1st hike into GC

Sherri and I hope all are having a nice Memorial Day Weekend. This weekend is very busy at the North Rim. We are still trying to get our hours and days off lined up together. We will both be off Wednesday & Thursday this week and we need to make our first shopping trip. Kanab Utah is our destination, about a 2 hour drive to the grocery store.

Last Sunday we were both off and took our first hike into the canyon, here is Sherri just below the rim.
Our destination was two miles down to Supai tunnel, on the Kaibab trail.

The hike down was nice and easy, but the thing about the Grand Canyon is you need to go back up. It takes twice as long to go up as it does down. Here is a photo of the trail further into the canyon and four miles down will be our destination next time.

Grand Canyon Update

Today marks the end of week one since the park opened. There are 200 people learning new jobs, so things are crazy at times. Here I am heading off to work; no I have not joined the LDS church:)

Monday both Sherri and I were off and we went out to Point Imperial and Cape Royal, a great drive up to 8800' and fabulous views to the east.

Tuesday and Wednesday saw more snow and cold. Wednesday was a blizzard most of the day and 5" of snow on the ground. I posted snow pictures last week so I won't bore you with more snow pictures, you will just have to believe me that it was nasty. On a lighter note I did have a couple of people ask me were they could get refunds. They were upset that they had paid a park entrance fee and could not see into the Canyon. I was laughing inside but I diplomatically explained that the NPS was in charge of entrance fees.
This morning my start time was 7:00am and this picture I took while on my way.

Beautiful!!! The final picture is of where I work, in the gift shop. It's a very nice store and this is just a part of it. Tomorrow, Sunday, both Sherri and I are off and we are planning on hiking into the Canyon.

First week at GC

It has been an extremely busy week work wise. Sherri has already been promoted to head of payroll and received a raise; who would of thunk it?:) She is now the accounting managers right hand person. The gift shop has made an amazing transition. We started on Monday cleaning the place from top to bottom. The retail operations team from Forever Resorts came up on Tuesday afternoon and the store started taking shape. We have had many hours of product training and operations training. I did have the honor of being selected to attend a Disney Customer Service seminar on Wednesday afternoon. We all are very excited about opening tomorrow morning, we are also somewhat nervous as hundreds lineup outside the gate to be the first into the park for the season.
It has been great having the park to ourselves for the week. Tuesday morning was beautiful but by early afternoon the snow started falling, by our Wednesday morning walk there were four inches on the ground. Here are Sherri and Ryder in our campground.

By Thursday the storm had passed and the weather quickly improved. After work we walked out to Bright Angel point and had the place to ourselves. The views are amazing!!

We walked back toward the lodge and took a nice sunset photo.

On Friday night the employees were the guests of the kitchen and we had a wonderful dinner in the lodge. The restaurant was able to have a "shakedown" and we had a free expensive dinner. Here is a picture of the restaurant's windows from below.

Tomorrow is go and we are ready to get going!

Arrived at Grand Canyon

We left ABQ on Saturday morning and drove as far as Cameron Trading Post, which is north of Flagstaff. The trading post is very nice, it is on the Little Colorado River.. This picture is the fire place in the dining room.

We arrived at the North Rim on Sunday at 11:30 am. We spent a lot of time finding a good site and we did find a great site where we receive satellite and have Internet, not all in the RV park are so lucky. We took a quick walk to have look at the Canyon. Ryder and Sherri found a nice spot.

Forever Resorts got right into it with a meeting on Sunday night and work started at 8:00am on Monday. It is really a surreal feel up here. There are no tourists, yet, and we are in a National Park. The weather has been crazy. Sunday night the wind howled and Monday it started snowing, by Monday afternoon the sun did come out and it was very nice.

Today started off cold but sunny and beautiful. My gift shop team walked out to Bright Angel Point for our morning meeting. It was truly spectacular. By noon the snow was falling hard and by 5:00 there was four inches of snow on the ground. After work I got up on the 5er roof to knock the snow and ice off the slide out covers...I am cold and wet. We hope the temps warm up and the sun comes out tomorrow.

Albuquerque Stuff

It is hard to blog about traveling while we are in our home town. Sherri and I have spent our week getting ready to go to the Grand Canyon. We are both very excited about being at the North Rim on Sunday. We will be leaving tomorrow morning and spend one night on the road.
I don't have any pictures for this blog, I don't think about takings pictures around Albuquerque. We saw our daughter, Amy and her boyfriend Jake a couple of times. We went out for dinner on Sunday night to Los Cuates, we were looking forward to some New Mexican Chile. Sherri's mom, Laverne also joined us for dinner. Last night Jake and Amy cooked us dinner in the 5er, they made a great chicken piccata.
Today I played golf at the Championship course, my home course. It was nice to get out with Larry and Clay. I probably will not play for a while, not much golf at the North Rim. Well I hope we have an uneventful trip and I will soon be posting pictures from the Grand Canyon.

Albuquerque

We made it to Albuquerque on Saturday evening after a couple of tough travel days. Friday was going smooth until we blew a tire about 100 miles east of Oklahoma City.

After a two hour wait for roadside service we got back on the road and headed to the next town to buy a tire. It did not take long to get a tire mounted, grab some dinner and get back on the road. Apparently the skirting we removed because of damage from the tire allowed some sheet metal to rub up against the front tire and 30 miles east of OK city we blew another tire. It was 6:15 and we did not get back on the road until 9:30. Tired and PO'd we had no idea what to do next. After pulling into a rundown RV park and not finding a suitable site, we headed to a WalMart on the west side of OK City near a tire dealership. It is good to have an IPad and Internet in the truck so that we can find store, restaurants etc. in strange towns.
So Friday night we had a first, boondocking in a WalMart parking lot; except for the howling north winds we did not have too bad a night. Saturday morning we headed over to the dealership, got some new tires and were on the road by 9:15. We drove 558 miles on Saturday, without incident, and we were very happy to be back in Albuquerque.
Well, the east canyon winds started howling about 3:00 AM and Sunday it was snowing. After all the rain we had in Arkansas we were ready for some warm dry weather.

Snow accumulated on the mountains and by the afternoon the sun started peeking out. This week is supposed to warm into the low 80's so it will be great. We have a bunch of stuff to get done this week before we head off to our Grand Canyon jobs on Saturday, number one is making sure the 5er is okay for some more miles. I hope to get in a least one round of golf this week, and check in with family and friends.