OVERWINTER '20-'21

 

With our coach packed away from the snow and ice until the next trip, we sincerely hope political conditions will allow us to travel east in 2021. Meanwhile, John and Debbie went out to dinner Tuesday night.

Perhaps it's the seemingly senseless and unscientific continuation of Michigan's social lockdown.  Perhaps it's because our Governor and her appointees continue to blame this disease on the Michigan Supreme Court Justices for tromping her toes when she trod past the line drawn by the state Constitution.... It all came to a head for us this week in reading the Michigan CapCon's description of the tribulations of a small restaurant owner in Newaygo.

We support the fight by the owner of Jimmy's Roadhouse against the unconstitutional continuation of Michigan's social lockdown (now by order of the state Health Department's gubernatorial appointee). His liquor license already has been suspended by another of Whitmer's appointees.  These bureaucrats are not elected by We The People.  They answer to no one but her.

Individually, we may not feel that we have the strength to oppose this juggernaut, but we can support those taking the brunt of it.

Enjoy your dinner at a threatened small business near you. Leave a big tip!

p.s.: Jimmy's asks folks to register how far they traveled to his place (and not be identified). Our nearly 1-1/2 hour trip was not the longest this day.   Entries show people have come from Traverse City and Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Holland....  There were a dozen names on the page when we left just before six. One employee told us it would be an historical document: “We are making history!”

The food was good; we'll be back!

–– 

Notes:

The Michigan Mackinac Center's publication is not a right wing fanatic's ravings. The Center is a “think tank” established in the late '80s with the help of former Governor John Engler.   CapCon has been one of the little heard voices of reason during this time that the Brys call the Political Pandemic.

Members of Governor Whitmer's administration reportedly have declared that anyone infected by the virus would be lucky to survive.  No intelligent, aware individual could say that truthfully, not with a nearly 98% survival rate of those infected.

The Michigan Covid “dashboard” continues to report this virus had killed no one under the age of 20. Ever!  Not any of our school children, nor even most entering college in this state.  The people who die are those who are old and relatively frail: 89% of all deaths are over age 60.  The CDC's figures are similar elsewhere.

December 15, 2020

Starting Back

We're still wandering, but now the arrow on our GPS track maps is pointed the other direction as we want to be home in time for the Election to make sure that our two Single Votes Matter in the avalanche of multiple mail-in ballots (if you accept the Right Wing webs' foretellings). And –what the heck– it's Game Night again! From Rock Springs, Wyoming, John joined his virtual group of cybernetic adventurers to defeat another horde of Orcs and even badder guys, storm a castle and bring justice, peace and harmony to a fantasy land known as Faerun. His Warlock's newly mastered Hunger of Hadar spell was a killer!

Okay, here in the real world, we stumbled across another of the roadside Wyoming Historical Markers that said we could see the

real, actual, Oregon Trail. Or at least a well-used spur of it at Sand Springs; the Lander Cutoff is said to be the first federally funded road project west of the Mississippi River, “Built in 1858...to provide shorter route for emigrants.” The public is kept off it, but you can walk along the fence line if you want a closer view of the 162 year old ruts cut by the many, many thousands of prairie schooners of that era, as many as 300 wagon loads every day!  (No wonder the Indians became upset?)

We also discovered the federal Bureau of Land Management

(the original BLM, before violent anarchists co-opted the letters with lies) has one of its many collection and holding centers for wild horses in Rock Spring. Apparently, these horses that run wild in the high desert are worse than feral cats in the eastern cities; their free ranging turpitude results in huge numbers that the land cannot sustain. Instead of letting Nature kill them, many of your tax dollars are spent on government helicopters humanely frightening these beasts into corrals where they are adopted out to people who refuse to control the numbers of these noble steeds by more direct means.

Our two-night stay in Rock Springs featured a side trip to the Flaming Gorge Byway and its dam. The scenery is just impressive! Places like this actually exist!

These overlooked the parking lot    

 We were just driving by; recall that
we had brought our house with us. 

of an ordinary Hampton Inn!

