What did I say about adventures?

Aaahhh yes, they are not all good although the bad ones often make great stories later on. Geoffrey says "An adventure is something you realize you have had once you get back to the place you were swearing you would never leave again while you were having it." Of course, one of the first things we tell anyone about our trip is what happened after we left Encampment ...

Having spent a great morning in Encampment we headed back north on Wyoming 130 towards Interstate 80. Although only one lane each way and with very narrow shoulders, it is basically straight with little traffic so easy to drive. But then ... about 7-8 miles south of the interstate a large truck went by the other way and wham, it was like someone stood in the road and hurled hands full of rocks at us!

With no where to pull over we continued on up to the interstate but went under and over to this little rinky dink Shell station with a closed cafe and checked out the damage. Couldn't get a good picture of the whole windshield but the photo shows two of the two dozen dings and cracks in our windshield. (The thing on the lower right is a big bug splat, ignore it.) Further investigation found another ding in the driver's side headlight and later on we found dings in the body work on the front and down the driver's side.

Made various calls to the state police and the insurance company and whoever else seemed appropriate. A nice lady trooper showed up after a while and took the report saying something about someone reporting in down at the next town south on that road which would be Saratoga. Turns out apparently the truck driver reported the event saying that a bag of rocks on his truck had split open and spilled the rocks at us. The insurance company tried calling all sorts of people but no one had the right windshield, not surprising with a new RV, sigh!

They held out some hope for Lazydays RV in Loveland, Colorado, so off we headed. The state trooped had reassured us that we could probably drive all the way home just to keep an eye on it so we headed off for Loveland. Lazydays was very nice and helpful including taking pictures of the damage and making calls to see if there was any way they could get us a windshield in a reasonable amount of time. We will always appreciate that they were straight up front with us even though it meant no business for them. They said at best it would be 5-7 days to get one, maybe, and it could take a lot longer. They repeated the reassurances of the state trooper that as long as we kept an eye on it we should be able to make it home.

One of the things we had not mentioned to anyone was that the air conditioning in the front part of the coach had quit. A warranty issue, probably Ford, possibly Fleetwood, there was no likelihood of a fast fix for that.

So we headed home, scratch the planned foray to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for sure. Instead Geoff drove dawn to dusk and sometimes after and I watched the windshield. As you can see in the photo to the left the temperature where I sat was 100 degrees or more, foot level was worse. The driver's side wasn't much better. 



We stopped for meals and other necessary breaks. One night we stayed at a motel and even that didn't go smoothly as we had to change rooms as the shower did not work at all! Not a drop!

Another night we simply got too tired and just stopped at a truck stop, a noisy place but tired and in the dark we were in no shape to hunt for better.

We kept the air conditioning on in the back portion of the coach with fans pushing it up front which helped a little. We drank lots of water and I tried coping with the heat by using cold packs on my feet propped up on poor Wolfie ... hmmm, just realized that I never included Wolfie in my blogs.

This is Wolfie ... some how, before we even got the RV I decided I needed Wolfie, ordered from Amazon. He's nice and big and made a great footrest for me from the start.

He pretty much lived on the floor on the passenger side of Timmber Wolf and kept watch out the little side window which I understand is actually there so the driver can see the edge of the road. Anyway, if you look carefully you can see Wolfie under the towel there to keep him dry and to help prop up my feet from the hot floorboards. I have no idea how hot it got down there, don't think I want to know. Since we came home Wolfie lives on the living room floor watching out the back at the birds and occasional cat and waiting on our next foray into the big world out there.

We made it home finally just in time to plunk down in our recliners and watch Wheel of Fortune. We had a great trip but I still like home the best.

Where grandma was born ...

Grand Encampment, Wyoming, known now as just Encampment. Somewhere I had never heard of a few years ago. In fact, A few years ago I had no clue as to my father's natural family. As most of you readers know, I did find that information and found a whole bunch of great family. The piece that is pertinent to this journey though is that my father's natural mother, Willa Haggarty was born in 1902 in Grand Encampment, Wyoming and that's where we headed next.

From Interstate 80 across southern Wyoming one gets off at exit 235, near Walcott, and heads south on Wyoming 130 through Carbon County. A lot of maps won't show Encampment but you ought to be able to spot Saratoga and then further south Riverside where the route becomes 230, angling southeast towards the Colorado border.

