Long awaited retirement trip finally here

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an RV or an interest in RVing!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Good luck on your trip John.  By now you have probably already passed Exit 131 on I-90 which is the turnoff for the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, one of my first homes as a USAF missileman.  You will like the Black Hills and, I haven't been there in years, but Deadwood was always interesting.  We haven't even dewinterized our Adventurer yet as we still are involved with tornado repairs to our sticks and brick and it looks like that may take all summer.  I wanted to revisit the Minuteman Historic Site again this summer as I haven't been there since 1963 when we had 10 live Minuteman missiles under our control.  Hope your repairs in the future don't overwhelm you as I seem to find some new repair required with every trip.
 
RVMommaTo6 said:
I've never even thought about my transmission fluid, how often does that need to be done?

Usually every 30,000 miles or sooner in heavy duty service, check your motorhome chassis owner's manual.  Of more importance than mileage is the condition of the fluid.  Drip some from the transmission dipstick onto a piece of paper and look at it's color. 

New fluid is a vibrant red and the red color fades as it ages.  Excessive heat will make it age faster, and pushing a motorhome through the air at highway speeds or climbing a grade generates heat in the transmission.  If the fluid has turned anything beyond a light brown or has black specks in it it needs to be changed ASAP.  Black fluid is very bad news and the transmission needs to be serviced NOW. 

Also sniff the end of the dipstick, if it smells like burnt toast the fluid has burned and needs to be changed ASAP.

Having good transmission fluid is the primary factor that determines how long your transmission will last.

Here's a site with lots of good information, but cut his suggested change intervals in half due to the heavy duty use in a motorhome (your owners manual should agree):

http://transmissionrepairguy.com/

http://transmissionrepairguy.com/what-color-is-transmission-fluid/
 
X2 for everything that Lou said, but I?ll add one thing. My owner?s manual says to change the fluid every 50,000 miles, so don?t pay attention to it. 30-35,000 miles is all you?re going to get with motor homes, especially if you tow.

Bill, sorry to hear about your home. I hope it doesn?t take all summer.

On the road right now at a rest area around mm170. We?ll see the minuteman site when we drive back in the car to visit the Badlands. This morning, I got a late start because it took the driver?s front Jack 45 minutes to retract and I had to flip the release on the brand new driver?s rear Jack solenoid because when I tried to deploy last night, it dropped about an inch and wouldn?t come up this morning. I don?t know if the problem is the new solenoid or wiring. For a while, I thought I was going to have to listen to the alarm all day. Email to HWH will hopefully be answered tomorrow.
 
Amanda , your Thor is on a ford chassis isn't it. If you need fluid change before your trip(I would recomend) 
I think it is Genesee Ford right off of 390 Avon exit,I allways see MH there for service.
Bob
 
Robert K said:
Amanda , your Thor is on a ford chassis isn't it. If you need fluid change before your trip(I would recomend) 
I think it is Genesee Ford right off of 390 Avon exit,I allways see MH there for service.
Bob
It is, thank you, that's very close to home. I'll do that!
 
On Sunday, we made it to Fish N Fry RV Campground, our first "vacation" destination. This is a rustic park, inexpensive and for good reason since it doesn't have cable tv, it's too far removed from society to pick up OTA stations, it has weak wi-fi and very weak cell service, at least with AT&T. But the sights are beautiful, with it located within the Black Hills National Forest south of Deadwood, SD.

The sites have a problem with flooding and slick mud after rains, which this time of year are plentiful. Since getting here, it rained yesterday off and on all day and night, forcing us to move our grill to drier ground in order to use it tonight. Our next door neighbor who pulled in yesterday told us they had to wait an entire day before hooking up their sewer connection because the dump pipe was under water. The biggest problem it has given us has been the back jacks continually needing readjustment from settling. I had to put 2x12's under the jack pads to give the jacks some extra height. But each site comes with its own fire pit, grill and picnic table, the site is gravel and at least started out reasonably level, and a fast running brook runs behind every site that feeds a pond that has been filled with rainbow trout that can be caught and fried for $ .75 per inch and an extra $5.75. Judy and I plan to go fishing on Friday for our dinner.

