Day 17 -- Missoula to Bozeman, Montana -- 202 Miles

Quite a few things wander across your mind while you're traveling by motor home from here to there: Did I successfully pick up all our gear from the campsite? If we used the crank-up arial for the TV, did we remember to crank it down? Did I lock all the lockers so they won't flap open and dump things all along the highway? Are the water heater and space heater controls in the off position? Did we forget anything when we stopped for groceries? Will the next camp be totally full and we'll have to look elsewhere? That sort of thing.

Even more prominently, the subject of tires is often on my mind. When we bought our first motor home in 2013, I chose to ignore the sage advice I'd been given about never trusting the tires on a used RV. Make sure, the advisor told me, to buy new ones before you take your rig out on the road. To me, the tires looked nearly new so I decided not to worry.

So it didn't come totally unexpectantly when Concetta and I had only traveled a few hundred miles from home, on our very first RV vacation, that the "nearly new" tires that I hadn't replaced began to fail on us.

One of the rear dualie tires started to go flat as we drove east out of Minneapolis on a horribly-crowed, eight-lane Interstate. Fortunately, I could feel it in the steering and was able to exit the Interstate, roll gently down the ramp, and come to rest beneath an overpass before the tire went completely flat.

We immediately called Triple-A, a service we had paid into for some thirty years, only to be told by an impatient young woman that Triple-A did NOT handle motor homes. I pointed out to her that their policy, which we had in front of us, did not back up what she was saying. Unfortunately, the young woman refused to agree, though she was kind enough to call a tow truck company for us. She affirmed, however, that we would have to pay the tow company ourselves.

When the tow truck driver arrived at our shady spot beneath the noisy overpass, he quickly discovered that he did not bring the proper socket for our wheel's large lug nuts. Fortunately, and incredibly, while waiting for the tow truck to arrive, I had discoverd just the right-sized socket for our lugs laying on the ground near the rig. I was more than happy to loan my newly-found socket to the driver.

The next problem we discovered underneath the freeway overpass was that our spare wheel and tire were for the wrong make of truck and did not fit on our rig. When we had purchased the RV, the previous owner had no spare tire and wheel. But being a nice guy, he offered to find us the proper wheel for the rig and have a tire mounted if we would pay for it. Since he was in Lodi, California, and we were Carson City, Nevada, that sounded like a good deal and we said okay. Even now, I choose to believe that the owner probably didn't even know the wrecking yard sold him the wrong wheel. We'll never know.

Fortunately for us, the tow truck driver was willing to remove the new tire from the incorrect wheel and the flat tire from the correct wheel so that he could mount the new tire on the correct wheel. None of this was easy to do using nothing but the tools he carried on his truck.

Once the job was done, the tow truck driver told us that we should return to Minneapolis and get a whole new set of tires for our rig. He even recommended a brand and quality of tire to use, telling us he personally didn't sell tires, but the tire he recommended seemed to be very reliable on motor homes in his experience.

Believe it or not, after staying the night in a local Minneapolis campground, we were on our way into the city to buy new tires when we had a blowout on the right front tire which dropped the right front wheel right down on the ground, bending it and making it useless for mounting a new tire.

I guess that at that point fate decided that it had punished us enough. Even though we were standing beside the Interstate, with loads of traffic screaming by, we were able to find a wheel company in Minneapolis that had two of the correct wheels to sell us, one for the incorrect spare and one for the ruined front wheel, and agreed to scrounge up an old tire to put on one wheel so that we could get to a tire company successfully.

The final part of this drama was played out when the wheel company employee came with our wheels, one bare and one with a mounted used tire. That was great! The only problem was, he had brought a jack that was insufficiently large to lift the truck far enough off the ground to get the old shredded tire and bent wheel off, and the new wheel and tire replaced. Were it not for the fact that we carried shovels with us, making it possible for the wheel guy to dig enough dirt away for the wheel to slide into place, we would have been stuck beside the Interstate for a few more hours while he went to find a better jack.

To make a long story even longer, the next morning we purhased an entire set of six tires for the rig, which certainly put a dent in our vacation budget. Because the tire store had two people out sick, and a huge backlog of work to do, they took the entire day to mount and install our six tires. What an ordeal

And that's why I often worry about tires while we're on the road.

