Day 14 -- Ashton to Salmon, Idaho -- 182 Miles

Last night's camp, being both well off the highway and "planted" in the middle of potato fields, turned out to be one surprise after another. After a whole slew of skinny county roads and multiple turns to get there, we arrived at a copse of trees that looked just like someone's farmstead or backyard. But that wasn't so. In reality, the enterprising owners of this particular patch of Idaho countryside had not only built themselves an RV park, but had appended the RV park onto a 9-hole golf course.

As we turned yet again and rolled up the drive, we couldn't, at that point, figure all this out. We had seen the signs that said "golf course." And we had seen the sign that announced that we had found our sought-after RV park. But the mixture of the two entrepreneurial endeavors, along with the normal accoutrements of a farmstead like tractors and piles of building materials, really made us wonder what was going on.

At first we couldn't even see a registration office as we passed a couple of elderly RVs semi-permenently nestled in among the trees, a personal residence that looked uninhabited and uninviting, and a whole lot of nothing else. But rounding a bend in the drive we finally saw a barn-like structure looking very much like the registration office we sought.

With no place in particular to stop the rig that would allow anyone else to get by us, I went ahead and parked, jumped down, and headed for the door. As I pulled the door open, a pretty young woman, at least a half a head taller than me, appeared looking quite surprised. She looked so surprised, I wondered if we had simply wandered onto someone's farm and us showing up was the last thing anyone expected.

That didn't turn out to be so, however, as I immediately caught sight of the registration desk. An older woman behind the counter looked up, smiled at me, and beckoned me to come on over. Once I was standing in front of her, she immediately set about paging through paperwork, rummaging through notes on the counter, and looking quite perplexed.

At some point I figured out what she must be doing. "Ah," I said, "I don't have a reservation."

She looked up at me and said, "You don't? Well no wonder I can't find you."

How she initially knew WHO to look for in her paperwork I decided not to ask. "Yup," I said. "We just wandered in off the highway."

That made her laugh and we were best buddies after that. Also, at that point, the pretty young woman came back from wherever she had gone off to, and together she and the older woman rumaged and figured and pondered where to put us and finally decided on space #6. We were all having such a good time by then that I actually hated to leave.

When I finally exited the registration office, there was a chap sitting on an ATV looking expectantly at me. "I'll show you your site," he said, though I never saw anyone communicate with him. Still, the chap set about turning his ATV around and then headed off down the hill from the office.

We followed until we had descended the hill, crossed part of the golf course, and pulled up in front of space six which I suspected I'd never be able to manuever the rig into without it being lifted in by a heliocopter. By then ATV guy must have seen the look on my face as he came over to my now lowered window and said, "don't worry, just turn your rig here," he pointed to my right, "and drive onto the golf course. "Then you'll be able to back into the space." Once he watched us get safely parked and explained why the water hydrant was on the wrong side of the space, he took off and left us alone to get organized.

And that's what we did. The space turned out to be anything but level, but with a few blocks and some fudging a bit, we were soon set up and ready for a quiet evening. And quiet it was for sure. Except for a small commotion an hour or so later when a couple of campers' dogs decided to engage in all-out war, we didn't hear anything for the rest of our stay.

At this point I have to say that we'd definitely stay at the Aspen Acres RV Park again were we traveling in the area. Looking at the map, I see that the park sports no less than 41 sites. Our small subset unit of the park numbered just 8. But I had no idea until I sat down to type this that there were that many spaces available. We just never heard any noise from all those campers around us. AND, as you see from the photo at left, celebrities like RTD2 spend their summers in Idaho and their free time playing golf at the Yellowstone Golf Resort next door.

Come morning we rolled out of the park just after nine and were happily on our way, at least we thought so. Soon yours truly was NOT a happy camper. The problem was we got totally lost. It was mostly my fault, of course. I was completely oblivious to the fact that the GPS on Concetta's IPhone took us TO the camp one way, and directed us FROM the camp another. We left highway 20 to begin navigating the county-road approach to our destination. And our departing directions delivered us to Idaho Route 32, which I thought was Route 20. Consequently, after we had driven two dozen miles in the wrong direction, I suddenly realized that the Teton Mountains were ahead of us when they should have been behind us.

Thankfully, we finally got turned around and found Route 20. Two hours later we had transitioned off Route 20 to Route 33, then Route 28, and by lunchtime we were, at long last, headed north in the direction of Salmon, Idaho on Route 28. The debacle put us noticibly behind and made it super tough to find a camp on Route 28 by the time we wanted to quit driving for the day. As you can see by the photo at right, there isn't a lot of anything along route 28 but empty space.

When we arrived in Salmon, the first thing we discovered was that there weren't many camps to pick from, and those tended to be a considerable distance outside of town. We stopped first at a tiny camp right beside the highway, but a sign in the office door said, "closed for a family emergency."

We drove on. The next camp we encountered looked completely empty so we drove in. But a sign over the door said, "We don't want any RVers. Go away. No spaces available."

We looked longingly at all the empty spaces with full hookups just going to waste, and for a fleeting moment I thought about hooking up anyway, since no one was there. But in the end I thought better of it, and we circled the camp and left.

Back on the highway, we hadn't gone half a block and we came across another sign that proclaimed that an RV camp was located on the property. It looked like a restaurant with RV spaces behind, so we drove in. But the further we got onto the property, the less inviting the so called RV camp looked. You've probably seen this type of camp. It's full of long-term people who never move, and everything is rundown and junky looking.

Nevertheless, it was now way past our usual cocktail hour, and I stopped the rig, got down, and went into the restaurant -- where I found no one there, at least at first. But after I had called out several times, a tall, twenty-something lad appeared and asked how he could help me.

When I told him we were looking for a space for the night, the lad wrinkled his brow and seemed to be pondering. "Well," he said finally, "we do have a space, but it's supposed to be for some heliocopeter smoke jumpers who are coming tomorrow."

"We'd be gone tomorrow morning," I told him.

"Hmmm," he said, with more brow wrinkling, then said, "How about I call the boss?"

Which is what the young man did. Soon the boss showed up in her car and walked around the tiny RV park with me. Once we'd finished, she told me that if we'd be out by 8:00 a.m. she'd let us stay. And that was that. Everyone was super nice to us. The young lad even gave me a free cup of coffee while I waited for the boss to show up. The electricity at our site was wonky, or that's what our surge-protector said, but I just hooked up the 110 volt line to be safe. Our super friendly neighbor turned off his water so I could use a "Y" on his hydrant allowing us both to hook up. Then he and I had a great conversation about our mutual endeavors in rental properties, and I liked him quite a bit. Lost his wife recently, he told me, and his kids want him to move to Utah to be near them. "But," he said, "I like it here and I don't want to lose my independence."

I knew just what he was talking about. "Yes," I told him, "hang onto that independence as long as you can. It's pretty darn hard getting it back once you lose it."

Tomorrow we're excited that the town of Salmon, Idaho, has a Sacagaweah museum for us to visit. We passed it on the way into town, so we know just where to find it. Tomorrow's promised weather doesn't bode especially well, and may include thunderstorms and even snow. But if we can find a camp tomorrrow, up the road toward Missoula, Montana, before the weather worsens, we'll just try and hunker down until the bad weather passes. For right now, you can see in the photo at right that we have a swiftly-running river right outside our window, and we're betting that the coming sunrise will transform it into a beautiful photograph.