As you might expect, I woke up with some rather sore leg muscles on this morning. At first, it felt like I could barely walk! But it was my last day at the Grand Canyon, and while I didn’t feel the need to tackle anything too ambitious (like, say, another trek down into the canyon), I was determined to spend at least some “final time” enjoying canyon scenery, and hopefully walking off some of the stiffness in my legs. So I decided that, since I hadn’t been over toward the eastern part of the immediate park area since my first day, I’d take the shuttle bus thataway, check out a particular scenic point that I hadn’t been to yet, and walk some portion of that end of the rim trail (the opposite end from the one that I’d walked three days earlier).
But not right away. I did sleep in a bit after the previous evening’s exertions, and then, even after getting up, I allowed myself the most leisurely morning of the trip. The previous day, down at Indian Garden, I had almost finished the book that I’d been reading. So, I relaxed at my campsite long enough to finish my book this morning, and then got going after that.
Once I was back at the rim, I took a final slew of canyon pictures. Here are many of them:
Besides yielding a bunch of photos, my late-morning walk succeeded in loosening up my leg muscles a bit, so it was a win-win! But it also pretty much marked the end of my canyon-oriented activities for the trip. It was lunchtime-ish (maybe even a little past), and I was starved, by the time I finished hiking the section of trail that I’d set out to hike, so it was back to the campsite with me. I passed the afternoon resting my still-tired legs and working on writing up the initial drafts of what became many of these posts, and then cooked a final dinner-over-unsatisfying-fake-campfire in early evening.
After that, I drove over to the general store to return my rented cooking burner and get fresh ice to add to my cooler, since I planned to be on the road the next morning long before the store would be open. Now, to digress for a moment: If you’ve read all of my posts about this trip so far, then you may recall that in my “general reflections” post, I commented that in some ways, the trip felt like it sort of marked a new beginning for me in moving on with life after divorce. And if you read my very first post…well, you probably don’t remember, since I initially forgot to mention this and only went back and added it later, but—if you read it after that edit, you might remember that while I was having my picnic lunch at Pomme de Terre Park in Morris back on Day 1, it crossed my mind that my picnic basket had been a wedding gift received at that very spot 23 years ago to the day. SO, with these two tidbits in mind: As I was pulling stuff out of the back seat of the car on this evening, in the parking lot of the general store, so as to drain the melted ice from my cooler and add the fresh ice, I grabbed the handle of that same picnic basket—an item that has been with me on every single camping trip that I have gone on since 1995—and it catastrophically broke in two places, causing the whole lid-and-handle structure to come completely off. Symbolism?
The rest of this evening saw me doing some preliminary packing and preparing for hitting the road in the morning, and then sacking out quite early, as I hoped to be up by quarter to five and on the road by 5:30 (and this time, I actually charged up my phone and used it to set an alarm).