Day 5, evening - South Dakota, Bad Lands

 After much driving through prairie, we reached the Bad Lands.  We planned on public land boondocking, but we a) mis-read the map on how to get there. b) found some really amazing wash boarding on the road to get there, c) plan C involved a pot hole that looked as big as the RV - so we skipped that. And eventually settled on the old reliable KOA. And managed to get there just before dark.

We live in a National Forest, but I didn't know there were National Grasslands. I guess that makes sense...

We were going to camp here, but the pot holes just past the cow grate were bigger than we thought we ought to attempt. So ends plan A...

Don't shoot the prairie dogs.

Cool sunset, and exactly where are we camping again?

The Bad Lands at sunset.

Day 5 South Dakota - Mt Rushmore

 My cousin and his wife had to leave early for an antique car show in Tombstone, but left us breakfast and a note to use the shower and feed the fish in the trout pond. We all had a great time feeding the fish.

We left at about 11.00 and headed back to Spearfish, got gas $2.30, 28 gal, 19,589 miles.

We talked to a former Las Vegas stage hand who was running the Trump concession stand. He had lost his job due to the Plague. 

We then passed through Sturgis, saw a really cool stone barn.

At 1.20 PM we arrived at Mount Rushmore. We took advantage of all the ranger talks and found both the site to be way more interesting than we expected and the story of how it got built to be super fascinating.

The sculptor who created Mt Rushmore (bust sculpted by his son who finished the project)

And who's bust of Lincoln was described by Lincoln's son as "I have seen my father as if alive again".

The model used to organize the carving. If they had not run out of 1949 money, it would have looked more like this...

We left Mt Rushmore at 3.47 (so that's about 30 pictures an hour I think) and headed to the Bad Lands, but I think that's the next post.

Day 4 Part 2 - Wyoming and South Dakota

 We headed north east through Wyoming, which once you get into the flats is pretty much like Kansas. Our previous experience at Jackson Hole and Yellowstone were very different (that's a different trip, another story) and by this time of year it was pretty dry. We did see a lot of wind farms as well as oil fields.

We stopped a the very small town, Midwest where the road turned east. Had Louisiana style fried chicken and discovered the sheriff was looking for a runaway. There was a historic oil field, and a pleasant looking town.

Sometime in the afternoon we entered South Dakota. At 8 PM we met my cousin and his wife in Spearfish, South Dakota, and followed them to their "cabin" in the hills above town. Had a wonderful dinner and Moscow Mules, and stayed in their driveway.

Day 4 - Wyoming

 The KOA is very conveniently located next to the freeway. This is good, easy late night access, bad, as it is right next to the freeway. And in the dark we saw that we had left the green, green grass of Park City for the drier summer pastures and tumble weeds.

We took advantage of the showers quickly, as we discovered KOA likes to do the cleaning around 10.00 and we got up about 9.15 which meant a bit of sprint. This KOA had clean individual showers which was good for COVID. My rule was that the camp bathrooms had to be uncrowded and I wanted there to be a good air exchange between shower users if I was going to use shore bathrooms and showers. Otherwise the RV was a better option.

We had our showers, made breakfast and got off the site and to the dump line by 11.00, but it was still after 11.30 before we actually left camp.  Beating noon by a technicality. There was a Walmart just as we were getting on the highway, and we discovered that Walmart gas is almost as cheap as Costco gas.
$2.13, 13 gallons, 19,232 miles.

And we were off on our tack northwards through Wyoming.

Day 3 - Utah

We wake up in the morning and it is still just as beautiful and we are still alone among the dunes. After a great breakfast outside (still short one chair) we have a bit more of a look around and pack everything up and get ready to go. 

It is the crack of Noon once again. We decide that we are going to have to figure out how to move faster in the morning, but so far, not much progress on that front. We did enjoy our first showers in the RV. It is again washboard leaving and on our way out a pickup with an ATV comes in, indicating it really is time for us to be going. 

We continue along I-80 toward Salt Lake City. This part of the trip we have done a few times before by car, so we generally know our way around Salt Lake, but we are now trying to find a Flying J so we can dump the grey water before going up the mountains. Water is heavy, and I sense that we are not getting 20 MPG. Possibly 1 GPM.

Following the GPS and getting to the right lane for the exit you want is a bit harder in the RV than it is in the car. We find the Flying J, figure that we have to pay a $10 dumping fee, and get the RV situated. This is the first time we are attempting the system dump and flush and thank goodness our inaugural episode is at a place where there is no line of people waiting because it takes us an hour to do it. But now we know more or less what to do, and we managed not to get anything dirty. 

 Lessons: 

1. Make sure you pay close attention to the instructions when you get the RV. Write them down (we were glad we had). 

2. Make sure you have all the hoses and practice hooking them up and taking them off. Ours we bolted on (bad bad idea) we think because this had been a rental. We did not fully understand that this was a) not normal, and b) a fairly stupid idea. 

3. Have a checklist and make sure that you walk through it like a NASA launch. Failure to do things in the right order and making sure that all the connections are tight and all the valves are set to the correct position could lead to disaster. (We had been forewarned and therefore skirted disaster more than once.) 

4. Have two people make sure all valves are closed before departure. Later in the trip the grey water valve was left slightly open more than once. Fortunately that is the least bad thing that can happen. 

5. We had good advice on the kinds of hoses (sewer dump hoses, city drinking water pressurized, and non-pressurized water fill) to have, which like everything else varies by rig, but make sure you have those sorted before you leave. 

