Yesterday, we traveled from the evergreen forests and vast meadows of the Grand Canyon's North Rim all the way to the red rock desert of Sedona . . . it was 48 degrees in the morning at the North Rim, and 95 degrees at noon in Sedona . . . but the biggest difference was technological: we had no wifi at the North Rim-- and these are the things we wanted to look up during our stay up there:
1) the veracity of the word "spackler," we were playing lots of Bananagrams and I used that word . . . but it looks like it's not a word;
2) the exact genetic origins of a mule . . . more on this tomorrow in a profanity-laced description of the North Kaibab trail;
3) the actual time . . . apparently, Arizona does not subscribe to Daylight Savings Time (but the Navajo Nation does) and so every ride was a crapshoot, because the GPS took this into consideration . . . sometimes . . . and we were operating with four different times-- the car clock said one thing, Cat's phone another, my phone a third time, and the clock in our cabin had a fourth (correct) time, but we never bothered to set anything to the correct time;
4) birds . . . we saw little blue birds (probably Pinyon Jays) and little birds with red heads and yellow bodies and all sorts of hummingbirds and we couldn't identify any of them;
5) the name for a group of ravens . . . everyone knows a group of crows is called a murder, but we kept seeing groups of ravens (usually consuming roadkill) and we didn't know that we could have referred to them as a "conspiracy" or an "unkindness" or a "constable";
6) what a decoy spider looks like;
7) if we could see Phil Torres getting attacked by a spitting cobra on a reality science show which never aired . . . we learned about this on a podcast called Talk Nerdy and the episode is great but you can't see the footage.
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