HWH responded to my emails yesterday with good news, telling me that if the jack retracts immediately upon flipping the valve, it means the solenoid was bad off the shelf and they will replace it, giving me the choice of them shipping one to me at the place of my choice, something that could be difficult since we're not landing in one spot for a decent length of time for the next couple of weeks, or having me go to one of their authorized dealers and have them swap it out for another one. I wrote a dealer in Kalispell, MT this morning to see if they could do the work when we get there in about a month. I'm willing to live with having to flip the valve every time we need to retract the jacks for that long. At least it deploys, which is more than it did before I visited HWH. I have to give kudos to HWH for their customer service as well as their prices and attitude regarding not wanting to repair or replace any part that hasn't shown the need to do so. They checked out my entire system while there and told me the only thing I needed was what I had asked them to do: replace the bushings on the longest slide and replace the solenoids on the two jacks that wouldn't work. I told them my home town mechanic wanted to replace every solenoid even if they were working because they were corroding. HWH said, "Why? It's the nature of the beast. They are going to corrode in an outside environment. Don't replace them until they stop working." Same with the opposing slide that had bushings that were cracking. They told me there was no need to replace them when they crack; only when they begin to fall out. They will cover the cost of both parts and labor for the upcoming warranty repair, so the only thing I'll be out will be a little time and inconvenience.

The roads from my last report have still been good throughout South Dakota. The route from I-90 to Deadwood gave me my first taste of a 7% grade while towing four down. At first, I tried to keep a reasonable speed of 40 mph but the auxiliary fan kept kicking in and out and I thought I smelled burning tranny fluid, so I allowed the coach to slow down to 24 mph to keep the rpm's below 3,000. It made me realize that this is what will have to be done when get into Wyoming, Montana and the Canadian Rockies. I checked the tranny fluid when we got to the campground and it still smelled good.

This almost 15 year old coach is still doing pretty well other than the issues already discussed. But we really want to get new shades since the day/night shades that came with the coach have seen their best days. We're thinking of getting MCD shades one at a time to make them affordable. The only other serious problem we are experiencing is not being able to use our WifiRanger. I spoke to one of their techs today for over an hour and it was determined that my unit needs a firmware update and that cannot be done until I get to an area that has better wifi or cell service. We'll deal with it on Sunday when we leave this RV park.

I was so burned out from being on the road for nine days straight, we decided to stay in Monday and simply rest and recuperate. We did some badly needed house cleaning after brushing the dogs and trimming their nails and just took it easy. I ordered Dish since we don't have any television here and dragged out the Pathway X2 that hadn't been used for about three years.

On Tuesday, we packed the dogs in the Equinox and set out for the Badlands. We stopped at the Minuteman Missle Historic Site and I found that a fascinating trip back to my childhood when seeing giant photos of grade school kids crouching underneath their desks and remembering the constant threat of nuclear war, always wondering if and when Russia was going to drop the big one on us and where it was going to hit. From there, we went to the Badlands, a fascinating place of colors, walls, valleys and canyons.

During our trip, I was in contact with Silver Script for a total of more than two hours because they refused to allow me a 90 day supply of two drugs I need. Caremark mistakenly sent these drugs to my house after I left on vacation and after I had called them and cancelled the order. I then had my doctor write new scripts for the local CVS pharmacy so I could pick them up at any location through the country. But since Caremark had mistakenly not cancelled the order after I asked them to and shipped the drugs, they now will not fill another 90 day order. No exceptions to be made, even after going through three levels of management. So I picked up a 30 day script for both drugs and will have to call my doctor and have him write more new scripts for other drugs or other dosages of the same drugs so I can cover the other 60 days. i promised SilverScript that I would let every person I can know that their customer service is quite lacking. From now on, I'll stop the mail order service through Caremark and have my doctor write scripts only to the local CVS.

Today, Judy and I left the dogs in the coach and took off for Devils Tower. It was a very enjoyable drive, but we found that when we got to Wyoming, the condition of I-90 changed for the worse and we will have to take sections of that highway by driving in the inside lane. Devils Tower was quite impressive and I'm glad it had been on my bucket list since Spielberg called the public's attention to it when he made a movie about alien visitors. I recommend it to anyone  interested in national monuments. In my opinion, this is a must see.