A little ways outside of Riverside is the sign for the town of Encampment, population 450, elevation 7323. By the population you can tell it is a tiny little town but it does boast a museum, the Grand Encampment Museum, and is rightfully proud of it's early history in which Willa's father played a significant part.

There is not much to see in Encampment and we headed straight for the museum.I'd had some correspondence with the museum before we came and knew they had some material about my family.

One of the first things you see when you pull up to the museum is part of the original tramway, the longest in the world when it was built in 1902 and 1903. It was used to haul the ore from the Ferris Haggarty mine to the smelter, replacing the old freight wagon road over Battle Pass.

It operated until the smelter went out of business in 1908, bringing ore in the buckets suspended by cables from the mine, up over the Continental Divide to the smelter in Grand Encampment. They would be emptied into the little cars on the tracks to go into the smelter.

As Agnes Wright wrote in Rocky Mountain Life in May of 1947, "Up in the far reaches of the Sierra Mountains of Wyoming, near the foot of Bridger Peak, huddles the ghost of the once famous Ferris-Haggarty copper mine. Fragments of cable whine in the wind on rickety towers of the one-time longest aerial tramway in the world.There on a windswept mountainside, almost 10,000 feet above the sea, Ed Haggarty, a penniless young Englishman, found an outcropping of spongy 'gossan' that later sold for $1,000,000."

A bit of hyperbole perhaps but it is certain that in 1898, Ed Haggarty, then not yet 32 years old found the outcropping of copper that proved to become one of the richest and most valuable copper mines in the state. Ed had immigrated around 1885 or so, perhaps age twenty, and supported himself by herding sheep whilst looking for copper in the mountains.

If the identification is correct he is the man on foot at left on a pack trip to Battle, a nearby town. This is said to be in 1897, a year before he found the copper.

In January of 1901, he married Edith Crow who had been staying with her brother Arthur in nearby Battle Lake.

They promptly went on their honeymoon which included a visit to his parents at Bonny Farm in Moresby, Cumberland, England, where they are found staying with his parents in the 1901 English census:

In 1902, their daughter Willa is born and in 1903, they are divorced, Ed filing in August of 1903 that she had absented herself from his home without just cause and refuses to return. She appears to be living with her family in Nebraska. Edith remarried in 1913, Ed appears to have never remarried.

It was fascinating to see my father's natural roots, so different from my mother's in Buffalo, New York, or my father's adopted lines in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Ed and Edith both died in 1944, the year I was born, Ed in January and Edith in October. I was born in December.

Lions and Tigers and Bears ... Oh My!!!

Okay, there weren't any lions or tigers and although there probably were some live bears at Yellowstone, we didn't see any. When last heard from we were about to leave Portland, Oregon, after some maintenance was done to Timmber Wolf. It was just one of those regularly scheduled things and we were soon on our way eastwards towards our next stop, Yellowstone National Park.

Much of this leg of the trip was a repeat of the route headed into Portland but we did spot some mystery railroad cars on our way. We simply could not fathom what these structures on the cars were intended to hold but we sure saw lots of them being trundled along the tracks.


Further down the road we finally solved the mystery when we spotted this not quite fully loaded car where we could see some of the structure ... lumber, lots of lumber! A few months later after we were home we even saw one at a lumberyard unloading. No camera was readily available so I'm stuck with this one taken through a fence.

The long straight stretches of Interstate 90 in Idaho and Montana lend themselves to speed although I don't know if that was a contributing factor to either of the accidents we saw that day. The one pictured was a nasty rollover and there appear to have been some young children in the car as a couple of young ones were being tended to by some of those who stopped. There were already people helping so we did what was best and simply got out of their way.

Further down the road we turned south towards Yellowstone. Although the park itself occupies the northwest corner of Wyoming, the northern approach is through Montana. The countryside is beautiful, running along the Yellowstone River where we stopped at a nice roadside rest area and had a couple of Cinnabons bought at a truck stop earlier and simply enjoyed not moving for a few.

Traffic seemed sparse until we got close and then it got crowded! Winding our way through the town of Gardiner and the approach to Yellowstone itself was tricky in a 27 foot motor home but we saw bigger ones so persevered!  I think the line to enter the park was close to a mile long, two lanes wide, although admittedly it was a summer weekend.It was a good thing we had NOT planned on staying in any of the campgrounds as most were full and the ones that were not were not the sort that take RV's.