Which brings me to the real subject of this blog entry. Both yesterday and today it appeared to me as though something was amiss with the passenger side dualies. I stood back a couple of times and viewed the tires and finally decided it was just soft ground on that side that made them look low on air. I looked again this morning before leaving Missoula, Montana, but once again decided that perhaps the left side tires looked "flatter" than the right side tires because they were resting on the grass while the left side tires were resting on the gravel. I decided to wait until I could see the truck sitting completely level to decide if I had a problem. It would have been nice to test the tire pressure, but I didn't think I had the proper tool to use on the dualie.

Finally, when we returned to the RV after doing a bit of grocery shopping in the town of Deer Lodge, some miles down the highway from Missoula, I definitely thought something looked wrong. A fellow shopper, in the parking lot at the same time, offered to check the air for me but he didn't have the proper tool, either. Thankfully, he was good enough to direct us to a nearby tire store.

Once we stopped at the tire store, things got a little more complicated. The tire store guy didn't have the proper angled tire pressure guage either, so he went to get his manager involved. The three of us decided that the tire simply needed to come off. The tire guy needed to test for nails or other punctures by immersing the tire in water and watching for bubbles, then make sure both tires on the driver's side had the proper amount of air before replacing them.

Accomplishing this feat of tiresmenship took the better part of an hour, and we discovered that the tires on the passenger side were underinflated by ten or more pounds. Once the outer-most tire had checked out as having no nail, puncture, or loose valve stem, the tire man aired the tire up to the proper seventy pounds and remounted the tire on the rig.

Though it appears that we weren't in any trouble to speak of, I feel better now that the tires have the proper amount of air and I don't have to worry about it quite so much. The incident let me know that I will need to find a tire pressure guage capable of testing the stem on the outer of the dualie wheels if I want to do the job myself. The photo of the rig next to the caboose is where we stopped for lunch in Deer Lodge after leaving the tire store.

This afternoon we managed to find a camp in Bozeman, Montana, and snagged one of their few remaining spaces. The trip here today on the Interstate was not as bad as we had anticipated, since the traffic was exceedingly light and there were't many 18-wheelers to complain about. Part of the reason we traveled to the southeast from Bozeman is that we expected that we'd encounter less snow. Amazingly, there is even more snow in the mountains here than in mountains around Missoula. But tomorrow we head straight south toward the top end of Yellowstone Park. We don't really want to spend any time there, but the northern part of the park provides a short of short cut away from the main attractions and toward the eastern entrance which will save us quite a few miles on our way to warmer climes.

As you can see by the photos, there's lots of snow in these here parts. We stopped to shoot some of the snow as we drove over the 6,368 foot pass between Butte and Bozeman today. The views were absolutely beautiful, but it's darn cold when you get out of the rig. On the Bozeman side of the pass we came across a truck on fire that had backed up traffic on the affected side of the highway for about a mile. We were sure glad not to have run into that bit of bad luck.

Day 16 -- taking it easy in Missoula, Montana -- No miles

Today we're going nowhere -- literally! The biggest reason is that the weather in the northwestern part of the country has turned decidedly wintry and quite cold. Perhaps we should have gotten a clue as we drove north on Route 28 toward the Idaho town of Salmon two days ago. Even though we started our drive under sunny skies, by midday the sunshine had been replaced by an eerie gloom. By the time we reached our camp and had begun to set up, it had begun to rain.

Then, after we'd gone to bed, the heavens opened up and it began to pour heavily. It poured so hard that I got up and retracted the driver's side bump-out which houses the banquet and refrigerator. We discovered in the past that when the bump-out is left extended during heavy rains we do get some water leaking onto the floor.

The next morning, as we rolled out of Salmon and up the canyon toward Missoula, Montana, the previous day's conditions persisted. Light rain continued to fall and the surrounding peaks were heavily shrouded in mist. Later, as we gained altitude, we were astonished to see patches of snow on the roadside and blankets of snow on many of the trees.

We got over the pass okay but by the time we rolled into Missoula around two o'clock, the weather conditions had not improved. Dark and gloomy was the order of the day. By this time Concetta and I had talked it over and decided to stay an extra day in Missoula, which would allow us to do some laundry and to possibly wait out the bad weather before we moved on.

Another "bucket of cold water" came last night as we watched the weather report on TV. The forecaster said that the entire northwestern area was going to experience as much as a week of continued cold weather. This morning the temperature outside the RV stood in the mid thirties. Fortunately, though we tend to burn through a lot of propane, the inside of the RV was a comfortable seventy degrees.

Heat inside the rig wasn't going to be our problem. We can buy propane lots of places, what we cannot buy is safe, ice-free highways. If it gets much colder, we might find ourselves facing some dodgy driving conditions. Of course, in all likelyhood, the Interstates and the main highways will be fine. It's the secondary roads that we like to travel that may not be a good idea because of their infrequent maintenance.

