Detour and a lesson in floods

We took northern Nebraska’s Highway 12, called “The Outlaw Trail” from Valentine toward Niobrara State Park, about 150 miles due east.  The road goes from Valentine to Sioux Falls and was said to be a hide out for Jesse James and other bad guys.  About 40 miles east of the park was a big “road closed” sign; we called the park, found out that the recent Missouri River floods still covered Route 12 both west and east of the park, and took a 70-mile detour.  Lesson learned: always check a Department of Transportation web site before heading across a state.  But the bigger lesson is just how devastating a flood can be to a local economy.

Near downtown Niobrara’s mall (a big, low building housing the post office, a grocery and hardware store, bar, and a couple of other small shops) we met the owner of the grocery store.  She said she was down five employees; she’d either let them go because of lack of business, or they quit because they could not afford gasoline to make the detoured drive.  She and the remaining employees are working extra hours to make up for the staffing shortage -- no time off for even new grandchildren -- and the store has a third fewer customers.  She told us of a day care center owner who declared bankruptcy, people whose homes were still under water since the flood hit Memorial Day weekend, and the high financial cost the flood caused the locals.  

We were going to wait until we got to Lincoln to buy supplies, but Jim and I decided to support the local economy and bought groceries.  Then Jim went to the “carry out,” where selection was limited and my IPA-loving husband bought a six-pack of Budweiser (if it’s really cold and you drink two of them, he says, the third one tastes pretty good.) 

The grocery store owner said the local cafe owners had lost their home in the flood, so we decided to support them, too, and purchased a restaurant meal for the first time since we left home.  The fiancee of the owner’s son waited on us; she said their home -- which was 50 feet away from the river -- still had three feet of water inside.  They plan to burn it when the water recedes and the house dries out (which could be a long time, she said) and maybe rebuild. Or maybe not.

View from the back of our rig:  Where the Niobrara River meets the Missouri.  The campground at Niobrara State Park in Nebraska has 76 RV spots but only 11 were filled.  Highway Route 12 -- the only way to get to the park from the east and the west -- has been flooded since Memorial Day.  The only way to get to the park is a single highway from the south, or a gravel road from the west, and town has been severely hurt by the lack of tourism. 

The Missouri River as seen from Niobrara State Park in Nebraska.  Notice the house in the middle of the photo.

A similar shot as above, but wider. 

The Sage Cafe where we ate lunch.  Piles of sand that protected the building from the flood circled the building everywhere except the entrance.

 Jim and Cooper at Highway 12 just west of Niobrara. 

Blinkers, bloopers and brake lights

If an electrical cord is involved, instructions often say something along the lines of “Important!  Do not disconnect by pulling on the cord.  Remove only by grasping the plug!”  Apparently there are reasons for that.  One of them is if you pull the cord that makes your toad brake lights and turn signals sync with your rig lights, you’re likely to rip the whole thing apart and have to spend an extra half day in Chadron, Nebraska. 

The Chadron Home Center in Chadron,  Nebraska.

Not that we don’t like Chadron.  We do.  We spent two nights at Chadron State Park and everyone ... and I do mean everyone ... who passed us in a vehicle when we were walking on the park roads waved at us.  Old folks, teenagers in pick up trucks, young adults with kids.  Everyone.  Chadron is Nebraska’s oldest state park (established in 1921); I wonder if it’s the friendliest one, too.  Plus, they have a great hike to a Black Hills overlook.

View on the way the the Black Hills Overlook.

View at the overlook.

Our camping spot at Chadron State Park in Nebraska.

We also got a chance to really explore the town while looked for a place to repair the result of the afore mentioned no-bodily-injury mishap (this time from unhooking the toad instead of hooking it up) and Chadron State College looks very big considering that Chadron has less than 6,000 residents.  We found a great repair place in the Chadron Home Center and their mechanic, Scott (shout out from Jim and Bev to Scott!) as Scott spent over an hour trying to find out why our sync lights are so screwy.  He kept saying “I don’t know why it’s not working” but kept trying until he figured it out.  

After Chadron, we made our way to the Fishberry Motorhome Park just north of Valentine, NE ( located in the Nebraska Sandhills, the largest tract of grass-stabilized sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere says my AAA book) and just a couple of miles from South  Dakota.   

You spell tomato...

After two days of being in Casper, Wyoming, I finally understand (I think) that the town and fort (that was there before the town) are both spelled Casper with an “e”, while the museum next to the old fort and  the campground we stayed at are  Caspar with an “a.”  The Army wanted to name the fort after Caspar Collins, a 21-year old lieutenant from an Ohio calvary killed in a battle along with four of his soldiers in 1865,  but had already named “Ft. Collins” in honor of Caspar's father.  So the army went with the young man’s first name ... and a paperwork snafu changed the “a” to an “e” and Ft. Casper was born.  Ditto the city.  The museum corrected the mistake -- and apparently the RV park, which is right next to the museum, followed suit.  Adding insult to injury, a portrait of young Lt. Collins in the museum was based on a misidentified photo.

View on the Platte River Parkway in Casper, WY.

View out the back of our rig ... not the usual scenic beauty we like,  but it was clean, quiet,  and had a laundry.

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.