HOME AGAIN - PORT SUSAN

We made the trip from Cascade Locks, OR to the Tulalip Casino in good time in spite of accidents in Tacoma, Seattle, and Lynnwood on I-5. They cost us about 30-40 minutes overall. We "dry camped" here last night and had a nice dinner at a Casino restaurant. Today we will fuel up and take the coach to our lot in Port Susan and start some serious cleaning of both the coach and the truck, both are very dirty and still have a red tint to them from the fine red dust of Monument Valley and Moab. Overall we drove the coach 3500 miles and put an additional 500 on the truck doing side trips. Wherever we were we were "home". Both vehicles performed perfectly but, as expected, we shook a few things lose and the coach is going to be spending some time at the dealership getting a few things fixed. We may find ourselves living on Denita again for a few weeks. Oh Darn!

This has been in interesting spring for weather. It seems we were experiencing some kind of weather extreme almost everywhere except right here in the Pacific Northwest. We left in mild weather and came back to sunny skies. Eslewhere we had everything from high winds with gusts to 70 mph to freezing temperatures, snow and hail. One thing we did not have a lot of was rain. Having said that I must also say that every day we went out to explore we had good weather to do that. We hiked where and when we wanted to. The only thing that kept us from doing all the hikes we wanted to do was crowded parking lots with no place to park at the trail heads in Arches NP. We made up for that by going off road with the truck and finding a great hike with almost no one else around because the trail head was hard to get to withour a four wheel drive vehicle.

We enjoyed this adventure a great deal and look forward to planning our next one. This may be the last post for a while but I hope to add some pictures to this post and the last one and Arlyene is working on some video too.

WMD

PENDLETON TO CASCADE LOCKS

GREEN again!

Easy trip to Cascade Locks from Pendleton down the Columbia River gorge yesterday. It is nice to be around real trees again. After the last few weeks we can see how visitors are overwhelmed by the green of our area.

Had a "quiet" night replacing the wind with a train every now and then - a train going by about 150 yards from us. Hard to ignore. More of a problem for Arlyene then for the deaf guy. Will add some pictures later but getting on the road this morning hoping for a smooth ride through Seattle (hard to do on the washboard they call I-5) and back to Marysville where we will dry camp at the Tulalip Casino tonight. Then on to Port Susan on Sunday where the big clean up begins.

WIND FALLS , ID TO PENDLETON, OR

View 1 from Pendleton, OR KOA.
View 2

Gizmo on bird watch.

No, that title "Wind Falls" is not an error. That is my official renaming of Twin Falls, ID.

Good Grief Charley Brown! Wind, wind, and more wind. We drove in the wind the first half of today and finally got out of it more or less near the ID/OR border. We are currently settled in the KOA campground in Pendleton and will head for the Cascade Locks KOA in the Columbia river gorge tomorrow. Not much else to report except that Gizmo is doing an excellent job of being a traveling kitty and she manages to find time to also keep track of the local birds for us.

TWIN FALLS, ID

Shoshone Falls
Snake River Canyon below Shoshone Falls

Rock Chuck

Not much to talk about as far as the 167 mile drive here from Brigham City, UT. Mostly flat and mostly windy. The later in the day the windier it gets. At one point on I-84 there were gates, like a railroad crossing, that they used to close the freeway during high winds and blowing snow.
As I write this about 5:30 local time it is very windy here and the sky has lots of dust in the clouds. Yesterday the forecast was for gusts to 45 mph. I think that is about what we are feeling here.

The KOA is actually in Jerome just outside Twin Falls so once we got settled I took the truck in to town and drove to Shoshone Falls. Oddly, all the local hype is about Shoshone Falls "The Niagara of the West" not Twin Falls. I likened it to Snoqualmie Falls but a bit wider. Being mid week and windy there were few people there. Few enough in fact that I was able to make friends with a "Rock Chuck" per the gate attendant. I had not seen one before. He said it is, "kind of like a Prairie Dog."

Expecting more wind tomorrow we hope to get an early start on our way to Pendleton, OR. Nothing to stick around here for that we can see except more wind.....

BRIGHAM CITY/GOLDEN SPIKE NATIONAL MONUMENT

We made it through Salt Lake City and north to Brigham City and had just enough time to jump in the truck and drive about 35 miles out to the site where the Golden Spike was driven at the completion of the Transcontential Railroad in 1869. I finished Steven Abrose's book about that about a month ago so this is something I wanted to see and I was disappointed only by the fact that we did not have more time to spend there. We got there at 4:15 and the National Monument closed at 5:00. Still, we were in time for the last "demonstration run" of the day with the real steam engine they operate there.

So these pictures account for most of today's excitement. Tomorrow we head for Twin Falls, ID hoping to get there early enough to see some sites.

'On The Road Again......"

After all we have seen the trip today was pretty ho-hum. More red rock....

...a couple more canyons and cuts ......

...and then sthe surprise, a pretty nice KOA campground in Richfield, UT where it was sunny and warm with only a light breeze and real grass! That's Arlyene in her sun chair with the mountains in the background. Too bad we are only here overnight, then it is on to Bringham City, north of Salt Lake City. We are taking it easy and only doing, on average, a couple hundred miles a day. We are in no big hurry to get back. Nothing personal you understand.....

LAST DAY AT ARCHES

Down a long gravel road and up a sometimes steep sometimes dusty trail.....

Then down through a valley surrounded by giants and around a corner. . .

... to visit yet another arch, this one hidden and reserved only for those willing to make the effort and enjoy the peace and quite of no crowds and no vehicles.

Today was our last day in Arches and all the parking lots for all the hikes we wanted to do were full. So it was off road for us and the reward was worth it. It was a good way to end the visit. Tomorrow we start the long grind home. We hear that Richfield, our next stop, has some views. I guess we will find out.

CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK

Just finished our trip to Canyonlands National Park with a side trip to Dead Horse State Park. This time I will just let the pictures do the talking. Tomorrow we head back to Arches to do some of the hikes we did not have time to do yesterday.

Remember you can click on any picture to enlarge.