Obviously, the thing to do is to head south from here. Though our intention originally was to head further north and west so that we might explore the most northern reaches of Idaho, we have to be practical. Motor homes and snowy or icy highways do not make good bedfellows. We're disappointed, but we're going to have to forego our original plans and go south.

But here's the thing. When you're in west central Montana, finding roads that head south but that do not include passes that must be ascended and descended can be difficult. I think we can head toward Butte and Bozeman, and that is the current plan. But going to Butte and Bozeman will require driving the Interstate, which we always hate doing. Unfortunately, avoiding the Interstate in this situation means finding secondary roads that don't route us over high-atitude mountain passes. So far, no joy in that area.

And that's the thinking today. Come the morning, things may have changed, but we doubt it. It's always disappointing to have your plans monkey-wrenched, but I'm sure we'll find equally exciting adventures and wonderful scenery traveling south from here. If things go the way I expect, Monday will find us down around Cody, Wyoming. From there we'll probably keep moving south in search of good traveling weather.

Speaking of south, where I grew up in Los Angeles County, winter really wasn’t a familiar experience for me. It was not until I joined the Naval Air Corp and the Navy sent me to a base near Chicago, Illinois that I truly learned about winter and freezing temperatures.

Of all the places for a fun and sun boy to end up! I had requested bases in California and Florida or, failing those, anywhere on the west coast. I think I even requested a base in Washington State, but Illinois had never even been on my radar screen.

I arrived in Chicago in October of 1969 as the fall season was quickly descending into winter. I didn’t even own a heavy jacket at the time, and I was totally aghast at the temperatures I was experiencing. What was worse, after serving a short stint in in the galley – that’s the kitchen and dining areas – I was posted out to the flight line where I got to work outside all winter in steel-toed boots as temperatures plunged below zero.

For the entire winter of 1969/1970 I spent my days fueling, de-fueling, and moving aircraft around the aprons and into the hangers using little four-wheel machines we called “Mules.” There was no escape from the cold, other than to work outside as long as you could stand it, then retreat to the maintenance shack where you could run in place to warm up and bring the circulation back to your feet.

Often it was my ears that got the coldest. Though it was strictly against regulations, I decided to buy myself a warm hat to wear while I was out on the flight line. Eventually I came up with a fur-lined leatherette hat that looked like a cross between a Russian Cossak hat and a World War II pilot’s hat. At the time I called it my “Rocky the Flying Squirrel Hat (photo above right).” I can’t tell you how often my Rocky hat got me dirty looks and sharp words from the officers on the base, but the darn thing kept my ears warm and I kept wearing it.

As I got more proficient in my flight line jobs, I was boosted to “Plane Captain” for the A-4 Skyhawk jet fighter aircraft (photo above left). In that job I had to learn about all the things that needed checking before a pilot could leave the ground with the airplane. I would walk around and do my checks and flash special hand signals to the pilot so that he knew I had checked a specific piece of gear and everything looked fine.

When all the gear had been checked, I gave the pilot a thumbs-up and he signaled back with the same sign. At that point all you had to do was get out of the way and not get hit by the jet blast as he eased the plane into motion and headed past you and out onto the taxiway.

Fortunately, when spring arrived, I was sent off to Navy electronics school, then to anti-submarine tactical school, and I never again had to work outside in the freezing temperatures. I still wore my Rocky hat when it got cold and I had to go flying in the P2-V Neptune anti-submarine planes (photo right), and officers still harassed me for wearing it, but never again did I have to spend time jogging in place to reestablish my circulation and thaw out my feet.

Day 15 -- Salmon, Idaho to Missoula, Montana -- 140 Miles

It rained last night in Salmon, Idaho -- A LOT! Fortunately, I had wangled our way into a tiny camp on the west bank of the Salmon River, and had gotten us all set up and cozy before the worst of the rain began. Still, I woke up a couple of times last night and lay listening to the deluge of water pounding on our roof, and really, REALLY wondered if we'd wake up in the morning to find the nearby River overflowing its banks and turning our RV into a houseboat.

Fortunately, the river rose somewhat but never got close to breaching its banks, and the rain had stopped by the time we started breakfast. Though our camp was really nothing to write home about, what with the bad electrical connection, I thanked the manager sincerely this morning when we got ready to leave. Had it not been for her generosity, we would have been until dark finding a camp after driving at least twenty more miles.

