4/14/2014

Before leaving Norton this morning at 7:30, we had to get the ice off the top of the one living room slide we had opened so we could get around in the trailer yesterday. Everything except the lower kitchen cabinets are accessible when the galley slide is in. It was right around 27 degrees and 20 mph winds when we left.

I was going to put a photo of the truck and trailer with ice hanging off of them here but found that due to my tiredness from driving for 12 hours, I had deleted all the photos off the camera memory BEFORE I transferred them to the computer. Oh well, imagine a picture of the truck and trailer with ice hanging off of them.

The roads in town were clear and dry. Unfortunately, up in the northern hinterlands of Kansas, where towns are few and far between, deicing of roads is apparently unheard of. Snow removal is done, but between towns, there were patches of compact snow and ice until we got to Nebraska. Fortunately, the roads are generally straight and as long as I kept the trailer directly behind the truck, in a straight line, driving was fine. Just had to not accelerate or slow down in the icy patches (some of which were up to 100 yards long.

Imagine a photo of a white road, surrounded by white land, with nothing more than roadside traffic markers running down either side here.

On the other hand, it would appear that Nebraska spends a great deal of money on deicing roads. There was no snow or ice on the roads, or shoulders of the roads, anywhere we drove in Nebraska, yet there was plenty of snow everywhere else and the temperature was no warmer than in Kansas.

I'd show a photo of what the Nebraska roads looked like here, but...

Got gas in North Platte, Nebraska then took US26 to I-25 in Wyoming. Some places in Nebraska had no snow at all, others had a few inches of snow. Snow everywhere in Wyoming. Fortunately, Wyoming does a decent job of removing snow from the roads too.

Got to Casper around 5:30 (including the change from central to mountain time), but it took until 7:30 to find a campground that was open and locatable. Had two cases where Garmin gave us a wrong street name or hadn't been updated with traffic revisions. Got to one, easy to find KOA on the north end of Casper that was closed for the season until April 15th. They wouldn't consider allowing anyone to stay the night of the 14th, under any circumstances, even though they were answering their phone. The one campground we finally found was on the south end of Casper. It was difficult to find because you have to take the entrance to the Fort Caspar museum and go around back about 2 blocks to find the entrance to the campground. Finally found it and got the one pull through site left. Don't like the traffic on either the freeway or the city streets in Casper.

Lots of "permanent" RV's (probably long term workers) staying at this park based on the number of trailers with skirting around the bottom to keep the wind out from the under side of the trailer and insulated water hoses to prevent freezing of the water lines.

We will head to Gardiner, Montana tomorrow, so we can finally stop these long days of driving. We should be able to avoid having to drive in the next storm that the weather service is saying will be coming through Wyoming and Montana.