If you are just clicking on this post as the latest update, let me point out that I also just posted the two updates below this one, dated this morning and last night respectively. We had no satellite access at the Grand Canyon.

We are now headed south along US89, and have stopped at a forest service campground just outside of Sunset Crater National Monument (map). We skipped driving through the monument, along with nearby Wupatki, since we did both of those last year in a rental RV. We came through in April, and this campground had not yet opened for the season, so we dispersed in the forest on the other side of the crater. All the roads there consist of loose cinder material ejected from the volcano, and I suspect Odyssey would sink in irrecoverably. The sites here, however, are paved.

We had a nice stop at the historic Navajo Bridge, and decided to check out the NRA campground at Lee's Ferry, six miles upstream. We pulled in to the campground, and found a nice spot with a view of the river and a short stretch of rapids. Mere minutes after pulling in to the space, the camp host came by to tell us that we could not park head-in, we had to back in. Which, of course, would mean no view. Now this, mind you, is in a remote park service campground with perhaps 40 spaces, of which only about six or seven were occupied. On top of that, one could see all the way around the campground from any site -- yet his concern was that, if the campground filled up (on Sunday night?), we could not jockey back out of the space in such a way as to proceed the correct direction around the loop (we had entered the space through a vacant pull-through, so no wrong-way shenanigans were involved).

If, indeed, the worst came to pass (oh my!) we might have to drive the wrong way around the campground loop for, gosh, about 30 yards. In a place where there is no traffic, and complete visibility!

After being a complete jerk about our parking, he then wanted to chitchat about the bus. We were both steaming at this point, so I blew him off, and we left in a huff. It was only 3:00, and we knew there were places on the way to Flagstaff that would work for us. It would have been nice to stay at Lee's Ferry, but this kind of attitude just doesn't fly with us. It was a marked contrast to last night, when a uniformed Park Service ranger went out of his way to accommodate us.