Days 114 and 115 - Rain in the Forest

Days 114 and 115 - Tuesday and Wednesday - Rain in the Forest

The promised rain arrives so we spend all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday indoors, working on HRB stuff and reading.  Late on Wednesday the weather clears so we decide to check out the small community of Jacob Lake.  If you drive up Hwy89A and turn down AZ67 to the North Rim, you see nothing but the NPS campground we're staying at.

However, a slight detour past a gas station with prices that will eat up your paycheck, and we find the Jacob Lake Inn, and a Visitor Center.

The latter is already closed but we check out the Inn.  A cool place to stay with nice looking hotel rooms and rustic cabins, but it's the food that captures us.  They claim they're famous for their cookies so we each try one.  Chocolate raspberry turns out to be a very light, very chocolaty cookie smothered with raspberry jam - need I say more?  Vicky settles for a more healthy 5 grain cookie.

We decide to find Jacob Lake itself and then come back for dinner.  We drive down the road to the lake and find a historic ranger cabin but no lake, so we keep on driving.  The lake was supposed to be 1 mile from the turnoff and after about 3 miles we decide we must have missed it, so we turn round.  Right across from the aforementioned historic ranger cabin we see a wet area in the middle of a filed and decide this must be Jacob Lake.  We look inside the ranger cabin and take a couple of pictures of the lake, which is very easy to miss.  As we pull out of the parking lot we see a sign at the side of the field
"Jacob Lake", so we know we've actually found it!

Dinner in the lodge features a jalapeño meatloaf for both of us - tender ground beef with large slices of jalapeño (so I get a double portion) accompanied with sliced squash and spicy skin-on fries for me and a more healthy polenta for Vicky.  The food is great but the highlight is a book on Navajo rugs sitting in the middle of the table.  The dining room and gift shop walls are both festooned with rugs of all sizes for sale, and with the book we're able to identify various traditional patterns as well as learn about their origins.

Vicky tops things off by surprising me with a lemon raspberry cookie - delicate lemon flavor with more of that tangy jam - and we head back home for our last night here.