I can follow up on that North Rim question with a solid "yes" to booking rooms at the Grand Canyon Lodge. First, it's pretty nice. Rustic, but a cool vibe under the pine trees. Second, there's nothing else nearby. I didn't realize how isolated the North Rim is, essentially near the end of the Arizona Strip.
As for our hike last week, it was a great experience. Set out from the South Kaibab trailhead at about 5:30 a.m. (had a slow shuttle bus that first took a bunch of sunrise-viewers west to Yavapai Point before swinging us back over to the trailhead). It was a very low-traffic descent. One of the dozen or so people we encountered on the way to the river was a trail runner who was running a box of pastries down to one of the tour groups on the river. There's a line of work I never considered.
Got to Phantom Ranch without any trouble, but then it got a little hot - only in the low 90s, but rough for those of us who experienced a cold spring in the Northeast. The Ribbon Falls detour from the North Kaibab was a good change of pace - a little quasi-off-trail hiking, some shade, and a spectacular sight at the falls. I was pretty well out of steam by the time we got to Cottonwood Camp, but a soak in the stream helped a little. The rest of the way (6 or 7 miles, I think?) was a slog. Too bad, because the rest of the North Kaibab was one of the prettiest parts of the hike: all the different rock layers and the changes in vegetation as the elevation increases.
Three of the six in our group decided we'd opt out of hiking the next day, so we really dogged it from the pumpmaster's house on up. I think we took about 100 minutes for the last 2 miles. Finished up at about 7:15 p.m. and were relieved to catch a ride to the lodge at the North Rim (I'd read that it was a flat mile on the road, but it's more like a rolling 1.9 miles and I wasn't up for that). We'd overshot our dinner reservation by almost 2 hours so we all grabbed a bite at the little deli in the lodge building. The food was mediocre, but all food is good after 23 miles and however much elevation change we'd put in. (Funny aside, both the lodge dinner menu and the deli menu have brisket, but the deli workers noted that it wasn't available because it was the first day the North Rim was open and nobody considered that the 16 hours it takes to smoke a brisket would carry them into the next day before it was ready.)
Really a fun hike, I'd love to do it again but I'd probably want to be in somewhat better shape and go with better footwear - I was all kinds of blistered and couldn't have made the return hike the next day if I'd wanted to...some hip and calf soreness was minor compared to how beat up my feet got. So three of us caught a ride back to the South Rim the next day (interminable - some neat sights but really a long ride through mostly desolate areas) and the other three hiked on back via the North Kaibab and then the Bright Angel trails. They made better time (no detours to Ribbon Falls or Plateau Point, though) without me slowing them down; their return only took about 12 hours. Hope I can join in next time.