Category: Traveling the hiways and byways

Quite a nice place in the middle of nowhere on an island in the Columbia River.   We have stayed elsewhere along the Columbia River and it’s a major artery for trains heading east and west, on both sides of the river.  Luckily this time there were no crossings so we didn’t hear one whistle during the 5 nights we camped there.

A few days into being their I happened to be looking out the side window and saw a huge tractor driving by.   After a few seconds I saw that it was pulling a fairly large 5th wheel trailer.   It then pulled in next to us.  We occasionally see HDT’s (heavy duty trucks) but usually they are the smaller regional style Volvo’s.   This was a first seeing something this big pulling a 5th wheel.   I bet its challenging when you have to go to the grocery store in that thing.  The tractor itself is very long and probably doesn’t fit well into a handicap space at the store..

The first couple days there was almost no wind, but there were a lot of flies.  Kind of made sitting outside an annoying game of swatting the flies constantly.   Then suddenly on the 3rd afternoon a constant 10 MPH wind started and stayed around that speed for the rest of the week.  The day prior to leaving, it got a bit higher and most of the afternoon there were whitecaps on the river.   That seemed very odd.

They do water the grass here constantly like water is free.  I guess they might have a shallow well that fills from the river.  All around the area it was quite arid.  Golden brown hillsides with the occasional vineyard on a hillside.

It was a long way to anywhere from here.  The closest town was 14 miles, and it was just 3 restaurants and a fuel station.  I drove there to pick up lunch one afternoon, it just seemed like a very long drive.  We are on the north side of the river (Washington side) and it was probably 40 miles east to a  bridge to civilization and about 60 miles to the west.   There is pretty much nothing along the river on the Washington side.

What a great little campground in an extremely small town!  It’s a city park and I cannot say enough about how nice it is.  Every other small town should take notice of what this place is like.  Wide paved smooth roads,  level sites, well-placed full hook- ups.  Everything worked well.   No highway noise or train noise, although there were train tracks only 100 feet away and a crossing, but no trains the 4 days we were there.  The tracks looked like they might be used every once in a while but not often from the rust on the tops of the tracks.

After being here a couple days, we drove up to St. Maries, about an hour’s drive into the St. Joe’s National Forest.  Beautiful drive!  The town wasn’t really what I was expecting.  I was thinking it would be a tourist trap, but I never even saw the requisite trinket shops.   We stopped at a small city park dedicated to the man that surveyed the area for a road for the army and then built it a few years later.

By then we needed lunch and I found a place outside of town, and it turned out it was at a golf course.   The food was good and the view from the patio was spectacular!   Although the yellow jackets attracted by the food weren’t much fun.  The warm tortilla holder lid was perfect for swatting them away.   Kathy hates them, so she literally ate standing up and walking around to dodge them.  I preferred to just swat them away.

We saw deer running up on the fairway near us.  Kind of wondering what type of penalty it was if you hit one with your ball?  Was it considered out of bounds or an ecology sensitive area or what?

Checked out the car museum here in Deer Lodge and was surprised how good it was!   I was thinking there would be a bunch of cars, but there seemed to be hundreds after you snaked thru a lot of rooms where you couldn’t see more till you walked thru the next doorway.  They had a lot of old cars starting out with an odd looking 3 wagon-wheeled contraption that looked like it would tip over on any turn,  and ended up with 1970’s muscle cars.  There was even a Super Bird in the collection.

One of the coolest displays I have ever seen was a 1933 Kozy Kamper Pop-up Trailer.  It was in very good shape for something that will be 90 years old next year.

To my delight there was even a funny little car that one of my childhood eccentric neighbors picked me up in when I was  hitchhiking to the beach one summer morning.  When he stopped, he opened the door, which was the whole front of the car.  Even the steering wheel moved with that door.  It was a bright-red German Messerschmidt, exactly the same as the one I was currently standing in front of!  I had never seen anything like it back then, nor have I ever seen another one since then, till today.  This one was even the same color.

This picture is of a car with the first car air-conditioner, looked more like a swamp cooler to me

This town even had a large Safeway Grocery Store, and the town itself is much smaller than our prior stop, Livingston, MT.