6. This is an excellent chore to turf off to your kids. If you figure out how, please let me know. 

The grey and black water being accomplished, it was about tea time and as we had only had brunch, we were hungry, short a chair, and a few other odds and ends, so we did the only logical thing, and went to IKEA. We knew about where it was from previous trips so very shortly were were in the IKEA parking lot. Take out food was all that was available, so we had another take out picnics in the RV, then went shopping. About two hours later, fortified with food, a folding chair, some kitchen items we neglected to load, and some Swedish cookies, we were on the road to Park City. 

We waived at one of our favorite ski resorts, one of our friends summer houses, and the Ralph Lauren outlet store as we glided past and ventured to places in Utah we had never been before. As we drove along and sunset started to be a possibility, we realized two things:

1. The cows do come home. We could see lines of cows slowly making their way off the pasture and presumably toward the barn. 

2. We were not going to make our primary over-night target, or the secondary-over night target, but maybe the KOA which was our third backup. This is where the crack of noon departures were making us think that the 5 hours a day of travel wasn't so conservative after all.

We entered Wyoming at 7.40 PM. 19,014 miles.

I called the KOA and they had a spot, and we made a reservation. For late arrival, after 10 (please be very, very quiet). KOA may not be the cheapest place to stop, but they answer the phone later than almost anyone else and they usually have a spot. The country side was beautiful and began the process of drying out changing from green pasture at Park City to more chaparral as we drove along (and then it got dark). We rolled into the KOA around 11ish and quietly plugged in and went to bed.

Day 2 - Nevada and Utah

We wake up about 9AM, the parking lot is pretty much empty. After several attempts to light the stove to make coffee, Maggie suggests that maybe we have to push the kitchen out to make the stove work. We do. Yet another thing no one bothered to inform us about.

Breakfast made after the false starts we finally get out of the Fernley Flying J at the crack of noon.  Making fabulous progress so far.

Once you leave Reno, Nevada is pretty empty until you get to Elko, which has its own mountain and is an oasis in the near desert. We usually stop here on trips east or north, but this time just for petrol.

As daylight was starting to fade we reach the edge of Nevada and stop at Wendover. We make our first discovery. We are a truck. The truck side has water and free air for the tyres. The car side does not. Filling the water tank etc. takes an hour. We will discover all stops take an hour.  We did wonder, how do you get the air into the inside tire of the double tyres on the back. Something else no one mentioned.

Being in the west, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) owns a lot of land. Like the Forest Service, they have a lot of camping on their land. There is a great app that tells you were BLM and Forest Service campsites are located. As we basically live inside a national forest we knew this and fired up the app about 4 pm. 

BLM Knolls campground is about 20 minutes past Wendover (Campendium is another great app).
$10, pay by phone (there is just enough signal to do that).  Don't tell anyone about it. It's our secret.

It was a bit washboardy drive. There are three big parking lots with a nice pit toilet (as in concrete floors, nice building, clean) at each one. Maggie said (having looked at the map) that we should skip the first one and try the second one, farther from the highway, 

The second lot was perfect, big stone hills between us and the highway. No one there. A big sand dune in between that we hiked up in the moon light (did I mention the light was fading?) and the kids rolled down the sides of to great delight. We could see the 80 in the distance but not hear it and the stars were really clear, even by Tahoe standards. As the moon came up, we set up the picnic table, discovered we had three chairs for the four of us (there's an Ikea in Salt Lake City....) and had a fabulous dinner.  So far after 80 days (net) on the road, this first real campsite was the best one so far.

Our first actually cooked in the RV meal!

Location

Miles start

Time start

Miles end

Time end

Gal

$/gal

Total

Flying J Fernley	18,412.0	12:00:00 PM			14.78
Elko			18,665.0		31.447		$78.27
Wendover			18,779.9		16.3		$55.42
BLM Knoll	18,820.0	8:15:00 PM

And we finally launch our trip. At 9 PM

 We finally were winding down the packing, but we had house sitters coming and the post packing house was a disaster (we neglected to put this on the time line) so a flurry of cleaning. And unforeseen travel delays meant that our cat sitter was going to be late, so we had to organize short term replacements. I told the neighbor (not full time residents) about the bear, and got 10 days of cat sitting (she liked cats) out of the bargain.

We also discovered that our other neighbor was selling their house and would be gone before we got back, which was a bit of a surprise (the timing anyway).

As daylight faded, we decided the house was clean enough, we had packed all we were going to pack, and we needed to at least leave the house, or we would never get on the road.

So at the crack of 9.15 PM we weigh anchor and start down the hill. Mt Rose Highway is a long and winding road down the mountain, so we take Highway 50 instead adding about 45 minutes to the trip, but avoiding the hairpin turns in the dark.

Having not eaten, we stop and In n Out our favorite hamburger place in Reno and have our first meal in our RV. I discovered that you could get fries animal style as well as the Double Double. Don't get four orders of these.

Our target for the day was the Grand Sierra Resort (in Sparks, just past the Reno airport) which we know had an RV park. Since the hotel rooms were usually about $50 we figured the RV park would be cheap.

We arrived at midnight, (a 45 min drive from our house normally). It was my first trip into a hotel since SARS-CoV-2 broke out, and when I got to the main desk I discovered it was going to be $100 for the night. That made us mad so we took off for the Flying-J truck stop an hour and a half away so we could log some miles.  We should have just parked in GSR's regular parking lot, but we were tired an not thinking straight.

We arrive at Flying J at 2 AM, there are about three spots left, so we take one. The truck next to us runs the refrigerator all night. We decide that it wasn't the single best idea we had had.

Miles start	Time start	Miles end	Time end
18,318.0	9:15:00 PM	18,412.0	2:00:00 AM