After leaving camp our first objective was to do just a bit of grocery shopping, then pay a visit to the Sacagawea Interpretive Center that we had noticed on our way into the town of Salmon last night. The center really looked like a quality effort to us and since the Lewis and Clark expedition has long been one of our favorite topics, it was with tremendous anticipation that we left the market, drove the half mile to the Interpretive center, and parked.

Sadly, we were destined to be disappointed as the Sacagawea Interpretive center was locked up tight. We did wander the grounds a bit, but the cold and rain made it hard to muster up any enthusiasm for the process. Snapping a few gloomy photos, we hurried back to the rig.

For future reference, when we left the Sacagawea Interpretive Center and headed north on Idaho Route 93, we did pass some mighty fine looking camps nestled alongside the Salmon, embraced as they were by some towering magma flows from some long-extinct volcano. Should we ever venture back to see the Sacagawea Center, and I hope we do, knowing the location of those nice camps might prove useful.

By the time we were nearing the Idaho/Montana border, we had begun to realize that the highway's grade was noticibly steepening and the trees seemed to be dusted with a light mantle of snow. I hadn't really noticed on the map last night that taking Route 93 entailed climbing the 7,014-foot Lost Trail Pass that lay between the town of Salmon and that of Missoula, Montana. Thankfully the grade ascending Lost Trail Pass was only 6%, a much more gentle ascent then the 10% grade we encountered ascending the 8,431-foot Teton Pass a couple of days ago.

On the other hand, there hadn't been any snow on Teton Pass. As we got nearer to the summit of Lost Trail pass, the misty haze that had been shrouding the surrounding peaks all morning became more dense, the highway more rain-soaked, and the snowload on the trees much more pronounced. Our main concern was to be vigilent for any signs of ice on the roadway.

Once again the rig performed flawlessly. Thankfully, we encountered no ice, and we even took time to stop and photograph the snowy forest at one point near the summit. Just as on Teton Pass, once over the summit we geared down and descended slowly using just the 3rd low gear. There was so few cars on the road that virtually no one came up behind us which made our descending at 40mph less stressful.

I remember passing a couple of large trucks near the summit that had climbed the pass from the other side. Seeing them, I found myself wondering if, like me, the drivers were relieved to see that someone in a large vehicle had safely navigated the steep and rain-soaked highway from the side they had yet to encounter. Maybe they did.

At lunch today I pulled up the 10-day forecast for northern and western Idaho because that's where we intended to go after Missoula, Montana. It wasn't good. The forecast called for almost continuous rain for the next eight days. Seeing that forecast, we mutually agreed that we should probably put aside our plans for Idaho and continue on into Montana where the 10-day forecast looked much better.

When we take these RV trips, we virtually always plan on the fly. Since we had set no firm destination in Idaho, it was an easy task to pull up the Montana map and pick a city in that state to visit instead. What we've decided to do is remain here in Missoula for two days, do some laundry, take a breather, study the map, and leave on Saturday. By then we'll probably have a better handle on where we want to go. The sun must be shining somewhere!

The camp here in Missoula is really nice and, from what we can see, really popular. We pulled in just after 2:00 p.m. and registered for two nights. Since then, we've watched out our window as rig after rig pulls into the park. I imagine that long after dark campers will be showing up to try and get a spot.

In better weather, the area of the Salmon River through which we traveled today would make a great destination. Someday I hope we're able to return and check out all the places that the explorers Lewis and Clark traveled with their indespensible guide, Sacagawea and her husband, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.

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.

Day 13 -- Pindale, Wyoming to Aspen Acres RV Park -- 140 Miles

Today marks the 13th day of this summer's outting, and it also marks the day that we topped 30,000 miles on our Fleetwood Jamboree RV that we purchased used back in 2015. Incredibly, our rig had had two different owners by then, though neither owner did much actual driving it would seem. Amazningly, the rig had only a little over 9,100 miles on the clock five years after it rolled off the lot as a brand new unit.

Our first RV, a 1996 Fleetwood Tioga had about 31,000 miles on it when we located it on Craig's List in Lodi, California. The truck had been thoroughly used, but was still a strong runner, and we wanted to give RVing a try without breaking the bank. We bought it in 2013 for the comparitively low price of $14,000 and spent hundreds of hours joyfully exploring America, adding 20,000 miles of our own to the oddometer, and learning just what we did and did not like about the 31-foot rig's amenities.

