4/16/14

This morning we had a few visitors to the campground. They stayed about an hour.
 

I was going to walk up to the camp office to complete our check-in, since it was closed by the time we pulled in last night, but our visitors were on the road between us and the campground office and I decided not to bother them while they were eating.

Later in the morning we decided to make a supply run to Bozeman. While we were traveling from Kansas to Montana, we maintained minimal supplies in the trailer, to keep the weight down. Since we will be quite a ways away from any town once we get to the Madison campground and won't be able to go shopping any time we want to, we figured we should stock up, so we can at least go a couple of weeks without having to go to the store. We also wanted to find some shoes that would be good for long periods of standing and hiking. 

Bozeman is about 80 miles away from where we are staying now and the drive is through some beautiful country. 

We had to sit and wait for about 15 minutes while the park rangers "herded" some bison off private land, back towards Yellowstone park. Herded is not the most accurate word in the case of bison, since they go where they want to. Hazing is the term used by the rangers. They just try to get them moving and hope it's in the right direction. 

As to my claim of beautiful country -

 

and that was just between our campsite and Livingston MT (the nearest town on I-90).

We hit some light snow storms along the way as you can see in the distance in this photo.

 

The temperature only got as low as 38 degrees, so nothing was sticking to the roads, but it snowed off and on all the way to, and in, Bozeman. By the time we headed back to camp all the snow storms had passed.

For those of you that like to fly fish (Phil), there's an outfitter on the edge of town in Livingston.

The scenery is just as beautiful looking south on the way back to camp as it was looking north on the way into town.

 

 

We passed some more wildlife on the way back to camp too.

  

The road to the campground follows the Yellowstone river from Livingston to Gardiner, in a valley between high mountain peaks. A place where the bison and elk like to winter over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We're thinking this retirement thing is great idea. We probably should have started sooner.

4/15/2014

Now that I'm no longer as tired as I was yesterday, I found that I had not actually deleted all of the photos from yesterday. So, here are the photos I meant to include in yesterday's blog.

This doesn't do justice to the ice and snow on the trailer, but it gives you an idea of the weather overnight.

 

The photo below gives you an idea of the road conditions in northern Kansas from Norton to the Nebraska border due south of North Platte.

Then we crossed the border into Nebraska and all the roads looked like you see below, from then on.

 

 Below is a photo of one of the snow drifts Penny liked so much.

 

The snow thinned out after we turned onto Highway 26 at North Platte.

Chimney Rock in Western Nebraska, near Scottsbluff.

Then we get to see more snow in Wyoming, but no problems with the roads.

 

Now for today's drive.

We left Casper around 9am and took a side road to the north end of the town, to avoid the traffic on I-25 through town. Got gas in Sheridan Wyoming, Billings and Livingston Montana. Penny got photos of a few Pronghorn antelope between Casper and Sheridan.

 

We got to Gardiner at 6:30, just as it started to snow. We saw many bison, white tail deer, elk and a few mountain goats between Livingston and Gardiner but the clouds made it too dark to get any good photos of them. It was a very beautiful drive this afternoon. Just before dark, five white tail deer nibbled on the grass around the back of our trailer. Our campsite backs up to the river, but it was too dark to take pictures this evening.

We'll be here in the Yellowstone RV park while we participate in a week of training, then we will make our final move for the next six months, to Madison campground inside Yellowstone National Park.

For now, we have spotty 3G cell coverage. Once we get to Madison, we will not have cell phone coverage. We will have to drive to a location that has it, so blogs and cell phone calls will be fewer and father betweener.

 

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.

4/13/2014

We left Russell, Kansas about 9:30 this morning. The wind was about 20-20 mph with gusts to 35 mph and it was just starting to drizzle. We headed north, with a plan to stop at Ogallala, Nebraska this afternoon. About 1 o'clock this afternoon, we got to Norton, Kansas and ran into what you see in the photo below.

You're looking through snow at a barn that is accumulating snow on its roof and the land around it. The roads were starting to get slushy so, having to get gas anyway, we asked the attendant if there was any place to park the truck and trailer long enough to wait out the snow. They said "Just about anywhere that's large enough for it to fit. In the gravel lot next door to them, the truck stop or hotel down the road or the store across the street." So we parked in their "gravel" lot. Kind of muddy but there is some gravel on it. We opened the living room slide so we could get around in the trailer and turned the heater on in the bedroom (so we could keep the smallest space warm and not run down the batteries).

Around 3 o'clock it looked like the snow was abating and weather.com indicated it would slacken, if not stop for a while this afternoon, but start again this evening. We closed up the trailer and were going to head out for out destination. By the time we got outside, a trucker had pulled in next to us, who had come from the direction we were going. We talked to him for a few minutes and decided to go back in the trailer and wait until morning to continue. He said that he had nearly slid into the ditch about 20 miles from town and if we didn't have to get somewhere right away, it would be best to stay put. So that's what we're doing tonight. Better safe than sorry.

The wind is picking up again, as I type this.

4/12/2014

Yesterday was our last full day at the New Horizons facility. We did some testing in the afternoon to determine the error in the readout for the grey tank. Even though they use one of the best systems available, that goes on the outside of the tank, there was some significant error. It is supposed to be a 70 gallon tank. The readout shows 100% full at a little less than 45 gallons. We start getting water backing up into the kitchen sink after we put approximately 60 gallons in. At least it doesn't say we still have more room when the tank is full. That would be bad. This just means we will be dumping the grey tank more often than is absolutely necessary. Didn't have an easy way to check the black tank. We also received our South Dakota license plates, so now the truck and trailer are registered in South Dakota.