Tomorrow, the weather is supposed to be good so we'll head south to Crazy Horse, Custer and maybe Mt. Rushmore if we have the time. We're trying to squeeze in more than we should in one day because the forecast is rain beginning Friday and lasting until next Wednesday. We will most likely pull up camp on Sunday in the rain.
 
Great post John. Since we lived in Rapid City and Ellsworth Air Force Base for 9 years back in the 60s  I am familiar with your surroundings. Glad to see you got to visit the Minuteman site.  I was  on the first launch crew to accept that site from Boeing in July 1963.  It was the first flight of 10 missiles to be turned over to the Air Force and that wing eventually had 150 Minuteman missiles.

Fish & Fry is also a very favorite memory of mine and my sons.  In 1965, on our first camping trip in our new Red Dale 15' travel trailer to Robaix Lake which is just south of Deadwood on the same highway as Fish & Fry, I took my son fishing and we had zero luck.  He was very young and that was his first fishing trip so I decided to go to the Fish & Fry which was only a fishing lake and had no campground yet and let him fish there for a bit.  It was worth it to see the smile on his face and he caught a couple and they cleaned and packed them in ice for us.

You are right about Devil's Tower - a must see.  Keep us traveling with you on your posts.  Very enjoyable reading and I hope you get your jack problems fixed in Montana.

Bill
 
Today was the nicest weather we have seen since getting to the Black Hills, getting up the low 70's and staying sunny most of the day. We got a decent early start at 8AM, left the dogs in the coach again, and headed to Crazy Horse.

I was disappointed with Crazy Horse. It has a $12 per person entry fee and another $4 for catching the bus to get close enough to the monument to take pictures. The $12 entry fee is for allowing you into the buildings that house genuine Native American artifacts, a theater, a gift shop and most importantly, the rest rooms. That's an expensive pay toilet.

You are not allowed to walk the ? mile to the monument; you must take the bus. Although the bus tour guide was quite informative and humorous, I feel the bus ride should have been included in the entry fee.

My disappointment with the monument is due to the fact that they have been working on this monument since 1948, 71 years, and only have part of the face and left arm cut. Granted, this is a massive monument, considerably larger than Mt. Rushmore, and when finished, will be the largest monument in the world, several times larger than the Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx. But they admit that at the rate they are going, it won't be finished for another 100 years. No one was working on it while we were there. They are proud of the fact that they have received no state or federal funding for this project; all their monies come from the public admission fees. But to charge $16 per person to see a monument from a quarter mile away that is roughly 25% finished is excessive. Yes, it is much larger than Mt. Rushmore, but I was moved when I saw the latter and felt robbed when viewing the former. And since both Judy and I have Native American heritage, I can honestly say this opinion is not racially motivated.

From there, we decided to skip Custer State Park until tomorrow and drive to Mt. Rushmore. In retrospect, I feel it was an excellent idea to go from one monument to another so we could make a more accurate comparison. We chose to skip Custer for now because we spent considerably more time at Crazy Horse than we thought we would and assumed correctly that we would do the same at Rushmore. The drive between the two was great; I love driving on mountain roads and it gave me a chance to see what our new Equinox could do in terms of handling and pickup. It excelled in both and I was quite impressed in this SUV with a 1.5L engine that I bought for my wife.

If I had to describe Mt. Rushmore in one word, I think I would use "awesome." Regardless of how patriotic you are, seeing this monument and learning how it came to be will drop your jaw. We opted for the audio self guided tour and spent close to two hours walking the path in front of the monument. One reason I felt this monument was more impressive than Crazy Horse was because this monument was completed in 14 years. There are a lot of steps to climb and we both learned just how out of shape we are since both of us recently had surgeries from which we just recovered. Our cost was minimal; we got a 50% discount on parking and paid $5 instead of $10, and we paid $10 for both of us to have audio wands instead of the normal $25 because we had the senior national park pass. Since we only paid $10 for this pass before the price rose to $80, it has paid for itself many times over just in the past week. But back to the subject, I strongly recommend seeing Mt. Rushmore to anyone that visits the Black Hills. Plan on being there for at least two to three hours to fully appreciate the site.