Once we had decided what we wanted in a newer rig, we put the Tioga back on Craig's List and a chap from Pennsylvania saw it, liked it, flew out to drive it, and then paid our asking price and drove it away. It was sort of a bittersweet day, but now we could begin to search for just the right rig that would fulfill all of our requirements for something more modern, comfortable, and powerful.

Soon we discovered an unbeatable deal right near us in northern Nevada. The Craig's List ad for the little-used Fleetwood Jamboree looked too good to be true, but we piled into the car and went to see it. Incredibly, the rig was everything the Craig's list ad said it was, and the owner was willing to deal. Checking with our Credit Union, we discoverd that the asking price was a good five thousand under what they considered a fair price. That was all we needed to hear, and we shook hands all around and became the new owners of a five-year-old gem.

I thought about this saga today after we left Pinedale, Wyoming, drove a couple of hours to Jackson Hole, had lunch, then took the Teton Pass route to Idaho. I thought about our history of RVing as we began our ascent of the pass because the grade was a wopping 10%, both up and down, which multiple signs warned us about. A ten percent grade meant if you didn't have a good engine in your rig, you might as well get out and walk.

In the old RV, the Tioga, the engine was a 460 cubic inch Ford, and it would pull that heavy RV without too much trouble on flat ground and up minor grades. But when tackling some of the heavy-duty grades in Colorado and Wyoming, you'd often be down to 30 miles per hour as you topped the various passes.

But the new rig, the Fleetwood Jamboree, has a V-10 motor that seems to be much superior to the 460. Today we pulled the 10% grade, probably the steepest we've ever attempted, at a pretty steady 40 miles per hour, and the truck didn't lug or strain or complain at all.

Descending on the far side of the pass was pretty interesting. The Jamboree has three lower gears other then "drive," and I've almost never used any of the lower gears but 3rd low. Today, once we had reached the top of the pass, I put it 3rd low gear, then a few moments later in the 2nd low gear, and finally in the 1st low gear to make sure that I didn't get out of control at any point. I was a bit concerned that 1st low drove the RPMs up to 4,000, but we weren't in that gear very long. All the while we were descending, I had the emergency flashers going, something that I'd never done before in either rig.

I wanted to say a few words about last night's camp. While we were at the Pinedale Mountain Man Museum, I asked the staff if they could recommend an RV camp nearby since the closest camp we had seen was behind us about twelve miles. They told us sure, there's a brand new one just a mile or so from here.

And that's how we stumbled into the Yellowstone Trail RV Park just off main street. The camp was so very new, that it looked like they had just finished doing the paving and planting the grass around the campsites. The two camp hosts that I met, Jamie and Corey, were exceedingly cordial and helpful and got us signed up for a nice site. They were also eager to help us find a local camping equipment business nearby that we hoped to visit.

Amazingly, though we were just a block off Pinedale's main street, the camp was completely quiet and we enjoyed a truly peaceful night. In addition, the views of the surrounding mountain ranges are unsurpassed. Since the Yellowstone Trail Camp is just south of Yellowstone Park, you might want to keep it in mind. It's a great place to stop over, visit the Mountain Man Museum, then be ready to drive to Yellowstone National Park just 200 miles to the north.

After leaving Pinedale, we headed north so that we could do some sightseeing in Jackson Hole, gas up the rig, and find a quiet place to pull over and have lunch. We had also planned to do a bit of shopping in Jackson Hole, but we were ultimately deterred by the masses of other shoppers and their cars. We had such a hard time finding a place to pull over for lunch that we litterally parked in some homeowner's open field next to their house (photo above left). Since no one came running out to shoo us away, we stayed there. But we knew we'd never find a parking place for our rig amidst such congestion downtown.

Most of our day today was devoted to just enjoying the sights. We did stop at a few roadside historical markers, but mainly it was the scenery that captured our attention. There was so much to see that we even left the book on DVD turned off. At one point we stopped to photograph the Teton Valley and were soon engaged in conversation with another traveler named Bob. Bob told us that he and his wife were seeing American via compact car and had started just four days before from the state of South Carolina.

I was amazed and told him so. I said, "We've been on the road for thirteen days and have only gotten a couple of states away from where we live!"

Bob took that declaration in stride and told us about all the states he intended to see including the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Ultimately, he intended to return to the land of his birth in far off New Hampshire.

Neither of us could quite fathom how he could travel all those miles in the tiny car he and his wife were driving, but we asked Bob to take our picture (photo left), we wished him well, and we parted there at the roadside rest completely awed at his determination and tenacity.

