Waking up this morning at the BLM campground felt like a real homecoming. We are back in the west! The air was cold and crisp in the morning, and the smell of sage was in the air:
The kids did a bit of fishing and whittling:
We left the campground pretty early, and managed to drive all the way to Cedar City, Utah. We stayed at the Walmart there. See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.
This morning, I called a couple shops in town and found the part that I needed to replace to restore our turn signals and running lights. Here I am doing auto surgery in the parts store parking lot:
To avoid the high passes of the Rocky Mountains, we decided to head North through Wyoming. It added 50 miles to our route, but I figured it would be a lot less stressful.
The most amazing part of today’s drive was how quickly we transitioned from the Midwest to the West. Once we crossed the 9000 foot pass into Wyoming’s high country, it was clear we had left the word of Corn behind. We queued up the John Denver as we drove into the sunset, marveling at the rugged landscape before us.
Eager to kickoff our entry into the west with a more meaningful overnight location than a Walmart, we use the Allstays app to find a BLM campground on the North Platte river a few miles north of Sinclair, Wyoming. It only has 5 sites, each 200 yards apart, and it’s free! We pulled in and there was serious solitude and wonderful dark skies.
It’s nice to be home!
See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.
The big surprise of the day was pulling off the interstate for lunch in Ashland, NE and stumbling onto the Strategic Air and Space Museum. We had lunch in their parking lot. Trish calls it the “nicest air museum we never went to”:
About 10 miles out of North Platte, well after sunset, we were pulled over by the state patrol. Turns out our RV’s running lights and turn signals were out. We pulled into a closed gas station at the bottom of the ramp where we were pulled over. After crawling around for a couple hours with the multitest meter, I realized that the module that passes the signals from the SUV to the RV had gone bad. I managed to find a 12V line under the RV and hard-wired it to the running lights line so we could limp into North Platte to overnight at, yes, the Walmart.
See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.
After a short night’s sleep at Walmart, we continued West. Two of the RV’s tires were almost done when we left New York, so when we stopped at a park in Davenport, Iowa for lunch, I called around and found a shop to replace the tires:
We drove a full day and ended up at a gas station in Des Moines in the early evening. While waiting for the tank to fill, I did a quick search on the phone and discovered that the Iowa State Fair is currently in progress. We have been using an application using Field Trip on the phone that tells us about local items of interest, and that’s how we found out about the fair being in Des Moines. Being that we’re not on a particular schedule, we decided to visit the fair! Trish has always talked about the county fair in her hometown, so I figured she would be thrilled to visit a state fair.
It was, in a word, huge:
We visited the pigeon display are first:
The pig building was immense:
The cow building:
High tension at the horseshoe contest:
Showing sheep for the ribbons:
The fair had a massive midway, and hundreds of RVs camped out in an adjoining field. Trish had a great time!
We left the fair at 11pm, and stayed that night at the Walmart of West Des Moines. See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.
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