I haven't heard from the RV dealer I wrote to about the jack solenoid warranty replacement, so I'll call them tomorrow to determine if they can do the work. I'm glad all the jacks are deploying because we are having trouble with the coach continually sinking on one side due to the rain this area has received. I took four 2x12's with us in the event we needed more than the plastic jack pads we use, and have used all of them, two under the jack that has the bad solenoid. I have wondered if, since we know the valve is bad, maybe it is leaking and allowing the jack to retract a little, but every time I look at it, it appears to be deployed the same amount as the last time, so I'm apt to believe it's the soil and gravel sinking. Speaking to the management about it, he seemed to understand the problem, as though this isn't the first time he's seen it, and he told me he has extra blocks to put under the jacks if I need them. When we returned this afternoon from our journey, the list was so bad, I had to turn off the refrigerator until I could get it leveled, and then reinstall the Dish antenna because its position had changed on top of the coach.

I had an interesting conversation with my next door neighbor when we returned today. He has a '99 Gulf Stream, about the same size as ours. He says he's got 90,000 miles on it and has never pulled the engine cover off of it. I asked him if he has ever changed the plugs and wires and he said no, it doesn't have wires, with each plug having a dedicated coil, and the plugs are still going strong, so he isn't going to fix it if it isn't broken. Well, more power to him. I wish I had that kind of luck with mine.

Tomorrow we will pick up where we left off today, driving the same route but a little farther to Custer State Park and if we have time, down to Wind Cave. This will complete our bucket list of things to see at this location other than spending a half day in Deadwood and Lead, which we can do on Saturday before we begin packing up to drive to our next location, Ten Sleep, WY. I am sure that driving a gasser and towing four down will prove interesting when traversing the Big Horn Mountains.

Bill, thank you for the kind words. Tonight, Judy and I decided we were hungry for fish so we headed down to the office where we were given rods and reels and told to catch our own fish. The pond is so well stocked, it took Judy and I both less than a minute to hook fish. She caught a 12" and I caught a 15" rainbow trout. They prepped and fried the fish for us and we had a good meal. The dogs got jealous when they smelled fish on our breath.
 
WOW what a difference in the many years since we left the area. Crazy Horse was not much less finished than you mention - Korzack (sp?) Ziokowski (sp?) was still alive and he and his family were pretty much the only workers. Keep in mind that was at least 50 years ago.  No charge to see what he was doing but donations were accepted.

As for Rushmore, it has always been an inspiring place but sounds like it got a lot more expensive.  On all of our many visits while residents of the area there was no charge to park or view the monument but, since then, the entire visitors center has been torn down and rebuilt and there was no walking path with a lot of steps as you mention.  For me, if there are steps, I am not a player anymore.

The Black Hills of South Dakota are truly beautiful and we used to enjoy exploring the back country on the gravel roads that led to some great fishing like Deerfield Lake where we did a lot of night fishing.  Enjoying your posts and when you leave the Black Hills you will be taking us on places we have never been so keep those posts coming.

Bill
 
Will you be driving the RV down to Wind Cave or leaving it parked and taking the car? I've read (maybe it was even on this site, I don't remember) that driving through Custer SP is impossible with an RV.
 
RVMommaTo6 said:
Will you be driving the RV down to Wind Cave or leaving it parked and taking the car? I've read (maybe it was even on this site, I don't remember) that driving through Custer SP is impossible with an RV.
You certainly can drive through Custer SP in a motorhome, but not all the roads are suitable. The Wildlife Loop is only for cars IIRC, and don?t even think of going down Needles Highway! But much of the park is accessible, though it is definitely best in a car. There are a number of campsites in the park suitable for bigger RVs too.
 
RVMommaTo6 said:
Will you be driving the RV down to Wind Cave or leaving it parked and taking the car? I've read (maybe it was even on this site, I don't remember) that driving through Custer SP is impossible with an RV.