We left the New Horizons facility at 8:30 this morning and drove the 150 or so miles, west, to Russell Kansas. Going up some of the hills (if that's what you can call them compared to what we had in Washington) we got 3 miles per gallon. Overall, we got about 9 miles per gallon for the trip. The truck pulled the trailer just fine. It hits max torque at 56 miles per hour in fifth gear going up hills. I set the cruise control for 60 and it would slow down to 56 going up the steeper hills but never got below that.

We are going to stay the night at the Triple J RV park here. It's right off I-70 but we can't hear any road noise. It has gravel pads with grass in between, 30 and 50 amp, mostly pull through sites with some trees. It's reasonably close to one of Don's aunts, whom he hadn't seen in over 40 years and it is a Passport America campground, so we got it for half price. Nice proprietor and some nice guests. Our neighbor guests were kind enough to come out and greet us.

Once we got unhooked we filled up with diesel and drove out to my aunt's house. It was about a 50 mile drive. We had a nice visit, then took her out to lunch (another 50 mile drive). She was getting tired by the end of lunch, so we took her back home and then came back to the trailer. We all enjoyed the all-too-short visit.

The temperature is up to 90 degrees this afternoon and the mosquitoes are out in force and we are tired from the long day of driving, so we are going to stay inside and rest the remainder of the day. Assuming the weather is good for driving tomorrow, our plan is to drive to Ogallala, Nebraska and stay the night. There's supposed to be snow in Wyoming Sunday, but Monday is supposed to be nice. If all works out well, we will miss the snow and get to Gardiner, Montana on Wednesday. That will give us a chance to get to the store before we have to check into our jobs at Yellowstone.

The only picture worth sharing from this little trip was a picture Penny took at a rest stop, of our trailer hooked to our truck. The trailer sure makes the truck look puny.

4/8/2014

We got a call today from a representative of Xantera, a concessionaire company that runs some of the campgrounds, hotels and eateries in many of the national parks. We had applied for a position in Yellowstone for the summer, along with possible positions in state and county parks in Oregon. Haven't heard from any of the other organizations.

Anyway, they have need of people to camp host in the Madison campground (the first campground you come to after you enter the park from West Yellowstone). We had a nice talk with the Xantera rep discussing their expectations and ours. Some of the work could be checking in campers, which requires computer and typing skills, so Penny and I have to take an online typing test. I completed mine, though I don't know how well I did yet. Penny has been taking their practice test, trying to remember how to type with more than two fingers. She will probably take the test tomorrow. If you don't pass the test, you just won't be assigned the task of checking in campers but would be able to do all the other tasks. We'll see how she does.

Once that's done, they will call us back for a phone interview. If that works out, they want us there from April 18th through October 17th. We're looking forward to the chance to get paid for staying in Yellowstone for an entire summer season (and not have to pay the full cost of a camp spot, plus have water, electricity and sewer hook-ups at our site).

We got our living room chairs yesterday. We decided on four folding chairs, rather than two fixed and two folding, so that they will take up less space.

We went down the road about 20 miles to the town of Manhattan. Penny needed to go to a couple of sewing stores to find some thread for something she's working on. While she was in the store, I got a call from one of the people from the trailer manufacturer asking that we return post haste because someone had installed someone else's trailer hitch in our truck and the real owners were on their way to have it installed. They assured us ours would be delivered tomorrow, so as soon as Penny got out of the store we headed back and the pulled the hitch out of the back of our truck. It's a good thing we hadn't decided to move on to a new location, or they would have had an unhappy customer on their hands.

Assuming we get the gig at Yellowstone, we will probably leave here Monday, so we can get to Yellowstone on time.

4/6/2014

This weekend we've been culling out stuff we don't need and moving things around so we can reduce the weight on the truck. Saturday I sold a bunch of my tools, like a circular saw, belt and orbital sander, plumbing tools, redundant screw drivers and wrenches for $200. One of the guys that works here got a great deal on some good tools, but I took quite a bit of weight out of the back of the truck. I also went through our basement storage compartment and eliminated some excess items. The trailer manufacturer supplied us with 30 feet of sewer hose and I had brought my own 20 feet of hose, so I moved the new hoses to the sewer drain compartment and took the stuff I had brought (it was new and in its packaging) to the Goodwill. We also got rid of three trash bags full of kitchen items.

Saturday evening, Tucker decided to check out the TV.

 

This morning we took a little sightseeing drive, since we had pretty much finished cleaning out the downstairs and were going to move up to the bedroom and do some sorting and reduction. We went up to Milford Lake. It's the largest man-made lake in Kansas (maybe the largest lake period). It's about five miles north of the trailer manufacturer.

Not far from the facility we're staying at, there's a burro rescue. Penny got a couple pictures of the residence.

A little farther up the road, on the other side, a couple of families really get into Easter.

About half way to the lake, there's a historic site of some kind. It was closed, so all we could do was take a few pictures.

 

Then we continued on to the lake. There is a state park campground at the lake but it apparently costs money every time you drive through a state park gate in Kansas, so we didn't go in. Crossing the dam, we saw a few buzzards. Some flying and some eating.



 

There is a fish hatchery on the downstream side of the dam. Unfortunately, it is closed on Sundays, so we couldn't go through their visitor's center. The lake is fairly large, but doesn't appear to be too deep at the moment.

 

 

Got home and did some more rearranging.