Tripometer – 11,698 mi
Gas Gauge – 890.799 gal
Location –Page Lake Powell Campground, Page, AZ
Lodging – $30
Cans of OFF – 4
The early portion of Paul’s day today was spent spit polishing the trailer and packing up for the move to Page Lake Powell Campground down the road. Ranger is suitably depressed for most of the day as two of his humans wandered away yesterday and haven’t yet returned.
Kelly dropped Dave off at the airport early this morning and started the 4+ hour trip back from Las Vegas. The wind was blowing through the canyons at over 30 miles per hour – good thing she didn’t have the trailer or she would have had to stay put in Vegas. We both think that Vegas is the quintessential, “I wouldn’t want to live there” place. After about 24-48 hours we are both done with the constant hustle, noise, and lifestyle in general.
On the way back Kelly had to stop for another bag of Ranger’s dog food. Ranger is picky, so picky in fact we’ve gone through bags and bags of brands and flavors he wouldn’t eat. As of this moment, there are 3 types of kibble we know he’ll eat – not one of which comes from a chain/grocery store or costs less than a steak dinner for 2 with drinks! Finding stores that carry his epicurean delights has not been easy. The nearest one to Lake Powell is over 100 miles away!
Both of us have an AT&T cellular plan. We have struggled for much of this trip with matching nice camp locations with acceptable cellular signal so Kelly can work during the week. Looking at AT&T cellular coverage maps for Arizona there is a significant lack of AT&T coverage in the northern part of the state. We drove by this RV park two days ago to confirm the high strength signal. Arriving at Page Lake Powell Campground this evening we were discouraged by the data transfer speeds we were experiencing over this tremendously strong cellular signal. Sitting in the RV park this evening, both of our phones are registering 4 bars of LTE but the signal is despicably slow. We learned from one of our neighbors at the RV park that this area of Arizona (much of the state) was, at one point in time several years ago, the only area of the country with its own cellular company with their own proprietary cellular towers. This little cell company was bought out by Verizon and the towers are now leased to AT&T through some kind of agreement. It is readily obvious to us that we are not getting full throughput on these cell towers with the Cadillac of AT&T cell phone plans. This seems criminal. The cell signal is enough for Kelly to do most of her work but it takes longer to transfer data than normal. We’re booked into this RV park for two nights. We’ll have to make due with this signal until then. We are also going to look into a Verizon cellular hot spot so that we can access two different cell networks making this game of ‘find the signal’ a bit easier.
Always looking for new dining experiences, for dinner this evening we had fried chicken at an independent fast food joint in town called the Birdhouse. We were richly rewarded for our experimentation. Both of us are fans of good fried chicken and are no strangers to our hometown favorite Royal Farms chicken. This chicken was far better. With dinner we ordered a side of seasoned fries to go with our meal. Imagine our surprise when the seasoned fries so highly praised on their Google reviews were spiced with Old Bay. Maryland is slowly taking over the taste buds of the rest of the world!