Grand Canyon

In a moment of weakness or maybe just total abandonment to reality, we decided to take a little detour and go see the Grand Canyon. I mean, who wouldn’t, and we hadn’t, so we decided we had to go. It would only add a couple of days to our journey home. So we made our way to Williams Arizona, enjoying the sun, the landscape and Route 66. The plan was to make camp, stay the night, get up early and drive to the Grand Canyon National Park, see it all, get back to camp, have a good night’s sleep and leave.

Oh, yeah, we also needed to do laundry. Now, while most camp grounds have a laundry, and this one did as well, they closed and locked it at 5:00 pm. We grabbed our dirty duds, sheets and towels and took them with us into town, thinking we might have dinner and then go to a laundromat and get our chores taken care of.

We had a very nice steak dinner at Rod’s Steak House on Route 66. It’s been there for 50+ years and will stay around for many more as the food was great. The problem was that it was so hot in there that Shawn and I both were having hot flashes and had to hurry the meal along. We couldn’t wait to get outside into the clear, cool air. Our laundromat was waiting, so refreshed and full of steak, we carried in our bags of laundry, including the plastic bag with the soggy slippers. (See the previous story if you want to read about the slippers.)

We found 3 laundromats along a very small stretch of this route 66. We could take our pick, but we picked poorly and Shawn’s inner alarm went off. I always know when this is happening because he starts looking around with only his eyes and his head doesn’t move. If you think that this is funny looking, I can only agree and have told him when he does this secretive look, that he’s the one who looks fishy. I looked around openly, and spotted a Mom with 3 little children, a man helping her fold her clothes and a thin 30 something man with a brown bagged bottle who talked to himself. He left after checking a washing machine and Shawn whispered to me that while he was at the little store next door getting change for the machines, the man was at the counter acting weird, and now he was in our Laundromat. You know the feeling I’m talking about. If we were in the car, the locks would have snapped shut.

We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. After the family left and we were alone with the man, who would leave and then come back, we weighted our options and decided that with a phone handy, a broken chair to swing as a weapon and the doorway at our back, we would manage to finish drying and folding our laundry. With a little bleach in the hot water in which we were washing our towels, I tossed in the L. L. Bean slippers. I have a pair which I’ve washed plenty of times, and they have always been fine, but I didn’t think about how hot the dryers are and how pretty and light yellow my towels were. So, hurrying along, we snatched the load of towels out of the hot dryer, only to find them covered with streaks of brown. The slippers had done their damage to every single one of our yellow towels. With fresh, brown streaked but clean towels in arms, we hurried to the door, dropping the damn slippers in the trash on the way out.

On a different and more to the point note, the Grand Canyon was AWESOME!