Our Little House in the Woods

After a week in our campground in Mount Carmel Junction, Utah, we are headed south down the road once again. In just a few miles, we crossed the Arizona border. We found that Arizona doesn't waste much money welcoming visitors to their state here on Highway 89.

We're still in mountain time zone, but we have to turn our clocks back one hour as we cross the state line. That's because Arizona doesn't observe daylight savings time. That also means that the sun is setting around 6 p.m., so we are having to get used to shorter travel days. We know that we could find that hour of daylight in the morning, but for some reason we're not good at that. Denisa did make it up for a sun rise coming through the pine trees at our new camp site.

We are camped in the Kaibab Forest near Jacob Lake, Arizona, the entry town to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. This tiny town has a gift shop with over-priced cookies, a restaurant with over-priced food, and a convenience store with the most expensive gas we've seen since California. There are also a couple campgrounds, but we are opting for a free stay in the forest instead.

We found a great place just off Forest Service Road 225. It fills all our characteristics for a good boondocking spot--close to the paved road but not too close, a relatively level, hard surface to park, and good scenery. We love camping among the tall pine trees.

Camping in the woods means a camp fire, and we are glad to be out of the burn ban areas. Mark built a fire, and we had a dinner fit for a backwoodsman. Denisa is holding the pie iron, filled with a reuben sandwich, while the beans, hotdogs, and leftover sauerkraut are sizzling in the skillet. We had a two-course dessert that started with our home-made huckleberry jam sandwiched between two slices of bread and toasted to perfection in the pie iron.

Of course, we can't have a campfire without cooking smores, but we only had three big marshmallows left. That just isn't enough gooey-ness for our taste. So Mark devised a way to toast our miniature marshmallows. Did you know that if you wedge  toothpicks into a crack in a piece of wood, you can fill them with those little mallows? Even more interesting, they will toast to perfection that way?!?

We will be running the generator for an hour in the morning, and another hour in the evening to keep our house batteries charged and our residential refrigerator happy. But we are really liking our little house in the woods!