 Less impressive was our civilized Honda C-RV on the sharply stony high hill road that the sign called The Wild Horse Loop. Debbie's little girl My Little Pony fascination with horsey butts took us several hundreds of feet into the wilderness above the town where we found many piles of evidence of horses (a la Mackinac Island's streets), but no actual sightings. We also had to replace all four tires after a jagged stone cut one of ours to shreds. The local guy who stopped to help was towing his own rugged-looking quad machine on a trailer because he'd suffered a similar blowout on burly, knobbed tires.

Then, on to Laramie Wyoming for two nights in a Walmart parking lot. That was less scenic a camp than at the reservoir lake leaving Idaho. We did, however,

visit Snowy Range Pass on our toad's new tires. It was very scenic –and cold. We estimate the air was in the low 30s^oF at the top of thenearly 11,000 foot pass. The wind gusted over 50mph, we're sure. Wind chilled John is sure, anyway; the two-dollar souvenir of a visit to his son in Alaska was ripped off his head and sent flying down the mountainside.   Here's Debbie, refusing to believe the cap is gone forever, running after it madly 

through ankle deep snow well after it was out of sight. The yellow patch of land on the horizon at 2 o'clock is Libby Flats, a couple thousand feet lower and at least 30-degrees warmer. Maybe one of the ranchers will end up with it.

Still in Nebraska, a commercial campground hosted us for two days afterward in Ogallala. John felt the minor thrill he's sure people from other parts of the country feel when they visit Michigan to learn there really is a Kalamazoo. We did laundry and finally visited Chimney Rock and the Scotts Bluff National Monument, the first real waypoints pioneers saw on The Way West. “Finally,” because John had wanted to start our

Western trip here last year and he's the one sitting at the keyboard now.  Chimney Rock's spire was the first indication those travelers had that there really was an end to the miles and miles and miles of grassy plains. But we're coming the other way, so it's the herald of lower elevation, water-boiling normalcy for the Brys.

We also discovered Runza. It's a Nebraska fast food chain, but instead of McBurgers, they serve Runzas, which are pretty much like Michigan Pasties, but without the rutabagas: seasoned beef with cabbage and onions in various configurations on fresh baked rolls.

Deb's not impressed. John is highly favorable; he wants more, and phone-cam'd this quote off a wall near their table.

   

Back at the coach, real life hit us in the face again. Our sewer hose broke open as we were about to leave. You don't need details that we don't want to recall.

We were still in Nebraska, when we found the Miletta Vista Winery at St. Paul. 

It was a Harvest Host location, meaning we camped for free on the assumption we would buy something. They had a dinner for sale along with their wines. It was okay. We didn't find the wine as memorable as their driveway sign. Also it was Debbie's birthday. John didn't bake a cake; he bought a teensy one at a Walmart and stuck a candle on it. Hey, when you're camping, you don't get everything you want!

And finally, we crossed the state line into South Dakota 

only because the US Army Corps of Engineers' Cottonwoods Campground was on that side of the Missouri River at the Gavins Dam. “Just freakin' gorgeous!” exclaims Debbie amid the cottonwoods' bright yellow amid a scattering of other colors.

Then she went outside in thirty degree weather to scrape the bugs off the windshield. John really does appreciate his wife at times.

––

Cindercones, Spattercones, 'n' Volcanoes –Oh My!

We had missed Craters Of The Moon National Monument on last year's Great West Adventure, running out of time to visit. It's here on Earth where, according to one sign, an early geophysical admirer had written the place looked exactly like the Moonscapes he'd seen though telescopes. Well, except for the trees, of course –and the severe lack of meteor impact craters.

Instead, we were presented the conical remains of active volcanic activity and many, many pictures of actual volcanoes on other parts of this planet with the assurance that these would be same except that they aren't now. And then again, the actual Moon hasn't been

volcanic for ages before any human looked through a magnifying lens.

Frankly, the only compliment we have is for the Lava Flow Campground: nicely laid out, frequently spaced water spigots, clean restrooms, and paved sites artfully separated by piles of cinder rock, each with a grill and a (synthetic?) stone picnic table.

Of course, any Ranger resource was absent and the information center closed: Covid.  Despite the stiff 10-15mph breeze all day, the sky was hazy from the annual California wildfires, too.

Last year, near Bend, Oregon, we were able to climb into the some of the quiescent volcanic features, touch and walk among the long-cooled remains at the Lava Lands National Park. Nearby, the Mackenzie-Santiam Scenic Byway drive took us up the cindercones of other volcanoes where we found a Depression era CCC project had built a mountain observatory near the top of Belknap Crater. If you would be the adventurous

type, you could park and hike across the tumbled boulders.

