Day 69-74 - Silver City, Happy Jack & Lake Powell, Arizona

We have been off the "RV'ing" route and back to "camping".  There is a big difference.  Camping doesn't have internet access, moving on a daily basis and in some cases,electricity!  Thus, my hiatus explained.  We have been discussing that our initial expectations and the reality of our trip are different (not in a bad way - just different) - the majority of this trip is RVing because there is so much to see, our days that we thought we'd spend relaxing and painting (John) and making a digital movie of Jack's first year (Cami) are filled with exhaustion from traveling and looking after a 1.5 yr old and reading maps/tourism info for the next day! 

After the White Sands, we travelled through an active US missile range (no testing that day thank goodness and they almost weren't going to let us in to the museum because we were "foreigners" - give me a break).  The gale force winds on the ugly desert to Silver City almost pushed the Beast off the road a few times - quite scary.  

On route to Show Low, Arizona, we stopped and picnic'd and hiked "The Catwalk" - a steel walkway perched high above a canyon...it was an old water pipeline that served a mine so they used the old fastners in the rock and made it a hike.  Weird.  Bam Bam had fun chucking huge rocks in the river.  While I was catering to the demands of a 1.5 yr old on a long travel day and not navigating, John missed the turn and we ended up on an entirely different highway than we planned (and he thinks I'm a bad navigator!).  We ended up at a great little town called Pinetop.  This part of Arizona is full of pine trees and is an oasis from the typical desert you think of when you think of Arizona.  Apparently, it is where the people of Phoenix have their summer homes as it is much higher in elevation and therefore cooler in the summer.  Lots of high end homes - basically the Invermere of Arizona.  

The next day brought us continued forest beauty of Arizona.  We are on secondary roads (which we usually are) and are passing through some really cute forest towns.  Horseback riding, ATVing and hiking are the pastimes of choice here.  We camped at Happy Jack, Arizona.  Sent our postcards from the smallest post office in the US and bought our t-shirts (how could we not?) and travelled back to Flagstaff yet again and picked up the now fully restored Jeep!  Not wanting to stay in Flagstaff, we pushed on to Lake Powell.  A long expensive day but once we arrived - all was forgotten and we savored a great camping spot on the shores of Lake Powell.

Lake Powell is the second largest man made lake (next to Lake Mead) - it is absolutely huge.  Very cool that it was only a river prior to the Glen Canyon dam being built which put 580 feet of water for hundreds of miles where there was no water before.  And boy, are people enjoying it - the marina near where we stayed had so many houseboats - we counted about 400!  We had a great day...biking around the resort, swimming in the pool, watching roadrunners scatter around our campsite, taking a boat tour to a canyon and then Jack thoroughly enjoyed his first pizza that we ordered from the nearby hotel.  However, we did realize why no one else was biking...the desert is full of tiny cactuses as well...we both had flat tires at different points in the day!