Hey, hey we’re the monkeys

August 4, 2011 ---Today was one big RV learning experience.  Maybe that’s why the cheapskate in me didn’t mind paying $36 bucks to stay in an actual RV park for one night and have electricity, water and TV.  At this point, I don’t feel like driving around looking for a free spot.

I once read a story written by a family who were new to RVing, bought a brand new rig, and took off on a three-month trip right from the RV store.  I remember thinking “These people are crazy” because too many things can go wrong.  In their case, a major appliance went out almost immediately, and they had to drive back to the RV shop and wait days for it to get replaced.  And while I can’t remember all the other issues, plenty more followed.  That’s the reason we knew we had to have our RV at least a year before we left on our trip.  If we hadn’t, we probably would have accidentally driven it off a cliff.

The same thing might be said of a tow vehicle.  In February, we bought a used Honda CRV, which is highly recommended on line by lots of folks as a “toad” because it’s all wheel drive and fairly light weight. We bought the Honda from Chris, the son of our good friends John and Debbie (Hi John and Deb!) But we didn’t get it to it’s full pimped out and expensive toad vehicle glory until a few weeks before we left, and only towed it behind the RV three times before the big trip.

Unfortunately, you just can’t just tie a car to a motor home with baler twine and take off, like my mom used to secure her luggage before a plane trip.  You have to attach big metal pins to the car, hook a bar with y-shaped, flexible “arms” to the pins, attach safety cables from the rig to the car, hook up an electrical cable that allows the “blinkers” on the rig to also turn on the toad blinkers, attach a big box over the toad brake that somehow makes the toad brake engage when you press the RV brake, and attach a breakaway cord that signals the aforementioned big box to engage the toad brake if the worst case scenario actually happens and the toad is no longer one with the RV.


And if any of that makes sense, you are obviously smarter than we are.

We seemed to have all that down, but were having trouble getting the y-shaped bar correctly attached to the toad.   The directions say the y-arm is correctly in place when “the locking handles are engaged and locked.”   But we could not always get both of the “locking handles”  locked, which in our minds meant if you pushed on them they would not move.  After a few hundred miles of driving, and repetitive reading of the tow bar instructions, we now think by “locked,” the instructions are actually referring to the arms of the Y bar and not the handles --  the handles only have to pop up when you first start to tow, and that we can get to happen consistently.

Another lesson learned today:   Don’t park your rig anywhere except a big open space or a designated RV campsite.  Downtown Lander has large parallel parking spaces, and we thought we’d just pull our RV into one of them, go to a coffee shop, get coffee and download our first blog entry.  JIm pulled into a parking space and asked me if he was going to clear a street sign.  I said “yes” because all I could see was the pole -- I didn’t even notice the actual sign.  A clearer head (Jim’s) prevailed and I got out to the rig to make sure we would clear the sign.  We could not.  In fact, if we kept going we’d put a big scrape down the right side of our rig.  Because we were inches from the sign and right on the curb, Jim made a hard left turn; the front Honda tire got caught in the curb and started to turn right instead of left.  A scream from me followed and Jim stopped.  So now our rig was partially in a traffic lane on Lander’s Main Street and our tow car was stuck.  Funny how quickly you can unstick things when you have to.   I’m thinking we will get the Honda’s alignment checked when we get to Ohio, but for the most part we got away unscathed.  And it was back to the casino we stayed at the night before to hook up he rig again in relative privacy.  Without coffee.

Then we got to the Ft. Casper Campground, paid our $36 bucks and started to hook up the electricity, dump hose, TV, water, etc, only to find we are missing a few parts needed  for hook up at an actual RV park. So we got to see a lot of Casper scenery on our way to the Home Depot. On the plus side, you can see forever around here.

Also on the plus side:  JIm is still happy as a clam, and I’m glad to be with Jim.  By the time we get to Ohio we will be  pros.  But today, we felt like monkeys driving a motor home.

East bound and down

After three days of major preparation -- if you don’t count eight years of talking about it,  14 months of figuring out how to drive/operate a motor home, and seven months of getting the house ready -- Jim and I left Salt Lake at about 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, August 2 on our retirement extravaganza RV trip.    We both retired Friday, July 29 and Jim wanted to leave Monday, August 1, but I got a one-day reprieve and we really needed that extra day.  So we’re heading east toward Ohio via Wyoming and then Nebraska.  First stop:  Fossil Butte National Monument in south east Wyoming.  We’d been to Fossil Butte, one of the least visited national monuments, a few years ago and really liked it.  Fifty million years ago a huge lake covered the area; today, it’s semi arid with flat topped buttes that contain some amazingly preserved fossils.  The visitor center brochure says the fossils are  “remarkable for their abundance”  and include plants, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals and over 20 kings of fish, and that millions of specimens have been uncovered.

After a trip to the visitor’s center, Jim and I started to hike an interpretive trail; about a half mile in we ran into a family from New Hampshire who told us they’d just seen a mountain lion; that shortened our hike.  Actually, they said they saw a mountain lion and a fawn, and we didn’t want to see carnage or be carnage.  With all the hiking we’ve done, I wonder how many many times we’ve been close to mountain lions and bears without knowing it.