Now came Geoffrey's real driving test. The roads in Yellowstone were built years ago and although well maintained are still the older narrower one lane each way with practically no shoulder! Some of them such as the turn for Firehole Lake are clearly marked, prohibiting any RV's or buses from taking them. I wonder if perhaps a Jeep would be better here!

We did see some wildlife: buffalo, moose and elk in several places including some rather tame ones at the Albright Visitor Center a few miles into the park. At one point a coyote was brazenly strolling down the middle of the road definitely disrupting traffic until it finally veered off into the brush and trees along the roadway.

We pulled aside into some of the geyser areas and caught glimpses of vistas and waterfalls but learned that pulling an RV to the side of the road especially when the area is crowded just doesn't work.

We eventually arrived at Old Faithful which although not the largest of the geysers is more frequent, erupting every 90 minutes or so. Of course we apparently arrived not long after it had erupted so had a wait of over an hour. This is a large area entailing a lot of walking or, better yet, out came our PoGoGo so I could trundle around to my heart's content.

To maintain our communications we left our commo hats on so we could keep track of each other which worked excellently including giving me time to peruse the gift shop and find an appropriate souvenir, a bison!

Which now puts me to wondering what is the difference between a bison and a buffalo?

Geoffrey mostly just sat in one place and relaxed after all that tension filled driving but PoGoGo and I zipped all over the place including down the walkways where you could see other geysers going off or at least thinking about it with little poofs and bits of steam rising into the air. I kept an eye on the time being predicted for Old Faithful at the ranger's desk and kept Geoffrey advised.

Eventually the appointed moment arrived. It doesn't go off in one big explosion but starts out gradually, increasing the size and height of the geysers until it is done. Even then sometimes there is one more and then one more!

I am sure there are many better shots of Old Faithful than the ones I took but what is special is that I was there for these! Like the Grand Canyon, it is different being there than any movies or pictures you see somewhere else.

We continued towards the south entrance out of the park through an area where the road is, like many of the park roads, closed from early November to mid-April or May. After a bit the road at least straightens out some but was still a narrow challenge to Geoff's driving abilities.

The south end of the park runs into Grand Teton National Park, running alongside Jackson Lake. Although we had planned to spend some time there, it was late afternoon and we were getting tired. We did get some splendid views right from the road across the lake towards the Tetons, possibly as good or better than if we had gone into the main area of the park especially since the main activities there are hiking and biking and other outdoorsy stuff that is not exactly our strong point.

We continued south through Jackson, a smallish town full of tourist stuff and headed for a fork in the road about 15-20 miles south of Jackson. Route 191 headed southeast towards Interstate 80 and Route 89 headed southwest also eventually to Interstate 80. Unfortunately as we headed for Route 191 we came up to a turnaround and a sign saying that the road was closed due to forest fire!

Back to the fork in the road and 89 was closed for the night due to construction! The choices were backtrack for many miles and maybe get around it, go hunting a motel room back in Jackson which would have been tedious and quite possibly unsuccessful with the road closures or simply pull into a small parking area and get a night's sleep, which we did.

At the start I did warn Geoffrey that although we were going to have adventures for sure, not all of them were going to be good!

Portland, finally!

When we went silent a couple of months ago, the postings had not quite reached Portland. I didn't mean to abandon you there but various events cropped up in real time and lack of internet access and then other events that you will get to hear all about in future posts kept me away from the blog.

But, back to where we were. It's Monday, July 11th, and we and Timmber Wolf are rolling along beside the Columbia River right into Portland. Our destination is the Pheasant Ridge RV Resort in a suburb called Wilsonville. It's a nice little park, possibly better than our first choice which was full.

We arrived in the afternoon and first on our schedule was to get a car rented so we could go see my son and his wife and our brand new grandson. We got a Dodge Durango which I promptly hated. For those who did not know, my left hip has become quite a problem and in fact surgery is scheduled after our return. This makes getting in and out of vehicles especially on the passenger side a bit difficult. With the seat moved all the way back I could get in and out of most vehicles. With the Durango though, moving the seat back exposes a metal rail with a nice sharp corner. Over the next few days I managed to scrape up the back of my leg on that corner several times!

