Day 16 -- All day in Grand Canyon, Arizona -- No Miles

For RVers the worst thing that can happen is equipment failure while you're on the road. This morning I saw our nextdoor neighbor spread all his tools on his picnic table in, he told me later, a futile search for a couple of wire nuts. I was sorry to tell him that I don't carry wire nuts, either. He was trying to work on one of his two air conditioners that had suddenly quit.

As for Concetta and me, we've had numerous equipment failures during our ten years on the road. We've had our slideouts fail to, well, slide. We've had the automatic step refuse to go up or down. We've had our running lights and tail lights refuse to work, and when I tried to fix that problem, I accidently disabled the engine electronics. We've had the awning fabric rip off, the awning suppport structure fracture, and the miniature roll-out awnings over the slide-out rooms tear loose from the coach. We even had the exhaust pipe break loose from the frame of the coach and somehow get run over. When I got out to look, the coach rear wheels were actually sitting on the pipe. I had to borrow a motorized saw from a chap taking his lunch break nearby so I could shorten the exhaust pipe, wire it up, and get going again.

The most time consuming failure that that can happen is with your tires, especially since you have so many. On our very first RV trip, with our newly purchased RV, we only drove from Carson City, Nevada to Minneapolis, Minnesota before the tires started to fail. They looked ok before we left, but they had just been sitting too long in the previous owner's yard. In that incident, we not only had to buy six new tires, but we had to buy two new wheels as the spare was on the wrong wheel and we ruined one wheel when the tire went flat.

On a recent trip when we went all the way to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, we had a rear dualie tire get shredded on the Interstate which required two matching new tires for that side. So we would have a complete set of new tires on the rear, we then bought two more tires for the other side. Then, some time later, we had another rear tire get punctured when I clipped a culvert at the Vicksburg battlefield site, and that required two new tires again. Since the last episode destroyed one of the first two new tires we bought, the untouched tire became the spare.

The key is to make sure you buy what's called a "basement model" RV so you have lots of room to take tools and other supplies along that you might need. Now that I've seen a person might need wire nuts for some emergency, I guess I'll start bringing those as well.

On this trip we have had excellent luck with our rig, and nothing of any note has gone wrong -- at least until today. But his morning, the very worst thing that could happen on the road happened in the middle of breakfast. Now you probably think the sewer tank overflowed as has happened to us in the past. Or you might think that one of the young elks that have been wandering the park here ate our water line. Or maybe, you might envision that a park attendant came by and told us we had set up in the wrong campsite. Nope, none of those things happened. No, what happened as I sat eating my shredded wheat with bananas and strawberries, was that Concetta went over to pour her morning coffee and found that the machine had made NO COFFEE.

Not willing to suffer the demise of such an essential piece of gear, after breatfast I did what I could to dissassemble the recalcitrant appliance and try to find out what had happened. I decided that since the machine had gotten hot but had not dripped water through the filter, it had to be the syphon that was at fault. I got a thin piece of wire and ran it down the syphon tube once I had removed the top cover. Then I put some more more water in the reservoir, plugged in the machine, and voiola, it worked!

We're not willing to count our chickens yet, and only a freshly brewed pot of coffee tomorrow morning will verify that the crisis is over.

As you can see by the title we spent the day in the Grand Canyon. The weather here is fantastic and it's neither too hot nor too cold. In times gone by, we've done a lot of walking along the cliff edge photographing all the beauty, but today we spent the morning listening to Ranger Annie tell us about the rock layers in the Canyon. You probably know that most of the canyon is sedimentary rock that has been layed down over many millions of years. If there was any igneous (volcanic) rock in the beginning it has all worn away now. And, according to Ranger Annie, there's just one cone-shaped outcropping near the lower reaches of the canyon that is composed of metamorphic (super heated and remelted) rock.

Of course we couldn't leave the Grand Canyon without buying a t-shirt for Tom. Though we've encountered very few t-shirts for sale on this trip that are 100% cotton, this time we got lucky. And guess what t-shirt subject we found? That's right, we found one that displays the various geologic strata in the Grand Canyon in case we might have forgotten Ranger Annie's lecture points.

After Annie's lecture, we made our way back to the Blue Line shuttle and rode all the way around to stop 7, Trailer Village, the RV camp where we've been staying. It was time to rest a bit and have a quiet lunch.

We remember fondly the days when we came to the Grand Canyon and spent much of the day walking the path that runs for long distances along the cliff edge, taking photos, and reveling in the achingly beautiful view. But coming to the Grand Canyon as seniors can readily serve as a reminder, as you watch the youngsters in their heavy backpacks, sturdy boots, and floppy hiking hats pass by, that your body is only Grand Canyon fit for a very short period of time. Before you know it, time has relegated you to the benches that line the trails. Thank goodness the Canyon remains as beautiful as ever!

But one important thing has not changed over all the years we've spent time here. People from all over the world come to the Grand Canyon and stand with the same awe in their voices and the same sense of magnificence on their faces. Today we heard smatterings of Japanese, German, one of the Scandanvian languages along with Spanish (from Spain we thought), and many others we didn't recognize. While sitting near the restroom waiting for Concetta, a black family passed me speaking what sounded like an African language. When we got on the completely full shuttle to head back to our camp, two men from one of the eastern European countries jumped up and gave us their seats. The Grand Canyon seems to unify the world's people better than any other attraction. May it ever be so!