We arrived at this small town which is about 30 miles east of Bozeman.   It was a bit larger town than I had expected.  As we pulled off I-90, there was an Albertson’s Grocery Store right in front of us. (which is a supermarket the size we have in large cities)  We headed over to our campground for a four-night stay.  It was in a rural residential area just on the south edge of town.

As most of the area we’ve been driving thru for the last few weeks was arid, the bugs smashing into the mostly flat front of the motorhome were minimal.  But the drive from close to Billings to Livingston was mostly irrigated fields and with that come the hordes of bugs!  Cleaning them off the front that morning was time consuming at best,  and I had just washed the whole bus the day before in the campground at the Little Big Horn.  UGH!

We drove out the next day to check out the Roosevelt Arch at the north gate of Yellowstone Park.  I had read about the Teddy Roosevelt Arch when I was a kid and thought then someday I would go there to see it.  I finally did, a lot of years after I first read about it.  It is a magnificent structure, very tall, but the opening to drive thru it into the park was not very wide…  I guess back then cars were few and far between.  I am pretty sure only one car can go through it at a time.   And it’s only for cars/buses going into the park, outbound vehicles bypass it.

The north entrance to Yellowstone is closed indefinitely from the flooding they had a few months ago.  It’s a big impact to the little town of Gardiner, Montana.  The main reason to take the drive out there is to go into the park.  Hope they make it through the years it will take to redo the road.

One evening when I was sitting outside, a woman approached with her dog, asking if we were from Southern California.  Apparently she had seen Kathy’s USC license plate holder.  I replied yes, that we are from San Diego.   She then told me her family owns a grocery store there.  I told her we lived in Del Cerro, and she laughed and said that’s where her family’s grocery store is.  I asked if it was Windmill Farms,  and she said yup.   Then she told me she had a sandwich in the deli named after her, the Lindsey Special, which is our favorite sandwich they make!!   She mentioned it was really her brother’s favorite sandwich, but they didn’t think that a Trevor Special had the right ring to it.  Talk about a small world, here we are about 1,000 miles as the crow flies away and we meet someone from home!

Later she came back when Kathy was outside with me and I introduced them.  She was astonished too.   Lindsey was on a 10-month trip in her travel trailer.  She told us she rented her house out via Air BNB and had her family friend (a realtor) handle all the details and issues while gone.  I think we should really look into that when we travel next year; with the price of fuel, an extra $2k per month could really come in handy at the pump!

The next evening a gentleman came by asking about my new paint job.   We ended up talking for more than an hour.  He had been a train engineer going between Amarillo and Winslow, Arizona, most of his career.  He retired recently and is currently living full time in his motorhome and fly-fishing everywhere he can.  He wants to have his 2006 motorhome painted too as it sounded like he has a clear coat issue like mine did.

I walked by his motorhome the next morning as he mentioned he had started using Starlink recently and loved it.  I wanted to see how he had mounted it.  He was using the standard tripod on the ground.  So, nothing new to see for my deployment this winter.   I didn’t notice his paint issues, so it’s probably not as bad as mine was.  Hopefully we will meet up again as he was fun to talk to.

We drove up from Buffalo, WY, and got to the 7 Ranch Campground around 1 pm.   They weren’t kidding about not using a GPS to get there.  Google Maps directions wanted to take me the wrong way twice after I got off the freeway.  The first one was down a long paved road along the eastern side of the freeway that I had noticed had ended at the Little Bighorn River prior to where the campground road was.   We followed the signs to the park and about half way there along the road on the west side of the freeway it kept wanting me to make a right turn down a couple of dirt roads.  Geez, the campground folks were right.  If I had followed either of those routes provided, I would have been a really unhappy person as we cannot back up with the car in tow.

We headed over to the Little Big Horn national monument early this morning, not long after it opened at 8 am.   It’s kind of an eerie place, vast hills and ravines for as far as you can see.   This would have been a really awful place to fight a battle in June, although the tops of the ridges and hills should have been pretty good vantage points if you still had ammo.

All along the ridges and hills were small groups of two or three white grave stones with the inscription, 7th Calvary solder fell here.   A few places there were many in the groupings.   The pictures of the landscape don’t show how steep the ground was.