Our current camp, called the Aspen Acres RV Park (photo right), is a hard-to-find tiny camp appended to a golf resort off route 20 in Idaho just to the north of Idaho Falls. As we approached the area, using the IPhone for guidance, we could scarcely see how there could be an RV park anywhere within fifty miles. Completely surrounding us as we drove were thousands of acres of potato fields.

But the IPhone kept giving us left turns and right turns and finally we saw way off in the distance about a half dozen acres of trees amidst the potato fields. Since it was getting on toward four o'clock, we hoped that the tiny brain in the phone would be correct, and we would actually find a camp at the end of all our twists and turns.

Thankfully, find it we did, and we're now set up so far off the main highway that you could explode an oil tanker out on Route 20 and we'd have to hear about it on the news. The trees around us are all Aspens and such groves make the nicest sounds when the wind blows. The camps are a little rustic, but we just love the isolation.

Day 12 -- Rock Springs to Pinedale, Wyoming -- 100 Miles

Today I thought we'd be a tad slow getting on the road since we had to do some grocery shopping before leaving Rock Springs and heading north in the direction of Yellowstone Park. To my surprise, after packing up, then finding a local supermarket and shopping for our short list of items, we still managed to roll out of town by 9:30 a.m. Since that time was just thirty minutes later than our usual departure time, I was pretty impressed. Naturally, it helped a lot that while seeking out the grocery store, I happened to glance in just the right direction and saw a sign for Wyoming Route 191, which was exactly the road we needed to take to reach Pinedale, our intended lunchtime destination.

We weren't actually headed for Yellowstone Park, of course, but for the Mountain Man museum in Pinedale about one hundred miles north of Rock Springs. But since Route 191 is called, in some literature, "The Gateway To Yellowstone," I thought it might help my readers pinpoint where on the map we were traveling today. Route 191 actually ends in Jackson about sixty miles north of Pinedale, and you have to take a couple of differently-labeled routes to reach the southern entrance to that famous National Park.

I'd love to say that Yellowstone is one of my favorite national parks, but I can't. We went there not long ago, entering the park via the west entrance near the town of West Yellowstone. It turned out to be an absolute nightmare and just one giant traffic jam as we headed toward the southern entrance and many of the most popular attractions. Even though tourists are forbidden to stop their cars in traffic to photograph the animals (pretty stupid), or, incredibly, to get out of their vehicles to approach the animals while their car is blocking traffic (even more stupid), the tourists did just that. I think it took us two hours to drive from the west entrance to the south entrance, which is perhaps, at most, a twenty mile trip.

Today, Route 191 turned out to be even more lovely and picturesque than yesterday's Route 13/189 from northern Colorado to southern Wyoming. The road was wider, the shoulders more ample, and the state had provided a multitude of places to both pass and pull over. Under a blue sky full of fluffy white clouds, we stopped just about every chance we got, and certainly every time we saw a historical marker to read and appreciate.

We stopped at a field full of dead trees, an overturned hay-baler, and a wheeless 1950 Chevy that had seen better days. We stopped at the pull-out where the old Sublette Cut-off on the Oregon/California Trail crossed the present highway. And we stopped to read about endangered fish in the area. But our favorite stop was that created for a point just south of the town of Pinedale where the Sand Springs Lander Cut-off crossed the present highway.

We thought that the historic marker was so informative that we included the entire narative here. It reads: "This site is a crossing of the Lander Cut-off, the northern fork of the Oregon Trail. Originally called the Fort Kearney-South Pass-Honey Lake Wagon Road when it opened in 1858, it was the first federally-funded road project west of the Mississippi River."

"F.W. Lander mapped this new route, shortening the trip to the Pacific by 5 days and avoiding a ferry crossing to the south where price gouging was alleged. Sand Springs was the only reliable water available to immigrants between Muddy Creek, eight miles to the east, and the New Fork River, ten miles to the west."

"Until the coming of the railroad in 1869, up to 300 wagons and thousands of cattle, horses, and mules may have passed here in a day. The trail ruts visible behind this sign and continuing over the next ridge are reminders of the largest known voluntary migration in world history."

"From homesteading in the 1880s, until use of the automobile in the 1920s, Sand Springs remained an important watering hole for travelers and stock on the north/south New Fork to Rock Springs wagon road."

We really liked the idea of being able to stand at the historic marker and gaze out along the line of travel of the hundreds of wagons and fortune-seekers a century and a half ago. It would have been a bit iffy to try and drive the RV to see the trail ruts of which the historic marker speaks, but were I driving an off road vehicle I would have done it in a heartbeat.

