and left in the Jeep.

We went to Locust Point at 6:25, in plenty of time for the 6:50-ish sunset. There were some nice clouds to the west, and I thoroughly enjoyed photographing the area. J wasn't nearly as enthused. My favorite image was taken just after sunset and shows the nice layers looking along the rim (below left). A quite different image was taken about 15 minutes after sunset (below right). I liked the clouds in the background and the yellow flowers in the foreground, and the canyon provides just enough sense of place. The 3-stop hard grad ND (neutral density) filter wasn't enough to balance the exposure from the bright western sky and the dark foreground, so I took two exposures and combined them in Photoshop. We left around 7:25.


We returned to the RV around 7:35 and had dinner of leftover citrus salmon, grilled squash, and long-grain-and-wild rice and a fresh garden salad.

After the late dinner, I downloaded the images from tonight and took a quick look at them before going to bed early. I was pooped from all of that driving around in the Jeep today.