Day 88- 95 - Montana, Idaho & Canada

We cruised through Montana - it is so much like home, it made us smile.  The weather is getting cooler and the trees more numerous, just a nice feeling.  Too bad we can't stay longer but it is close to home so I'm sure we'll be back.  We camped at Bozeman and Missoula, taking in the pools at the campgrounds and not doing much else.  Driving and swimming make us all pretty tired!  We experienced our first rainfall since Oregon (about 2.5 months ago).   Jack has finally decided that he will wear his sunglasses for longer than 2 seconds.  Figures, now that we are out of the 100 degree bright hot sun we have experienced for weeks!

Near Coure D'Alene, driving north on I90, we had to stop as the scenery included huge roller coasters and a waterpark - so we set up camp and took in Silverwood.   Fun times were had by all....except maybe on the Elephant ride!  John and I enjoyed the wooden rollar coasters!  We also saw our first Alberta licence plate of our entire trip and it turned out that we knew him from the industry!  Small world.

We continued north through Sandpoint and found a great campground (voted by both of us to be the best one of the trip) at the junction of the Kootenay and Moyie Rivers.  It was our last night in the U.S so we had a campfire and did a 20 question questionnaire (I wonder who made that up?) of our best and worst campgrounds, places, events, etc.  It is so hard to pick when the places are all so unique...seriously, how can you compare Disneyland and Death Valley??  But we both decided the Kootenays is our favorite place...its a good thing when your retirement plan and your favorite place are the same!

We spent 3 nights with our friends in the Kootenays who again spoiled us with their generosity and homemade salads and muffins!  The weather was much better than our first stop out there this trip...Jack and Gus both loved to hang out on the edge of the water and we weren't complaining!

One night in Fairmont Hot Springs and then travelled home.  95 days and in the words of Dorothy, there is no place like home!  

Happy Canada Day!

John, Cami, Jack & Gus

Day 84-87 - Teton & Yellowstone National Parks, Wyoming

We left Utah, traveled through Idaho and entered Wyoming - all within a few hours.  The scenery is beautiful and the weather great.  Wyoming is so picturesque.  It is like being in the Black Diamond/Longview area of Alberta for a much longer distance!  The feel is very western, the ranches are stunning, most with absolutely huge log and timber frame homes with green rolling hills and mountains in the background.  Antlers are the decoration of choice here...we had to laugh at one town, the welcome sign was an arch of antlers that was put right over the main highway...no doubt you are in cowboy territory!  The trend continued in the next town as we saw antlers used to make park archways and wreaths on doors!  I was a little shocked at first and then remembered that elk lose their antlers each year so they don't each represent a killed animal at least!  

We stayed a couple days just outside of Yellowstone park and took in the beauty of the Teton mountains.  Our campground was right on the snake river and we fell asleep to the sound of cows mooing (or booing as Jack calls it) on the hills across the river.  They were hilariously loud.

We were lucky to get a campground in Yellowstone with only 1 day notice - people make reservations months in advance so I must have called at the right time!  We met some great people in the campground and Jack met a fellow truck lover (Alex, who was 3) so he was more than happy with Yellowstone.

Yellowstone is a huge busy park with so much contrasting scenery.  Although it was hit by fires in 1988, the trees are in re-growth stage and are providing a neat backdrop to all the geysers.  As you drive around, you see mist billowing out of the forest, and you know there is a geyser there...a little further along you will see a barren area where the trees cannot grow because of the heat of the hot water bubbling up from the earth in amazing colour..and yet there is still quite a bit of snow on the ground - very bizarre.  And lots of wildlife!  

We (along with hundreds of our closest friends) saw Old Faithful shoot into the sky...as it does every 90 minutes or so.   It was neat but my best memory of Old Faithful will forever be that as Jack was playing in front of it waiting for it to blow he finally decided to stop calling me Daddy and called me Mommy for the first time. yay!