Amanda, I chose our campground specifically because it was a centralized location for all there is to see in this area. That way, we don't have to take the coach anywhere. Yesterday, we drove the car to Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore and today we'll drive it to Custer SP. i wouldn't trust being able to take the rig, especially while towing the car, to any of the state or national parks with its length being about 58'. On all of our stops, we will be in a campground outside the parks we will visit, and then drive the car to the various thing we want to see.

Getting ready to leave now, the wife is walking the dogs for the last time. I'll post today's travels tonight.
 
UTTransplant said:
You certainly can drive through Custer SP in a motorhome, but not all the roads are suitable. The Wildlife Loop is only for cars IIRC, and don?t even think of going down Needles Highway! But much of the park is accessible, though it is definitely best in a car. There are a number of campsites in the park suitable for bigger RVs too.

or even better on a motorcycle.. especially when stopped in a herd of buffalo on the road, close
enough to feel their breath on my arm !!  :eek: :eek:

 
Ok, I want to do Needles Highway, it's om my list, so we'll park and take the car.
Thank you!
Ps- sounds like such a great trip!
 
We just back from Custer and I must say that it has gone to the top of my list for favorite places to visit, just ahead of Yosemite.

We picked a bad day to go for seeing wildlife because it rained most of the day, sometimes very hard and there were a number of lightening strikes close by due to all the iron in the mountains. We were able to see two male bison apart from any herd grazing a couple hundred feet from the road, a group of burros next to the road, and two herd of bison so far away from the road, all you could make out were black spots. I'll blow up the photos we took and see if we can make out the individual animals. No antelope or sheep. I would imagine most of the animals were trying to stay dry, just like us.

After doing a minimal amount of research, we decided we would have the time to take two roads: the Wildlife Loop and the Needles Road. The Iron Mountain Road sounded like something we would like to see, but we took the Wildlife Loop from the west side and could only take either Iron Mountain or Needles, not both without doubling back, and we didn't have time for that. We left the dogs in the coach and didn't want to stay gone for more than six or seven hours.

What was said about these roads is correct; you cannot take them in a large coach. We saw several Class C's on Wildlife Loop and a couple of small 5'ers and A's, several trailers, but nothing very large. I think most of these RV's were coming from campgrounds that did have easy accessibility, but further down the road there were a number of switchbacks that I would not try to take my 39 footer down. On the Needles Road, there are numerous switchbacks, hairpins, and three tunnels a decent sized coach would not make it through. The Needles Eye near the end of the road is a tunnel that has a 9' clearance and is 8' wide. When we got up to it, a smaller than average tour bus was attempting to enter the tunnel. We waited for over 20 minutes while the bus driver got his bus positioned and pointed exactly right because he had absolutely no clearance. Why any tour bus driver would attempt to do this is beyond my comprehension. But he made it. When we finally were able to enter the tunnel, we could touch the side walls on both sides at the same time - that's just how little clearance there was, and this was in a small SUV. We saw the bus parked a mile down the road at a lodge. From a distance, it didn't appear as though it had lost anything.

While the Wildlife Loop didn't live up to our expectations from the rain, the Needles Road made up for it. The formations of rock that appear like needles standing straight up in the air are fascinating and worth dozens of pictures at the numerous turnoffs available on the road. But then the road travels up into the needles so you are even with them! I would post pictures of them but I can't get my photo editor to make them small enough for the forum to accept them. This road is a must see for anyone visiting Custer State Park.

Entry to the park costs $20 per car or $10 per motorcycle and the pass is good for a week. We stopped at one welcome center (there are several because there are several entrances) that had an excellent display of the history of the park and a very good education about bison. I never knew bison and buffalo were two different animals, always thinking the names were interchangeable. A theater inside shows an 18 minute film about the park narrated by Kevin Costner and shot from a helicopter, giving you a very good view of much of the scenery. If I ever have the chance to return to the Black Hills, and I think I might put it on a future list, I will definitely go back to Custer State Park.

At present, it is pouring down rain again and I think the burgers I was going to grill will be cooked indoors instead. Tomorrow, we will drive into Deadwood and check out some of the casinos, comparing them to the Vegas casinos we used to work in and frequent when we lived there.
 
