Friday, August 7

Today was a long day of driving. Our destination: Grants, New Mexico, 347 miles from Williams, Arizona. We packed up in about half an hour, and got on the road around 7:30. It really wasn't an eventful day, but the scenery was nice. Nothing truly amazing, but nice. However, the wind was absolutely terrible. There had to have been around 80 mph gusts that spontaneously popped in at terrible times. It was so bad, we believe it stripped the screws away from a 6-foot-long strip of sheet metal on one end, because we looked in the mirror and something was flapping around in the wind. We stopped at the world's largest existing meteor crater to fix it, and what we feared was true. We proceeded to take the whole strip off, as there were no screws to screw the other end back in. After our little adventure, we continued down the road to Grants. Anyway, we stopped about 11:30 at a Walmart, to get 22 gallons of distilled water for the water/methanol tank in the back of the truck, as well as to look for windshield washer fluid, which contained the methanol to combine with the water. We found some, but not of the type we were looking for. For lunch, we got Subway, which we ate on the road. We checked into the campground around 3:30, to find that only four campers occupied the park! It was a very good, clean campground, with good cable (thank goodness), much to the delight of Mom and Dad. There really is nothing else that happened, so tonight's closing will be in Arabic: وداعا وتصبحي على خير !