We headed north out of the park which put us into Montana and we are starting to head home somewhat in shock that time has gone so fast.  We are going to head toward Sandpoint, Idaho for a few days and maybe to the Kootenays for a couple of days and end off where we started.

Day 79-83 - Park City & Salt Lake City, Utah

We had a long day of driving (for us, that is about 6 hrs including breaks) and made it to Park City which was the home of the 2002 Winter Olympics (or at least the skiing part) and found a great campground with a nice pool and view of the ski jump hill.   The weather is great.  We are again at a high altitude (they had snow only 4 days before we got there!) but it is about 80 degrees and sunny and we spent a relaxing day watching the aerialists put on a show...it is a big practice facility where athletes can jump off the ski jumps into a pool.  There was music, lots of people and we had a picnic while we watched.  Toured around the town a bit and realized there are about 12 ski hills right in the area and about 4 right in town!  I'm sure it would be a bustling fun place to be in the winter.  There is tons of condos, new developments and it is obvious there is lots of money in the area.

Sunday was our adventure day and we took in the rides at the olympic park...zip lines down the mountain, an alpine ride down the mountain (an individual sled down a stainless steel track where you can control how slow/fast you go) and I went in a bobsled down the official track on the fastest, craziest minute of my life.  It gives 4 Gs of force as you barrel down the track with a professional driver.  Pretty cool.  Then we went to another hill in town and did an individual rollar coaster down the mountain and another alpine slide that allowed Jack to go on with John (we just had to lie a bit and say he was 2 years old).  He enjoyed it - I was more nervous of the ride up on the chairlift than the ride since 30 years ago my sister fell off the very same chairlift.  We toured mainstreet shops and ended the day with a swim and then a hot tub (baby monitors are a wonderful thing).

We visited with some distant relatives and family friends in Salt Lake City.  The weather is great (90s) and it was nice to see people I haven't seen in 20 years!  The Jeep had yet more problems (we weren't able to go above 50km/h on the interstate since it wouldn't shift gears - yikes).  We were lucky to get the issue fixed right away ("lucky" - this is looking on the positive side since we are getting a little frustrated with it at the moment).  We are staying at the most children friendly campground in the world (not surprising - as we are in Mormon country).  It has a waterpark, waterslides, minigolf, batting cages, mazes, etc.  Jack loves waterslides - he was on the run from the end of the slide up to the top again - I can understand why all the people here have children so young - so you can keep up to them when they are running in a waterpark!  John and I felt like we should pretend to be Jack's grandparents so we would fit in -the parents are very very young here!!  We slowed him down by enjoying the lazy tube float through a mock western town.  We had a great day and all are exhausted.

On route to Yellowstone National Park tomorrow.

Day 75-78 - Zion & Bryce National Parks

From Lake Powell we headed to Zion National Park in southern Utah.  We had to buy a special guide pass ($15) for the Beast to pass thru the tunnel into the park – basically they have to stop the traffic going the other way so the Beast can go through the tallest part of the tunnel!  What an entrance to the park…the scenery is incredible…you travel right down into the base of the canyon…tons of switchbacks. 

Our first night in Zion was the strangest night of our trip. The biker dude, (complete with Harley motorcycle and long ponytail) in the monster motorhome next to us (ours looked puny) came to chat and next thing you know, his friend stops by who was pretty scary looking (turns out he was in a band called UFO and was the roommate of a band member from Motley Crue).  They are telling us that in the town they live in it is the law that you have to own a gun (I don’t know if I really believe this).  He offered to show me all the guns he had in his motorhome but I gratefully declined.  Later in the evening after continued talk of guns, he gave us the tour of his motorhome, and it was the tackiest thing we’d ever seen…it looked like a band tour bus from the 80s – mirrors on the ceiling and everywhere else, a stuffed rattlesnake in a glass case on display, lights lining the ceiling and stairs (I could go on).  Then somehow, John leaves me there and I am forced to sing karaoke with the biker dudes.  It was so bizarre it was funny.   I could have killed John for saying …”Cami will stay, I have to look after Gus so he won’t bark”.  Somehow, I managed to survive the whole ordeal…I had a few choice words for John upon my return let me tell you!  