Yesterday, Saturday, was a take it easy day since it was the last day we had until hitting the road again. A bit of housework, computer work, making out the bills for the next month, and then heading into Deadwood to see a little bit of the town. We didn't know we had picked Wild Bill Days this weekend, an annual event with a lot of activities and several decent musical groups including Tracy Byrd. We walked down Main Street, saw where Hickok got shot, where his killer was caught, grabbed a pizza at a local bar, and played video poker at two of the only machines we saw in the entire town, playing for over an hour and losing only $16.75 between the two of us. This is little more than a tourist trap town, but we expected that.

Today, we got up and out in less than 90 minutes, getting better and faster at our PTI and hitching up the car. For the first time, we had an issue with the slides going in and I thought we were going to have to get a new motor and pump installed just after visiting HWH a week ago, but it turned out to be a weak chassis battery after having sat all week without being charged from driving. I told my wife to start the coach and then try it, and it worked. We dodged another bullet. It took me a little longer than it should have to hit the road today because earlier in the week, I had put our satellite dish on top of the coach to get a good signal and today had to climb up and take it down. Tonight, the dish could not be used.

We drove west on I-90, catching some bad concrete after the state line into Wyoming for a few miles, but we avoided most of it by driving in the inside lane until we could tell the road was once again good enough to keep from shaking the coach to pieces. I watched the elevation continue to rise on the Garmin for much of the trip today until it peaked out at 9,700 ft in the middle of the Big Horn National Forest. The mountains are spectacular there and at our highest, we were level with snow still on the ground. In June! The drive was rough at times because it rained much of the way, causing us to be extra cautious when going back down the 6% grade on wet roads. The slowest the coach ran was 20 mph when climbing the 8% grade up to the top. The worst mileage according to the computer was 4.9 mpg and the best was 15.8 coasting back down the other side. I'm hoping this will be indicative of what we will see for the rest of the Rockies as far as engine and transmission performance are concerned.We filled up in Gillette for $2.50/gal.

We spent two hours off the road trying to get the WiFiRanger working by downloading new firmware, and it turned out to be a complete waste of time. The tech working with me on the problem told me he will ship me a new system when I can give him a shipping address. I'll have to see if my campground in W. Yellowstone will accept packages.

We got into Ten Broek RV Park at 5:15 just as the owners were closing up the office. They told me to park the coach for the night and then come back to the office and settle up. Nice folks. But the campground is old and has the hookups on the wrong side of the RV with the water and electric on the right. And, the sewer could not be hooked up because the pipe is in a concrete encasement in the ground and my connector wouldn't fit. We'll dump in the morning, not a big deal.

But the big disappointment was not being able to get the Dish satellite dish to work. Apparently, some of those bad roads took their toll because we have lost communication between the cable connection inside the outer compartment and the other end that connects to the receiver. Just to troubleshoot the problem, I connected the cable from the dish directly to the receiver through a window, and it worked so I know it isn't the outside cable. It makes sense that the problem is at one end or the other since in between, there should be nothing but wiring, the connections that could be shaken loose being on both ends, so I'll look at those places first.

Another issue we had was the jack that has the bad solenoid didn't want to deploy. Apparently, this morning when I flipped the valve open to retract the jack, I must have disconnected the wiring harness. A simple fix.

This is a primitive campground with no television stations or cable, but good, strong wi-fi. possibly because the campground isn't full. The owners are friendly and accommodating and the price is reasonable.

Fish N Fry in Deadwood has very friendly owners that make you want to return, but only at a different site. We had problems all week long with flooding from rain and sinking in, even with a gravel pad. Every morning when I got up, I could tell the coach was no longer level. I also have never had water as bad as this at anywhere in the United States. Maybe as this trip progresses, I'll find out there is a lot of iron in the water in different locales, but this water was a real shocker. Yellow to brown every morning, you didn't want to shower or rinse out your mouth after brushing your teeth because of the smell and taste. Very strong iron taste making you think you were eating rust. The first morning, I accused Judy of not flushing the toilet because the water was yellow. When I flushed the toilet, I realized I owed her an apology. It made me wonder what our clothes were going to smell like. I refused to fill my holding tank with this water, choosing to wait until we got to a different spot. Now that I'm a few miles further down the road, but in the mountains, I am realizing we might be in for the same thing for much of this trip because the water at this campground isn't any better.