Next stop, my son John's apartment and my brand new grandson, Luca, born June 25th, and of course his darling wife TK. We ordered take-out Chinese so we could just sit and visit and simply spend time together. Luca is the sweetest baby for sure!! Eventually Geoff and I went back to the RV park and Wolf. The next night John would come visit us and the night after all of us went out to dinner together. It was a great visit and I have no pictures taken during that time because I always get too busy just being there and forget to take any!!

Our plans had meant to include a two day trip down to southern Oregon to meet a cousin and spend some time in Eugene where I lived for a few months many years ago. We had to scrap that plan. I wasn't feeling great and needed to rest and Wolf was due for a servicing which we managed to get scheduled for first thing Friday morning. This did give us some down time including a chance to catch up on laundry, again! That seems to be a never ending chore when traveling.

Having the rental car did mean we could get out some and do a little shopping, including souvenir hunting. Some how this little white ceramic elephant I spotted at a Target no less seemed like just the right thing to represent Portland and baby Luca. Maybe because he weighed 8lbs 12oz when he was born! No, more likely the simple innocence of both the elephant and Luca. 

Portland and its suburbs are nice. They feel clean and look pretty and I can see why many people love it there but some how Geoff and I did not like it that much, some how we weren't comfortable or something. 

The photo here at the end of this posting is not in the timeline as it was taken several weeks later during the third week of August at Luca's first kite event, the Washington State International Kite Festival. My son John is a champion professional kite flyer and gives lessons, holds workshops and of course attends numerous kite events. So, of course his son Luca was only a few weeks ago when he attended his first kite event! I am surprised he wasn't born with a kite in his hand.

Time to get that maintenance done and then head out back towards the east, only three main stops planned before we head home: Yellowstone & Old Faithful; Encampment, Wyoming; and Mount Rushmore!

On the Oregon Trail

Heading west on I-70 from Green River, we take a shortcut from Salina, northwest to join up with I-15 northbound at Scipio, cutting off some 120 miles or thereabouts where I-70 makes a significant southwest jog to meet I-15. Before reaching Salina we raced some bad weather to the rest area at mile marker 79 but the storm won. At least it wasn't a bad one!

The scenery is much the same most of the way ranging from valleys to mountains and back again. Some of the sights happen in various locations but I mustn't fail to mention that we saw cattle out grazing in the median and wind turbines from Kansas all through the west including this part of the trip from Utah through Idaho and Oregon.

This day we ended just short of the Utah/Idaho border in Snowville, Utah, where we stayed at an RV park named the Earp & James Hitching Post. It was a fairly ordinary place without much to recommend it one way or the other but it was convenient and the name unique! It did have pretty flowers in the grass.


We angled on I-84 all the way across Idaho and into Oregon, much of it along the same route so many pioneers followed into this countryside. Many paid the price and there are monuments and markers detailing some of the disasters that befell them.

Along the Snake River

This route follows along the Snake River and then the Columbia River. The Snake River is far too winding through the hills to stay close to but the Columbia flows smoothly not far from the interstate.

One of the things we found different in Oregon is that it is the law that a gas attendant must be the one to fill your tank. You are not allowed to do it yourself. A mixed blessing but I must admit it has been a very long time since I had an attendant do the tank. At one truck stop we even had the attendant wash our windshield which was home to a lot of bug splats by then. He didn't get everything but it was greatly improved and he was well tipped for his strenuous effort. We definitely appreciated it!

I wonder if any of the road trains we saw along the highway had their tanks filled. Maybe it is different for trucks? We saw many road trains, some with not just two but three trailers behind them like this UPS road train. They aren't kidding with that sign on the back that says "LONG LOAD" but I'm glad it wasn't me driving it!

We kept on westwards following the Columbia River and stopped to have a picnic lunch of bananas and bagels with cream cheese at a river front park. Note the Columbia River across the top of the picture, this was really a river FRONT park. The Rand McNally GPS in the foreground gives you our location at The Dalles in Wasco County, Oregon. We're resting our heads by taking the communications caps off for the meal when they are not needed. That's the mysterious jumble in the box to the right of the picture.

Soon we are back on our way following the Columbia with its dams and locks all the way to Portland.