The next day, we took the shuttle from the campground into the park (no one is allowed to drive in as they didn’t build enough parking spots in the park either) and then went on a couple of nice hikes into the canyon (the walls of the Zion canyon are huge!!)…and its greener than you think it would be because the rock is so porous it can hold lots of water.

We stopped for lunch at the lodge and Jack had his first ice cream cone and subsequent first ice cream cone disaster when the ice cream plopped on the grass.  He wasn’t impressed!  It was a long day of hiking so we had escaped to the Beast and didn’t come out till the morning (it had nothing to do with the fact I didn’t want to be kareoking again!).

The next couple of days were at Bryce Canyon National Park.  The days are warm but this park is at a very high altitude (8,000 -9,000 feet) and is cold at night.  There are lots of tenters at this campground and we were feeling pretty old in our big Beast…where has the time gone…we were the teenagers in the tent not that long ago…but what happened?

We started the day with a hike along the rim of the canyon – what a spectacular sight.  I can see why this rivals the Grand Canyon!  It is red hoodoo like formations as far as you can see!  We weren’t going to do another hike but it was one of the coolest places we’ve seen so we did another hike down into the canyon…absolutely astounding scenery - a very steep climb back up but definitely worth every painstaking step!

The red rock is gorgeous but we have had enough and have decided to forgo yet another red rock national park that we had been planning to see and head north – we need to see more familiar landscape and are now thinking about home.  Destination:  Park City, Utah.

 

Day 69-74 - Silver City, Happy Jack & Lake Powell, Arizona

We have been off the "RV'ing" route and back to "camping".  There is a big difference.  Camping doesn't have internet access, moving on a daily basis and in some cases,electricity!  Thus, my hiatus explained.  We have been discussing that our initial expectations and the reality of our trip are different (not in a bad way - just different) - the majority of this trip is RVing because there is so much to see, our days that we thought we'd spend relaxing and painting (John) and making a digital movie of Jack's first year (Cami) are filled with exhaustion from traveling and looking after a 1.5 yr old and reading maps/tourism info for the next day! 

After the White Sands, we travelled through an active US missile range (no testing that day thank goodness and they almost weren't going to let us in to the museum because we were "foreigners" - give me a break).  The gale force winds on the ugly desert to Silver City almost pushed the Beast off the road a few times - quite scary.  

On route to Show Low, Arizona, we stopped and picnic'd and hiked "The Catwalk" - a steel walkway perched high above a canyon...it was an old water pipeline that served a mine so they used the old fastners in the rock and made it a hike.  Weird.  Bam Bam had fun chucking huge rocks in the river.  While I was catering to the demands of a 1.5 yr old on a long travel day and not navigating, John missed the turn and we ended up on an entirely different highway than we planned (and he thinks I'm a bad navigator!).  We ended up at a great little town called Pinetop.  This part of Arizona is full of pine trees and is an oasis from the typical desert you think of when you think of Arizona.  Apparently, it is where the people of Phoenix have their summer homes as it is much higher in elevation and therefore cooler in the summer.  Lots of high end homes - basically the Invermere of Arizona.  

The next day brought us continued forest beauty of Arizona.  We are on secondary roads (which we usually are) and are passing through some really cute forest towns.  Horseback riding, ATVing and hiking are the pastimes of choice here.  We camped at Happy Jack, Arizona.  Sent our postcards from the smallest post office in the US and bought our t-shirts (how could we not?) and travelled back to Flagstaff yet again and picked up the now fully restored Jeep!  Not wanting to stay in Flagstaff, we pushed on to Lake Powell.  A long expensive day but once we arrived - all was forgotten and we savored a great camping spot on the shores of Lake Powell.