Tomorrow, we head to Cody by way of the Gooseberry Badlands. I don't have a reservation for that town, so we'll have to hope the RV parks aren't completely full on a Monday. We plan on staying there for a couple of days and then backtrack down to Dubois.
 
Yesterday, we drove to Cody. We had planned on taking the road past the Gooseberry Badlands, WY421, but it snuck up on us so quickly, I couldn't make the turn with an 18 wheeler breathing down my back without him seeing what I had in the toad. So we took the long way through Thermopolis but still made good time and enjoyed the scenery. Near the end of the trip a few miles outside of Cody, the road, WY120, got so bad, I thought I was on I-10 driving through Louisiana again. Since I lost my generator on that trip due to it bottoming out on its springs and severing the conduit to the transfer switch leaving us with no electric, I decided that this time I would slow down to a crawl to make the bumps caused from poorly patched raised slab edges much more reasonable, and I think we made the trip without damage.

Since we didn't have reservations for this town, I called Absaroka Bay RV Park Monday morning and had no problem getting a spot. With Good Sam discount and only a 4% Wyoming sales tax, the price was very reasonable at $39 per night. We decided to stay two nights so we could see the northeastern quadrant of Yellowstone along with the town and what it has to offer.

When we arrived, we found a nice campground with plenty of room between sites, good utilities, a friendly and helpful manager, and a lot of dogs for ours to bark at and spend plenty of time and energy sniffing out who had been in the dog walk area for the past couple of weeks. That afternoon, we grabbed a pizza on Main St. and walked several blocks looking for things to take back home. We wanted to see the western museum but needed a third day for that, so it got skipped.

Today, we wanted to see the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway and the Beartooth Highway. We didn't realize that meant we had to drive all the way to Fishing Bridge and essentially cover the northeastern quarter of Yellowstone. While in Montana, we paid $3.20/gal for gas, the highest of the trip thus far. Fortunately, we dealt with little slow traffic and were able to make the trip in eight hours, the limit we want to leave the dogs in the coach. We missed a couple of sites I would have liked to have seen, but will have the chance to pick them up when we stay in W. Yellowstone for two weeks. I think this was the correct decision to see this portion of the park while staying in Cody rather than trying to make an even longer day of it from the other side of the park.


Seeing the wonders of Yellowstone from the plains to the snow covered mountains and everything in between will make anyone who doesn't believe that God created this planet think twice. The beauty is simply astounding and something I would not get used to for a very long time, maybe never. Of course, this is coming from someone who has lived in Florida for over 20 years, so seeing anything that isn't flat is exciting. But we took so many pictures, we ran the camera's battery dead and forgot to bring our second. So the phones came out and finished the job. For wildlife, we saw countless bison over the entire area we covered, some at a distance, some crossing the road in front of us and then taking a dirt bath on the side of the road. This, of course, caused slowdowns, but no one seemed to care because everyone wanted pictures. It was absolutely fascinating. We also saw pronghorn antelope fighting on the side of the road with the females beginning their climb up the cliff, one black bear, chipmunks and marmots, but no elk, moose or grizzlies. We look forward to seeing those animals on our return visits with two full weeks to spot them.

We made it back in good time, even with the Fishing Bridge roadwork slowing us down. For those who don't know, Fishing Bridge RV Park is closed and several miles of the road around the park has been torn up and is nothing but dirt and gravel, one lane for quite a distance where each traffic path must take turns. If you want to see this part of the park, plan on taking extra time.

Tonight we dined at Irma's Buffet, supposedly a must do restaurant while in town. I was not impressed and the meal did not meet my expectations. Afterward, we went straight back to the coach so the dogs wouldn't think we had abandoned them. Tomorrow, we head to Dubois, again without a reservation for one night before driving to the Grand Tetons.
 
Back
Top Bottom