Once back on the road from the Lander Cut-off, we had only to drive twelve more miles and we arrived at our destination for the day, the Mountain Man Museum, which sits on a bluff overlooking the tiny town of Pinedale. I was certainly thrilled that after three attempts, I was finally going to reach a goal that I had set for myself some years ago when fortune let me get close, but kept the destination just out of reach.

I'm not sure just when I became interested in the saga of the mountain men, though it might have been Hollywood to blame. But wait, it may have happened way back in the very early 1960s when my mother, the genealogist, dragged the family all over the west in search of family ties for her research. To keep myself busy while riding in the back of Dad's pickup truck, seated as my brother and I were on an old Studebaker seat facing backwards, I started buying and reading magazines like True West, Real West, Frontier Times, and -- my favorite -- Old West.

Not all the stories were about mountain men, of course, but a significant number were. I read about Liver Eating Johnson, a trapper who would later be played onscreen by Robert Redford. I read about Hugh Glass, a trapper who would later be later be played in the movies by both Richard Harris AND Leonardo DeCaprio. I read about Jim Bridger, and "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick, and Joesph Walker, and Jim Beckwourth, and Kit Carson, and a raft of others and just loved their stories. Nowadays, I find it truly amazing that we could be living in a town named for Kit Carson, perhaps one of the most well-known of the mountain men.

In more recent times, I've become intensely interested in just how the mountain men did what they did. Concetta and I have watched all nine seasons of the TV show, Mountain Men, where we often get to see virtually all the techniques once practiced by the mountain men of the 1820s and 1830s. Though we have never been to a rendezvous in progress, we have several times visited the sites of one of those famous gatherings of the faithful. Not too long ago, I even purchased a throwing tomahawk from Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and taught myself to successfully hurl it at a stationary target and hit what I was aiming for.

So, as you might guess, today's visit to the Mountain Man Museum was really a thrill, and Concetta and I got to see first-hand all the tools, and weapons, and handiwork of those incredibly creative and independent Americans of two hundred years ago. I was especially intrigued to finally get to see clothes made out of the Hudson Bay Company's blankets that you read about in history books and that were so common for these guys who had to survive winters in the wild. Buckskin clothing was also fascinating to see. Beside their personal needs, all the tools the mountain men had to carry to maintain their weapons, to maintain their traps, to care for their horses, and to skin and process their furs were wonderfully interesting.

Though I was a little disappointed in the museum's selection of T-shirts, their book collection on the subject of mountain men was outstanding. I picked up a couple including one on the life of Hugh Glass which is on my reading list for tonight.

Tomorrow we're heading further north to the town of Jackson where we hope to find a hand-crafted walking stick for Concetta and maybe one for me as well. From Jackson we'll be drifting to the northwest and the Idaho border. Though we've crossed Idaho a time or two, we feel that there is probably much more to see. We won't know until we get there, but we're sure it will be fun and interesting.

Day 11 -- Steamboat Springs, Colorado to Rock Springs, Wyoming -- 215 Miles

Today we enjoyed an achingly beautiful drive from Steamboat Springs, Colorado to Rock Springs, Wyoming. The sky was bright and blue with not a cloud to be seen, and the road we chose, Route 13 off of Colorado Route 40, was so lightly traveled that we probably saw no more than twenty or thirty cars over the course of the whole day.

Of course on both ends of our drive we had to endure segments of the dreaded Interstate, Route 40 in Colorado, and Route 80 in Wyoming. Flocks of 18-wheelers in front, in back, and on the sides of us jockied for position in their rush to get somewhere as fast as possible. Even people towing travel trailers seemed to be determined to go as fast or faster than the law allowed. But we just kept to our usual 60 or 65mph and let them rush on by us.

Route 13 out of Colorado eventually turns into Route 789 in Wyoming for reasons I'm not sure anyone would know or care about. But the tiny track of well-worn asphalt, on which we happily traveled, meanders through mile after mile of high desert sage, sandstone outcroppings, and occassional volcanic lava flows.

On the subject of fawna, scattered everywhere on the land we saw small herds of pronghorn antelope. I've heard that the word "antelope," when used to describe these fleet-of-foot, brown and white, horned creatures, is incorrect. But I learned to call them antelope long ago and it's a hard habit to break.

I wanted very much to get a photograph of a pronghorn herd, but as usual when the pull off space was available there were no pronghorn present, and when the pronghorn were present there was no available pull-off. I even thought we might get lucky when we found a nice level acre off the highway for our lunch, but not a pronghorn did we see.