Lake Powell is the second largest man made lake (next to Lake Mead) - it is absolutely huge.  Very cool that it was only a river prior to the Glen Canyon dam being built which put 580 feet of water for hundreds of miles where there was no water before.  And boy, are people enjoying it - the marina near where we stayed had so many houseboats - we counted about 400!  We had a great day...biking around the resort, swimming in the pool, watching roadrunners scatter around our campsite, taking a boat tour to a canyon and then Jack thoroughly enjoyed his first pizza that we ordered from the nearby hotel.  However, we did realize why no one else was biking...the desert is full of tiny cactuses as well...we both had flat tires at different points in the day! 

Day 68 - White Sands, New Mexico

We had a long difficult afternoon of traveling (someone did not want to be in a car seat) but it ended great.  We stopped at a cute little mountain town called Cloudcroft and wandered the street (there is only one I think!) and did some shopping (John even bought his first things on the trip – a t-shirt and a hat) and then we ended up at White Sands. 

What a completely bizarre place.   There are 250 square miles of the whitest and softest sand (actually gypsum) in the middle of this desert like area.  You drive down this 8 mile road that starts as asphalt and desert and then there are all of a sudden white hills of sand on either side of the road and then the road is no longer paved and you are driving on the sand (very compacted).  It is exactly like a huge beautiful snowfall (except that it is 110 degrees F).   It is the world’s largest field of gypsum sand dunes – if you walk 10 minutes in any direction, suddenly all you can see are chalk white dunes (30 feet high). There are some plants that grow in it even – the Yucca to name the only one I can remember.   There are also a few lizards, mice and even a fox that has adapted to this strange terrain.  But again, you can’t see them because they have all adapted and are white.  No disappointment on my part – oh darn, I can’t see the mice. 

We bought a snow/sand disk and tobogganed down the dunes!  It was so much fun!  The only drawback was the howling wind blowing the sand into our face (Jack was not impressed when that happened).  But I guess you can’t have dunes without wind.  The sand is really soft – I had to take my flip flops off because I almost lost them walking up the dune.  And even in this crazy heat, it’s not hot on your feet – because the white reflects the sun.

We took a ranger guided tour at sunset - the setting sun on the dunes is so beautiful.  It is a super cool place and another on the recommend to see someday list.

Day 66-67 - Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico

Wow.  A conversation from our friend Don sparked our interest in the Caverns and we are sure glad it did!  We stopped along the way from Lubbock in the town of Carlsbad and had a quick swim in the Pecos river that goes through town.  It was 112 degrees and we needed a swim break!  Lots of kids playing in the water and Jack played for a while in the water but would rather run his new truck along the neighboring sidewalk!

We reached our campground (if you can call it that - yet another in the running for the ugliest campground), grabbed a quick bite and headed for the 7:30 show at the entrance to the Cavern...millions of bats fly out of the Carlsbad Caverns around sunset.  Everyone gathers in the outdoor amphitheater, they tell you about bats, the cave swallows (birds) swoop around to get you in the mood, and then the bats fly out in droves!  It is really quite cool and it happens everyday.  (Jack can also say "bat" now).

The next morning we drove back up to the Cavern and walked into the 750 foot deep cavern.  We walked and walked and walked - we went at a relatively good pace and it took us about 2.5 hours!  The place was simply huge and simply astonishing.  So beautiful and breathtaking.  Difficult to describe.  I will let the pictures say it all.  But you can't really get the feeling from them...the flash changes the ambiance and one of the areas down there is so big that it can fit 14 Astrodomes in it (their words not mine).  There is an elevator that takes you back up.   That is always the draw back to these amazing natural phenomenon - so many people want to see them that there is always too much over commercialization...but without it, we couldn't have seen it.  Good with the bad.

We throughly enjoyed the caverns and highly suggest it to anyone coming down this way.  

Spent the evening in a campground whose electricity kept going out...not the best when your air conditioning works on electricity and its 112 degrees or when its the 3rd OT period in the Stanley Cup playoffs and you miss the goal!