Tuesday 31st May 2011

Sorry about the date error with the long post I sent from the visitor center at Bryce Canyon this morning.  It's hard enough keeping up with the time switching between Pacific, Mountain and Mountain time (Daylight Saving).  We have been moving between three states quite rapidly.
I managed to connect to the internet at the visitors center this morning as those of you who clicked the link to get the blog emailed to them will know.
After leaving Bryce and filling up with Propane at a garage just outside.  It was so cold there that we had been using the heater quite a bit.  We had a nice drive with the weather getting steadily warmer.  We stopped at Kanab which was quite a reasonable size town with a good supermarket to stock up a bit as we may not see any shops for a few days.
We arrived at the North Rim of the Grand canyon at 5:30 and went into the Visitors Center the lady Ranger was very informative and told us where we should walk to get the best views and where we could camp outside the Park as the Camp Ground was booking only, but she said it is worth calling in because sometimes they have "No Shows".  As we were at the Canyon we took a walk first to "Bright Angel Point" which was a thin slab of rock hanging out over the rim.  The view was fantastic but at this point we could not see the bottom, so off to the Camp Ground and yes they had one place left so we booked in and got set up.  At the little shop we noticed people with laptops so inquired and were told that they had free wi-fi and the log-in code. Great we should be able to connect from our van with the "Super" wi-fi ariel.  Off to the rim to see the sun set over the Canyon and were shown by some friendly fellow campers a very thin lump of rock hanging out over the rim about 1000 foot up.  Where they said we should get a great view.  Well over the past few years Steve has begun to suffer from vertigo for some unknown reason.  Well a bit of vertigo was not going to stand in the way so out we go walking the plank over the rim.  (who needs the new glass sky-walk on the South Rim?)
With luck if we manage to get another camp spot tomorrow with this connection we will be able to attach some photo's to the blog.
By the way although we are at 8,310 ft here it is much warmer than at Bryce canyon we are still in tee shirts at 11pm.
Please look at the blog if you can, Steve has now put a second page with the GPS trace of our route.  Unfortunately it is difficult to get the time and bandwidth while traveling to update the interactive Google Map as we had hoped.  But although not scalable this is a screen shot of the actual second by second GPS trace we are doing live using Microsoft Streets & trips which is the American Version of Autoroute.  We are hoping to stop somewhere long enough to investigate whether Steve can incorporate the gpx files that can be output with Streets & Trips into Google to  be able to produce a scalable map.  If anybody has the time to look into it for us he would appreciate an email about it.
Must sign off now as we over did it with the computer this morning and ran the battery down so had trouble starting the van!
Steve & Judy