Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Going west or southwest? With Nellie - Part 1 of 3

After 30 years of working as a HVAC guy I convinced my employer to let me take a three week vacation, we are excited! We've been thinking about where to go for the last 6 months??? Texas was our first choice, visiting relatives and camping on the gulf but after watching the weather we decided 80-90 degrees was too hot! So maybe next year, leave earlier? Then we thought about hitting the big 5 national parts in Utah but decided that we need to plan farther ahead for that.
  Finally decided that going west and staying in the center of country would give us perfect temperatures and lots to see, so here we go! South Dakota,Wyoming,Utah,Nevada,California,Oregon and back, woohoo!
Friday night, we're on the way, 1st stop, made it to Minnesota!
Minneopa State park
The first campsite we picked lasted about 5 minutes till the man in the
next site started yelling at his dog and kids:-(
We moved as far away as we could, much better!
The  dogs were very happy to be joining us!

The Buffalo Gap Grasslands outside of Wall So. Dakota was Night #2 and our first time free camping on BLM land.
Alone in the wilderness! Somewhat!
We were 15 minutes from town!
This was a great way to start our trip! Definitely high on my list of best places to camp!
We hated to leave but we had country to see! 
Note: Not easy to get to if it has rained, road gets pretty muddy!

Night#3 Wind cave National Park,
Nice quiet place for an overnight stop. We will have to return and check out the cave!
After a long drive to southern Wyoming and very close to running out of gas!!
Night #4 our first Walmart sleepover, Cheyenne Wyoming
It was a pretty busy place but we sleep well, the dogs weren't bothered by the noise but it did help that it was raining ! We woke up in the morning to an inch of snow on the truck! We were up
early and on the road, heading south!

So it turns out weather is always changing and after we got into Wyoming we found ourselves waking up to and inch of snow on the truck and camper??

It is nice to have a home on wheels so we can move to the nicer weather! If we were to keep going West as planned we would have had 4plus days of snow and ice, that didn't sound appealing.


So we changed directions and headed to Utah! It was very nice to not have a set schedule!
We survived getting through Denver and had lunch with a view!
Some people take pictures with Flat Stanley, our granddaughter Nora sent her favorite
Dinosaur with us so Raura as we named him will show up in many pictures:-)
The scenery changed a little in the mountains above Denver! Beautiful drive!

Night #5 at Highline State park, following good weather is working well!
Left for Moab the next day and drove about 30 miles thinking I would fill up with gas at the neighboring town, no gas station there so not wanting to take the chance in the Utah dessert we turned around. I need a bigger gas tank on the next truck!

Thinking back to traveling with my parents when I was younger, Dad had dual gas tanks on his truck and a 100gallon propane tank, he could drive forever without worrying about running out, sometimes that was a problem when we needed a pitstop!

Now onto Moab,Utah!

Part 2 Coming soon! 

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