We drove down to Reno’s battlefield and realized that was a long way south of where Custer’s men were.   And about halfway between there was a marker for an Indian settlement.   Not sure how he could have fought his way to Custer with the mule train of ammo as he was under attack the whole time too.

The park appears to have private land right in the middle between the two largest battlegrounds.  Along that way we came upon a herd of horses.  As they appeared to be on the private land area, I was guessing they weren’t wild.  They appeared to be fenced in as there were fences along that stretch of roadway.   But all along that part of the road were piles of horse dung.  It seemed odd the horses would walk along that roadway, and how did they get past the fence?

Short Horse video.

There is a national cemetery there where I presume all the 7th Calvary men were buried, although there appeared to be many more than 270 graves, but nowhere near as large as other national cemeteries we have seen.  The one my Dad and Mom are buried in is huge in comparison.

We arrived in Buffalo Wy around 1 in the afternoon, checked in and drove over to our very shady campsite.   Trees are not normal in the high plains, so this is  a really great campsite as the whole campground was full of very large trees.  Now this might not of been a great place to be if the Gale from the prior night had come thru here.  But my neighbor said the night prior had been totally calm winds.

We had been to Buffalo 5 years ago but when I drove off to buy groceries it didn’t look at all familiar to me.  We are still recovering from our Covid 19 bout so we haven’t been doing much at all.

We headed west from Denver toward Idaho Springs, then up the highest pass we had ever traversed at 11,307 feet, Berthoud Pass, with the Bus pulling the car!

We arrived at the campground and it took a while to find the entrance.   It is a HUGE place and there appeared to be hundreds of small, very new cabins that could be rented.   The campground was so large that each time we drove back in the car, I had a hard time finding our spot.  I actually had to look for our uniquely painted bus to find it.  That was a first!  And it happened each time we came back from somewhere.   No wonder they do a brisk business renting golf carts so people can get to the front where all the facilities are!  The down side of that is kids are frequently allowed to drive, and we have seen some bad outcomes from that!

That campground was very nice, and I personally think it qualifies to have Resort in the name.   Very few, in my opinion, of the parks with resort in their name are.

We drove up to the western entrance to the RMNP before 9 am so we wouldn’t need another reservation, and then drove up to the Continental Divide to a lake I thought was really the headwaters of the Colorado River.   It wasn’t.  It was actually just on the other side of the Divide that would drain toward the Atlantic Ocean.

The next day we headed to Grand Lake in the morning to hopefully beat the crowds, and it worked.  It’s a tourist town, zillions of shops selling trinkets or food.   The lake front was very nice.   The city had spent its money well.  It was much smaller than expected with the name Grand Lake.  There were a couple of much larger manmade lakes just south of this one.

We spent the morning walking around and eventually had lunch there on an outside patio with Dusty in tow.   We headed back to the Bus, having felt we saw all of Grand Lake, except from the water.  And it was odd, there were a lot of boats on the water, but I didn’t see any place to rent one.  Busiest lake we have seen while traveling:  boats, paddle boards, canoes, kayaks, jet skis, sail boats, pontoon boats (which Kathy would love to try!).  By noon it was packed!  I think it was worse than San Diego Bay in the summer.

We couldn’t any campgrounds with vacancy so we left early from our Royal Gorge campground to see if we could get a FCFS campsite at the Colorado Springs Elks lodge.   We lucked out, there were two spaces unoccupied.   We had a base camp for the area now!   We had tickets for the next morning on the Cog Railway to the Pikes Peak summit.   Then we wanted to check out the Garden of the Gods and the Air Force Academy Chapel.

I was also trying to get someone to replace the Intake and Exhaust Camshaft Solenoids on the car.  I purchased an ODB2 Code Reader and figured out the issue was with the those two solenoids.  For a while now, everywhere I called was too busy for many weeks before they could work on it.  I really didn’t want to do the work myself, but I was thinking I might have to.  I drove over to the local Chevy dealer in the north end of CS and they were able to do the work in about an hour.

One afternoon driving around the city on the freeway I saw an object that made me think we would find Richard Dean Anderson, AKA Jack O’Neill.  We had to drive over and get a closer look.  From the distance it really looked like the SG, but not once we got there.

July 13th thru the 17th.