26th May – Flagstaff again

After realising that the Grand Canyon was a 160 mile round trip, we decided to rest up today and make a day of it tomorrow. We therefore opted to spend the day catching up on some “housekeeping” such as doing our laundry, charging all our electrical devices and continuing our exploration of the delightful town of Flagstaff.

After a night and early morning that was disturbed, variously, by a noisy fridge, freight trains hooting and a chap who decided to start loading his car up at 6am (and who locked his car after each of his several trips, causing his horn to sound every time!) we were glad to be able to have a lie-in.

Having gradually eased ourselves into the day we set off into downtown Flagstaff to buy some hand-wash soap and a hat for me (as, despite its high uv protection factor, a motorcycle helmet looks silly if worn when walking round town). We found a massive outdoor equipment shop which eventually yielded up the soap but the hat proved to be a more intractable problem. I had set some exacting expectations in that the headgear should not make me look either moronic or homicidal and should not cost $100 dollars or more. After about an hour of fruitless and increasingly irritable searching I finally agreed to abandon the first two stipulations and settled for something that would at least stop the top of my head looking like a char-grilled steak by the end of the day.

In the course of our travels we also visited a very large bookshop, which serves the university here, and various smaller shops. In a small second-hand bookshop we were able to help the proprietor out by swapping some of our loose change for his paper money. He said that sometimes, some people just make his day and today we were those people!

Having spread a little good will and bonhomie around the place we decided that we deserved some lunch and maybe a beer or two which we enjoyed out in the sun watching the world go by.

After a brief return to our grim and inhospitable motel to do the washing and generally faff about we headed back into town for our evening meal. We found a really nice restaurant where Mark feasted on endangered species (Bison meatloaf) and I ate a duck, while we speculated on the personal stories of the other diners. For once the food was neither deep-fried nor coated in industrial strength sauces, nor were the portions ridiculously huge so we might well eat there again tomorrow if they’ll let us back in.

Tomorrow we are definitely going to the Grand Canyon and plan to make an early start to beat the crowds. With luck we should have some interesting pictures to post next time.