Us

 Where we spent our first night:  A Fossil Butte ranger told us we could stay on BLM land near the park, and a flat space recently used to stage equipment used for resurfacing the road might be  good bet.    It was perfect.

Jim and Cooper hiking.

View out the back of our rig.

View while driving to Kemmerer, about 8 miles from Fossil Butte.

August 3, 2011

It rained hard last night.  The bottom of our “sleeping loft” is about three feet from the top of the rig, so that made the rain seem even louder.  I thought we’d wake up with mud over our wheels, as we spent the night parked on a flat space at the side of a county road near Fossil Butte.  But all was well.  Before leaving the Fossil Butte area, we took a 2.5 mile hike called he Old Quarry Trail, near the no-longer-in-existance town of Fossil, where we saw an “A frame” shack used by fossil-farmer David Haddenham, who eked out a living mining fossils for 50 years. 

We planned to camp near Atlantic City, Wyoming, a funky town 4 miles off Rt 28 via a gravel road, but didn’t see any good spots, so we decided to drive to Lander.  What a nice town and a beautiful area.  We visited Sinks Canyon State Park.  Water from the Popo Agie River rushes into a limestone caverns; two hours later the same water (they’ve actually done dye tests) appears in a much more peaceful pool just a quarter of a mile away.  Why the water takes so long to get that short distance is still a mystery, said an interpretive sign, but there was some thought that it just travels much more slowly through rocks and crevices of the limestone.

Bev at David Haddenham's summer home of many years.

Where the water enters the sink hole...

And where the water comes out two hours later just one-quarter of a mile away.

Jim and Cooper at the Popo Agie River just outside of Lander.

Our second night home:  Jim called a casino on the Wind River Indian Reservation just a few miles out of Lander and asked if we could stay there over night.  Really, another perfect spot and also free.  

First real trip of the year

The wet, cold weather finally abated so last weekend we took the rig somewhere other than our street for the first time this year: Diamond Fork Campground, just an hour and 15 minutes southeast of Salt Lake.  It’s easy to get to – for anyone familiar with Route 6 and the path to Moab, the turnoff for the campground is just 2 ½ miles past the big wind turbines in Spanish Fork Canyon. (Those things creep me out up close.)

It was a well maintained campground, clean, and with a great kid's hiking path (OK for adults, too) with educational/interpretive signs.  Our site was A1 (Note to self: A12 also looked good) so we were near the entrance, but it was quiet and away from some of the more crowded sites in the middle. 

Our camping spot

View out the back window at dusk.

Right after arrival we hiked a trail we'd read was very popular called Three Forks. It’s popular because after about two miles you come to some hot pots.  It was a little too warm for us to hop in the hot pots, but what a beautiful hike along the really fast flowing Diamond Fork River with lots of shade.  Only thing wrong was that I forgot my camera, so I couldn’t get a photo of the small Niagara Falls near the hot pots.

Next day we drove further up Diamond Fork Canyon and hiked Sawmill Trail.  Again, beautiful, and this time we got some photos.

Jim and a bear climbing a tree.

Sawmill Trail.

T Minus 90 from yesterday

Retirement Date is July 29.  First planned trip is through Wyoming, Nebraska and then to Ohio. In the meantime, we’ve been trying to get the rig ready but have been a tad hampered by cold weather.

For example, here’s the rig when we optimistically brought it home after a warm spell in March.

And here’s a photo of our front yard just yesterday.

Nevertheless, we’ve flushed out the antifreeze we put in the water system last fall and re-packed most of our gear.  We’ve also been involved in a major home downsizing, including getting rid of items we didn’t even know we owned.  Examples: a mixer neither Jim nor I claim to have ever seen; specialty tools whose purpose we can’t imagine; and about 20 cords and parts for land line phones when we no longer have a land line.

So we are getting our house ready to leave, (our daughter, son-in-law and grand daughter are moving in and will watch it while we're gone), finishing up the current careers and should be on the road in August.

And, one year ago this weekend we drove our new-to-us motorhome from California to Utah.

Going to bed

The week before Thanksgiving we put the rig to bed for the winter.  Jim took it to Camping World where they blew air into the water pipes to get the water out, put in anti freeze, and then drained most of the anti freeze.  Any water that’s left has anti freeze in it and supposedly won’t freeze when the temps get low.   Then, Jim and I put a cover on the rig, which was kind of akin to putting a thin cozy on a huge toaster. It was a good thing we did all this, because the following Tuesday while Jim and I were in Ohio celebrating T-Day week with family, SLC got about a foot of snow ... and it stayed very, very cold for two weeks.  Jim is thinking that every few weeks he wants to start up the rig, run the generator, and try everything out just to make sure it’s all running and he did that last week.  Other than part of the cover ripping, so far so good.

      Top photo:  Jim and the back of the rig.  

       Bottom photo:  Jim and the front of the rig

          What we came home to after Thanksgiving in the balmy midwest.