#56 Kaibab Lake in Williams Arizona. Went to see Grand Canyon and got run off by a vigilante

Our next stop with the Kaibab Lake Arizona. I was on the road that goes up to the Grand Canyon. I never heard of it but it sounded like a great place to visit and so we got there and imagine that it was dark. I entered through an unlocked State Park gate. I saw signs that says the camping area is closed for the season, but it was just late enough in the evening to where I didn’t want to do anything else. I just decided I would just nose around and maybe find a parking lot somewhere and crash. I noticed that there was a big old parking area down below and I tucked into there and we slept like a bunch of little babies.

When I cut the truck off that particular time it was really kind of creepy. It was just smoking a lot and I wondered if we would make it to the engine rebuild place in time.

The smoke that was pouring out of the valve cover called blow by was coming out so heavily it was getting into the passenger and drivers windows. As we were riding down the road, we were completely gagged by all this. It’s difficult to breathe with exhaust porting into the passenger compartment. At some point I knew I had to create a way for this smoke to go down back behind the truck. I began to invent and using some 11/2 PVC pipe and some flexible hose I redirected it to the back of the truck so we could breathe. It worked pretty well actually and when I got to Kaufman Texas and showed it to the engine rebuild guy, he laughed hard.

He didn’t want me to remove it so he could take pictures of it and put it in the shrine somewhere.

The next morning, we saw some guy walking his dogs around and we didn't think a whole lot about it.

A little later I saw park ranger and spoke to him and told him that we were came in last night late and we just needed a place to sleep. He said he didn't really care but we weren't supposed to be there like that, and I said well do you mind if we just crash for one night so we can visit the Grand Canyon. He said I really don't feel like I can give you permission, but I really don't care either. You're welcome, just don't stay too long. Now I was very happy because I didn't even have to worry about being evil. Just when I began to feel peace the weird thing happened with local guy with his truck and dog. He said he wanted to have a word with me, and he spoke to me about how I really shouldn't be here. He said if I stayed that the authorities would most likely come down here and give me a fine. He seemed to be the unpaid, unelected volunteer anti boondock police. It seemed weird that the park ranger who has jurisdiction had just said I was ok so who were theses authorities? I begin to realize he was going to make sure the local sheriff got a call.

I think it was a situation where there's nothing wrong going on, but he didn't like us being on his territory. He was going to see to it that we got back on the road. If the authorities didn't catch us in a natural kind of way, he would call them and make sure we could get in trouble.

There was another fellow boondocking across the way in a class C. I had spoken to him earlier and he had some English but little and an accent sounding heavy eastern European maybe. The boondock police guy asked both of us to follow him north a few miles to a much better location. It was no more than about a mile away and in a weird way he had shown us very cool Boondock. It was a national forest dispersed campground. This means you go down a kind of a dirt road and you see a bunch of little sites in a carved out into a giant field. You can stay there at the 14 days and if you've got solar and water and a generator you can be happy as a clam.

We parked there mainly to keep him from calling the law on us, but he was right that it was a better choice.

We got settled in and went up to the Grand Canyon as this was Williams Arizona. I believe the canyon was about an hour north. We spent the day up there and into early evening and then come back home and it was a nice day. We knew to stay until we soaked up a nice sunset at Hopi Point.

First we were here in a parking overnight

We ended up here for the second night