February 11, 2005 - Grand Canyon National Park in the rain.

It was sleeting and raining a freezing rain when we awoke, so we were in no hurry to get up. I happened to glance out the window at one point and saw 3 elk wandering through the campground in our direction. Hurriedly fumbling with the camera, I managed to get it operating in time to take some nice pictures of these majestic beasts before the wandered off. They did, I must say, look wet and miserable to me but I may have just been anthropomorphizing again. If it had been a moose, for example, I now know that moose prefer much colder climates than we humans do, so a moose would probably have been quite comfortable in the freezing rain.

We had pancakes for breakfast and after breakfast continued writing photo letters until we started having writer's cramp and also ran out of people we had addresses for. We decided that in addition to dropping off the letters at the Grand Canyon Post Office, it would be a good day to do our laundry (sightseeing in the freezing sleet is not our idea of fun). Monika loaded up 3 bags of dirty laundry-it's amazing how quickly dirty laundry accumulates!-and I chipped the ice off the truck so that we could drive over to the laundry center in the Mather Campground. After popping the laundry in the washer, we read some discarded newspapers for a bit, shifted the laundry to the dryer, and at last took it all back to the trailer. That pretty much killed the morning.

For lunch we had the baked potatoes with chili and green beans for a vegetable, and were both happy enough with the meal to want to have it again. After lunch Monika returned to selecting pictures while I updated the journal and had a short nap. Later that afternoon we had high (or is it low?) tea with some cookies, and then I started reading Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, another of my Project Gutenberg e-books, on Baby. I read that for a bit before when the thought occurred to me that it was a golden opportunity to practice my recorder playing, so I put those thoughts into action by taking out my recorder and practicing for a couple hours. I usually practice playing American or German folksongs. Since the tenor recorder was exactly in my vocal range, I could play songs I used to sing and sing new songs that I just learned how to play, and that made it a lot of fun.

Monika used the time to finish crocheting Peanut's cap and then began to input German folksong tunes on Daddy while she listened to my very impromptu concert. Pausing for a quick supper of sandwiches, I went back to reading Dickens for the remainder of the evening while Monika was plugging away on Daddy. So although we were rained in all day, we had, as it were, both music and literature at hand and lacked only some form of art to completely enjoy ourselves. The pictures, at least the best of them, approach being art in my opinion, but the vistas of the Grand Canyon are one example where it is very difficult to capture the spectacle properly with a camera, and an artistic approach may actually tell a truer tale. Indeed, if the sun didn't come out by the time we left, I thought I would have to try to paint a true impression of the Grand Canyon whenever I could acquire sufficient skill to do so.