Adventure’s End: #AVMTour Recap Part Nine

Could it be? At long last, the final post in my recap of this summer’s Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour! Previously on the AVM Tour, the girls and I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time and learned the value of hydration.

We spent night seven of our trip at Maswik Lodge, one of several hotels situated within Grand Canyon National Park itself. Maswik was the fifth hotel of our trip, and by this point in our travels I had gotten very good at unpacking and repacking our various bags and belongings. I’m not one of those people who is always trying to remember where he packed something. No, my approach is to put every little thing in a consistent and at least semi-logical place, so that I can find those little things later in the day when I need them.

That’s why I was surprised that I couldn’t find Lily’s wallet that morning. I was sure that I had tucked it into her backpack, but as I was getting us ready for breakfast and a day of fun at the Grand Canyon, I couldn’t find her wallet anywhere. I went through every bag twice and asked Hannah to triple-check. Nothing. There wasn’t much money in Lily’s wallet, since she had been spending her trip allowance pretty consistently. But she had collected a few mementos along the way, and I hated the idea of my five-year-old losing the little trinkets that meant so much to her.

Alas, we couldn’t postpone breakfast indefinitely, so we headed out. I packed the bags in the car, but I didn’t check out of the room. During breakfast, once I had some calories in me, my brain started working well enough to realize that the wallet must be hidden in the bedsheets somewhere. That was the only place we hadn’t looked. So after our tasty but ridiculously expensive breakfast, we headed back to the hotel room. Surprise! Housekeeping had already turned the beds. All of our sheets and such were in bags in the hallway, and there were fresh linens in the room.

Housekeeping isn’t supposed to do their thing until after you check out, right?

We tried to explain our problem to the housekeeper. Her English skills weren’t quite up to the task, but it seemed fairly clear that she hadn’t found a bright purple wallet while cleaning. We checked all the dirty linens anyway, dumping them all over the hallway floor, finding nothing, and then packing them back in their laundry bags. We checked the room again, but I had lost all hope at this point.

Lily took the news about her missing wallet with surprising calm. She shed a few tears, but she didn’t throw a fit. She’s getting a little better about dealing with life’s unfairness. With some reluctance, we filed a missing item report at the hotel office and headed back to the South Rim to try and enjoy ourselves.

Losing Lily’s wallet was probably the most frustrating part of our trip. The most stressful parts were consistently those occasions where we had a deadline to meet. There was Hannah’s horseback riding, which meant we had to cruise through the sequoias fast enough to meet a 3pm appointment. And there was the 9pm check-in deadline at our hotel in Williams, Arizona, which meant a speedy drive across the Mojave Desert. On this penultimate day of our trip, it was a ranger talk on Grand Canyon wildlife at 2pm. Thanks to the wallet fiasco, we had already missed the “Walk on the Wild Side” ranger-led nature walk. Given how great our Reelfoot Lake ranger tour had been, I was determined to spend some time with a ranger while at the Grand Canyon!

But that meant we had another deadline.

The morning’s activity was a walk along the Trail of Time, a two-mile section of the Rim Trail that features exhibits about the geological history of the Grand Canyon. Each meter of the trail represents one million years of that history, and, alongside the trail, you’ll find examples of rocks from various canyon layers that correspond with the time period on the trail. I figured this was our best shot at really putting the “Mineral” in the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour!

The morning was hot and sunny, but the trail was flat and we were well-hydrated, so the girls generally had a good time. We had forgotten to charge Hannah’s camera the night before (so many details on a trip like this!), but she had fun taking some pictures with my DSLR. Lily wasn’t interested in taking photos, which was probably for the best, since I didn’t want her getting near the unguarded rim side of the trail. Mostly, she wanted to be close to me, which I didn’t mind at all! We have a wonderful photo of the two of us that Hannah took that morning.

We had a bit of excitement several million years into our walk down the trail–it rained! It doesn’t rain very often at the Grand Canyon, and the sky had been clear all morning.  But a couple of small clouds popped up out of nowhere and opened up on us. It was wet enough for us to take shelter under one of the wispy trees along the side of the trail. And two minutes later it was over. I didn’t even have time to get the video camera out and capture any footage of the rain!

Two miles, even taking our time, was a lot for the girls, so they were glad when we finished the Trail of Time and entered the cluster of shops and restaurants near the Bright Angel Lodge. We had just under an hour before the ranger talk at 2, which meant we needed to eat lunch quickly. Unfortunately, the guidebook I had with me wasn’t too helpful in selecting a restaurant that was both nearby and quick. Do we eat at the fancy El Tovar Lodge, which is right here? Or press our luck and walk a quarter mile further (away from the ranger talk) to see if there’s a faster option? Deadlines!

