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Yellowstone
Trip, Report 1
Greetings, All.
This is our first trip in Tuzigoot Two, abbreviated as TuziTwo, since
we drove home to New Mexico from Tennessee. We’re traveling in tandem with Bill and Connie
Lacy in their motorhome. Departure
date: Sept. 9, 2006; destination: Yellowstone
National Park. Actually, it’s quite a bit more than Yellowstone.
We’ll spend a day in Moab,
Utah and see some of the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Then we’ll spend a couple of nights in Grand Teton National Park
en route to Yellowstone.
The first day we drive to Moab.
The drive across NW NM is gorgeous after all the summer rain we’ve had
– lots of yellow flowers, green grass, multi-colored cliffs and mesas, blue
skies. All goes well, in contrast to
later events. (I provide this
foreshadowing of trouble to come as a favor to Mike Blackledge, eminence grise of the Last Thursday Book Club,
who loves this particular literary device.)
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Our campground in Moab
is north of town, a “riverside oasis” tucked between the highway and the Colorado River.
It’s nicely shaded, but the spaces are tight and tree limbs at our
site are rather low and scrape the top of TuziTwo as we pull in and set
up. I don’t like that. Then, as I pull out Monday morning,
watching ahead and overhead, I apparently brush the lower left rear corner of
TuziTwo against a tree trunk, which I wasn’t paying attention to. I don’t discover the damage – a small area
is mangled -- until a couple of hours later when we stop for gas. Makes me sick, but it’s fixable and as
Susie says, I’ll “Get over it.” This
incident is eerily similar to our first scrape in Tuzigoot – pulling out of a
tight spot in Lampassas, TX, watching the overhead branches while
sideswiping and breaking off a water faucet with the lower body. Live and Don’t Learn.
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The Magellan GPS had said the fastest route to
Yellowstone is via Salt Lake City,
but we’ve opted for a more scenic, less-traveled, shorter route. From Moab,
we angle up and over to CO, then, just west of Grand
Junction we take Hwy. 139 northward, over Douglas
Pass -- 8268 ft. elevation, pretty
small potatoes by Colorado
standards. Bill and I had decided
this shouldn’t be too much of an obstacle and should be scenic. Turns out to be a long, steep climb, but we
surmount it in fine shape and park for a breather. Spectacular views, too, but, it was pretty
slow going, as Magellan must have recognized.
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Down the back side of the pass we angle out of
CO to Vernal, UT, notable for huge flower pots, colorfully overflowing with
flowers, lining main street. Next,
it’s north through the SW corner of WY via the Flaming Gorge
National Recreation Area. More
steep climbs and descents and great vistas of mountains, meadows, and the FG
Reservoir.
On one climb, Bill calls us via walkie-talkie
and says he’s getting some strange noise apparently from the engine. Oh, no, might be a broken belt. We stop at the top of a pass and Bill finds
that a muffler support has broken and the muffler is dragging. That’s fixable – he’s done it before. With wire coat-hangers and wooden blocks
we, mostly he, lift the muffler and secure it and proceed to our destination
of Rock Springs, WY.
I resolve to carry some wire coat-hangers along with the plastic
ones. Can’t think of what you could
repair with a plastic coat-hanger.
It’s been a long day, and not an easy drive, so we’re looking forward
to getting to camp. I had called in a
reservation that morning from Moab. Sorry, we’re told when we arrive in Rock Springs; your
reservation was booked for tomorrow and we’re all full tonight. I know I said today, Susie confirms it, but
nothing we can do. There are no other
campgrounds nearby, but they will let us park in an overflow area for
half-price – dry camping, roughing it.
That’ll do. We park, go out to
eat at Applebee’s, then do a Wal-Mart run.
Like I said, roughing it.
Last inconvenience of the day is that the
12-volt cord with which I can power my CPAP machine from a cigarette lighter
socket, in the absence of 110 volt electricity, somehow didn’t make the
transition from Tuzigoot to TuziTwo.
Which means I’ll snore and snort a lot and not sleep much. I sleep on the couch, but Susie says I had
a pretty quiet night – fatigue winning out over apnea, I guess.
Next up: Grand Teton National Park.
Cheers.
Susie and Rob
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