I did have some fun collecting more rocks while Concetta crafted the sandwiches. The entire road on which the RV sat had sometime in the past been “paved” with the most incredible mixture of crushed stone. The most plentiful of the paving were pieces of red sandstone so eminently typical of the red sandstone cliffs and mesas of Colorado. In somewhat lesser amounts were the inky-black chunks of volcanic basalt that is hard to mistake for anything else. Surprisingly, scattered here and there I even found small chunks of creamy white Quartz, their crystals beaming back at me in the radiant sunlight.

But the most startling and interesting rocks I found were a mixture of two rock types. Every once in a while, I’d pick up a chunk of red Colorado sandstone that exhibited a definite swath of volcanic basalt adhering to one side.

This told me that I was holding in my hand an event that happened perhaps millions of years ago, a firey collision in one tiny stone the size of a golf ball. Probably a nearby volcano had erupted and lava had spewed out, covering and engulfing the existing alluvial sediment that may have built up over eons as a nearby mountain range weathered and eroded down to a flat plain. The violent encounter of those two dissimilar rocks had formed a marriage that had never been broken to this very day.

After lunch it was back on Route 13/789 again -- for just a few minutes. Almost before we'd gotten up to speed, we saw a sign for a historic marker and we backed off the gas and pulled right in to see what we could see. Turned out we were standing there on a bit of Wyoming soil that had once been a portion of the Overland Stage Line.

Now the Overland Stage Line has never been one of my areas of study, so I went to the web to educate myself. Here's what I found: "The Overland Trail (also known as the Overland Stage Line) was a stagecoach and wagon trail in the American West during the 19th century. While portions of the route had been used by explorers and trappers since the 1820s, the Overland Trail was most heavily used in the 1860s as a route alternative to the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails through central Wyoming."

"The Overland Trail was famously used by the Overland Stage Company owned by Ben Holladay to run mail and passengers to Salt Lake City, Utah, via stagecoaches in the early 1860s. Starting from Atchison, Kansas, the trail descended into Colorado before looping back up to southern Wyoming and rejoining the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger. The stage line operated until 1869 when the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad eliminated the need for mail service via this stagecoach."

"Benjamin Holladay (October 14, 1819 – July 8, 1887) created a stagecoach empire and he is known in history as the "Stagecoach King." Through Holladay's friendship with Utah's Mormon leader, Brigham Young, Holladay established a profitable freighting contract to Salt Lake City. His transportation empire later included steamships and railroads in Oregon."

Looking both ways where the stage road was supposed to have crossed the highway, we could scarcely see anything resembling a road, but to the west I thought you could just make out a slight swale that would probably prove to be the old stage line's path across the playa. As a seeker of old roads since I was very young, I know that often you have to depend on the most obscure clues to find your quarry. Were I fourteen again, however briefly, I would have jumped the fence and scrambled right down there to try and find more evidence of the road's existence. Alas, an additional six decades has made me a bit more conservative when it comes "bush-wacking."

This afternoon we managed to grab a spot in the KOA here in Rock Springs, a camp in which we have stayed a couple of times in the past. Though devoid of much foilage at the mostly level campsites, the folks here are efficient, the prices are lower than we've been experiencing, and their tiny store of "must-have" items is pretty complete.

Tomorrow we intend to jump on Wyoming Route 191 and head north for the village of Pinedale about two hours away or so. In Pinedale I hope to do something that I've been wanting to do for several years: visit the "Museum of the Mountain Men." On two different sojourns in the RV in previous years we have gotten within a half-day's drive of Pinedale, only to miss it for scheduling reasons of some sort. So this time, I'm not leaving Wyoming without seeing this museum.

The photo at left I grabbed off the web and depicts a real life mountain man in history, Hugh Glass, in a fight for his life with the infamous grizzly that nearly ended his career. You may have seen Hugh's story depicted in DeCaprio's movie, "The Revenant," or in Richard Harris' earlier movie, "Man in the Wilderness." Personally, I like the Harris movie better as it's more believable and less violent.

As an interesting sidelight to the story, it was young Jim Bridger, a relative newbie in the mountains then, who was one of the two men who left Hugh Glass to die. They even took Hugh's gun and other gear in the process. Jim would, of course go on to become a famous trapper, guide, and frontier entrepreneur later in his life. Probably a good thing that Hugh Glass didn't track him down and kill him once he had crawled back to civilization. We would have missed out on some great history.