We went with the El Tovar option, telling the waiter that we had to eat quickly. That didn’t seem to help, since it took fifteen minutes for our food to arrive. All the other diners seemed to be enjoying leisurely lunches in the grand old lodge. Not us, we gobbled up our food in about five minutes, once it finally came. Then we were off to the ranger talk, just in the nick of time!

Just our luck: Our ranger was brand new to the Grand Canyon, having moved there from some other national park a week earlier. Maybe that meant he was some kind of park ranger all-star, moving up to the big leagues from some smaller national park? Not that I could tell. He was… not as engaging as I had hoped. Still, the girls learned a little about the local fauna (who knew that squirrels were the most dangerous animal in the area, thanks to their lack of fear of humans and to rabies?), and they had fun during the animal guessing game portion of the talk. (We used to play the animal guessing game–someone thinks of an animal, everyone else tries to guess it by asking yes-no questions–all the time in the car. My girls are animal guessing game rock stars.)

After the ranger talk, we got some well-deserved ice cream and watched the other tourists, who were unaware of the danger, feed the squirrels. At this point, there was no way I could talk the girls into walking another trail–all they wanted to do was to shop. So we headed to the nearby Lookout Studio, which has a fantastic view of the Canyon and a pretty swell gift shop. It was there I scored the Holy Grail of single dad family vacation photography: a photo of all three of us actually smiling with the Grand Canyon in the background! Thank you, friendly German tourist, for taking such a great photo! And to the little old Asian woman who thought Lily was adorable and wanted to join us for our family photo, you’re strange. Go away.

Next was a visit to Kolb Studio, home for decades to one or both of the Kolb brothers, the Grand Canyon’s first professional photographers. Go read about them, they’re pretty amazing. The girls weren’t quite as fascinated by the studio’s exhibit on the brothers as their amateur photographer dad was, but they got a kick out of seeing the turn of the (20th) century photography and trekking gear on display. Hannah talked me into purchasing a gift pack, complete with a book and DVD about the Kolb brothers and their exploits.

And then it was over. Our visit to the Grand Canyon had come to an end.

It was getting late in the afternoon and we still needed to have dinner and drive to our hotel in Flagstaff, so it was time to board the park shuttle bus and return to our car, parked back at the visitor’s center. The girls were in a good mood from the Kolb Studio, but they were tired. I knew that if we tried to fit in one more sight, they’d get cranky.

I told the girls to take one last look at the Grand Canyon. I took a few final photos, getting a little more use out of the wide-angle lens I had rented.

I was sad. It wasn’t just that our time at the Grand Canyon was ending, it was that our summer vacation was coming to a close. All that was left, really, was to get back to Nashville. That would take several hours of driving and two flights, but there wasn’t any adventure in it. We had had our fun. It was time to go home. The girls would spend the next week with their mom. I wouldn’t get to spend every waking minute with them. I had really come to love that about our trip, in spite of all the responsibility I felt as the sole parent.

Nine straight days of quality time. Of the best kind of quality time.

The girls sat on a low stone wall, looking for pretty rocks on the ground, while I snapped my final pictures. Then I sat with them and gave them a hug. Then we made our way back to our car.

Postscript: That long trip back to Nashville wasn’t entirely adventure-free. We saw a thrilling half-hour film about the Grand Canyon at the IMAX theater just outside the park. We had the most relaxing dinner of our trip at the Grand Canyon Hotel restaurant in Valle, Arizona. We saw dozens of deer on the pitch-black drive along the country roads to Flagstaff that night. And we saw giant cacti and beautiful desert landscapes the next morning as we drove to Phoenix. I wish I had stopped to take a few photos, but we had a flight to catch. Deadlines!

The girls talked me into telling stories about the team of super-heroes I made up back in middle school, which made the last hour in our rental car go by quickly. I cleaned out the car and more or less repacked everything at a gas station in Phoenix, then had to try a total of three gas stations before I could find one that accepted my credit card so I could refill the rental car’s gas tank. But we made our flight with time to spare, and the flights home were pleasant and uneventful.

That night I took the girls to their mom’s house, where they couldn’t stop telling her about the things we had seen.

Two days later, while putting away all our trip gear, I found Lily’s wallet. It was in her backpack, in a pocket-within-a-pocket I didn’t know was there. She was thrilled to find out that her mementos had been found. As was I.

We’ll do this again someday. Not another Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour. That was a once-in-a-lifetime summer vacation. But we’ll go somewhere else next summer. We’ll explore some other part of the world. I can’t think of a better way to spend my summer than going on adventures with my kids.