Tuesday August 8th 2017

There was some nasty weather in this area last night. It did a good job of disrupting a good nights sleep. Around two in the morning I woke to the sound of rain on the roof. A little rain isn’t a big deal, but this accompanied by wind that rocked the RV. It was enough to cause me to get out of bed to check my cell phone for the weather radar and any warnings. Neither showed anything more than an ordinary thunderstorm. I think the wind direction was what made it seem so strong. I managed to dose off only to repeat the exercise a couple of hours later.

The pictures in this blog entry are from yesterday’s visit to Arches National Park.

The interruptions overnight caused my plans for the day to change. I was going to return to Arches National Park today. However, I was really dragging this morning. Instead of getting another late start for the park, I used today as a planning day. I started the day without any reservations for the rest of the month. I ended the day with reservations through the middle of September.

I view reservations as a necessary evil. Having to commit to a direction of travel and a particular campground without knowing the specifics of an area is very limiting. It makes it necessary to depend on reviews people publish on the Internet. Reading online reviews is a crap shoot. There are always a wide spectrum of opinions. The trick is to figure out what the real store is and what is important in the review. For example, a review that complains about dust in a desert campground should probably be taken with a grain of sand. Every campground in the desert is going to have a dust issue.

The route I selected for my travels this month is a little different than I had been thinking about. My first plan was to travel into the middle of south central Utah around Bryce Canyon National Park. I started looking for a RV park in that area back in June. The issue has been that the available sites are marginal for my size rig. Marginal usually means the campground gets very conservative with compatibility once your rig is bigger than 30 feet. They have to account for people that don’t know how long their rig is and those that can not maneuver their RV into tight areas. Most won’t let you book a site that their reservation system claims is too small for your rig. I’m left with the choice of lying about the size of my RV or getting someone on the phone that really knows what size rig will fit on a site. I chose a third option. I’ll stay further away and commute to the parks in my SUV.

My plan is to go back west on Interstate 70 to the town of Richfield for a few days. From their I can travel to Capital Reef National Park. Then I’ll move on to Cedar City. In Cedar City I can go up into the mountains to the Cedar Breaks National Monument and down the other side to Bryce Canyon National Park. I might even visit the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City.

Ill spend the Labor Day weekend in the St. George Utah area. From there I can visit Zion National Park and a few other areas. After the holiday weekend I cross southern Utah and Northern Arizona to Lake Powell National Recreation area for a week. That brings me to the middle of September. I still haven’t found a viable plan for visiting the Grand Canyon. The places that I’m willing to pay a premium to stay at are not available and haven’t been since I first looked in March. Some of the places in Williams and Flagstaff, which are 60 to 80 miles away, are more than double what I’d expect to pay. So I’m still looking.

I plan to spend a couple of weeks in the Verde Valley near Cottonwood AZ, then a few days in the Phoenix area before continuing southeast toward New Mexico and Texas. I still have a lot of planning to complete.