But not at Craters of The Moon!!

This year, in this place, we were very disappointed to find that almost every “information sign” on the first short, meticulously paved, half-mile walk was, as we put it last year for the extremely disappointing National Park at the Olympic Mountains range, filled with “glossy Environmentalist propaganda about why we need to spend our tax money to preserve this wilderness.” Also, “Don't Touch Anything.” So very disappointing that Debbie couldn't suppress a disparagingly disgusted snort after the fourth one of those signs in few hundred yards because there was very little real information about the geology and their formation. We'd seen this type of terrain much more educationally –more “up close and personal”– in Oregon. After that experience, now –this year– to be treated like mindless Wowzers –on our dollar, no less!– is the height disparagement.

Our strong recommendation is this: Craters Of The Moon is not worth your time if you have seen or intend to visit the two sites we mentioned near Bend, Oregon for a respectful education.

Getting there and returning on the fifth of October, we drove through Arco, WY: “The first city in the world to be lighted by atomic power”. We also used the Butte County RV Dump (free!). Debbie says that “Arco water tastes best of any on this trip” –and it didn't make us glow in the dark, either! John used the internet to learn that Idaho National Lab owns much of the high desert of eastern Idaho, between Arco and Idaho Falls and down to Blackfoot. Atomic City, Idaho is just south. It has its own RWC (according to the road sign) which we deduce is some sort of governmentese for Radioactive Waste Containment. We're still newbies to this part of the country and learning things anew here.

After that one night very shy of the actual Moon, we headed back

toward a Homeward Bound track, still wandering aimlessly, but also now our house has developed a surprising overnight crack in the windshield. It was there when we woke up. The insurance people kept demanding to know what incident caused it. Sleeping was not an option for them. The fourth We just don't know apparently was –with a sigh. They are involved because the windshield is a gigantically huge hunk of glass that we don't expect to find easily while traveling and hope we can get home first.

Then, while plugging in our towed Honda, the electrical socket connecting coach-to-toad's brake

lights broke. Unable to find a site in Yellowstone National Park's Madison Campground (one of the few still open at this time of year), we headed back toward Jackson to spend the night on the wonderfully fall-colored shores of the Palisades Reservoir. We were just a bit above the dam, at Blowout which is a USFS campground that had been “closed” for the winter: no water, no restrooms, no trash pickup. However, it was open for self-contained boondock camping at Debbie's preferred price for anything –free. Between that and the brilliantly turned leaves, life was good enough to forget the windshield worry for the moment. Thank you taxpayers.

We decided to stay at the Blowout Campground another night to let us drive our uncoupled

Honda back about an hour to Swan Valley. Three miles west, just across the Snake River bridge, is a dirt road to a scenic view of the river valley and surprising falls gushing from under the road. Back at Swan Valley, we turned off US-26 to the Teton Scenic Byway for a 20-mile trip over local mountains to the town of Victor (where we had ended our Teton Pass exploration the week before Idaho Falls). Descending to that town, we were treated to a “backside” view of the Grand Teton lording above local mountains. In this fall environment, the drive in the lower elevations was wonderfully

yellow with the brilliant aspen trees. Well worth the side trip!

The next day, we made a return visit to the Teton National Park, at Gros Ventre Camp, where we replaced the 6-pin brake light receptacle for the toad and futzed for hours with the wrong tools before finally getting it attached the next morning in time for a “quick” trip (five hours round) north to Yellowstone National Park so Debbie could see the Prismatic Geysers from the upper viewing trail that she had missed last year.

Good thing that's off the bucket list because they closed the campground gates for the winter at 11a the next morning. We'll head to Rock Spring, WY, where there is cheap camping –but a review promised the showers are awesome– at the Sweetwater Events Complex. Debbie says the sites will be full service and looks forward to longer showers inside the coach, too, with a “city water” supply and sewage coupling. When we rely on our limited tanks while boondocking, we practice navy showers: moisten, soap, and quick rinse, using minimal water. So, we suppose, it really is like “camping” after all.

––

Falling into Idaho

As we explained earlier, to reach this state in our car explorations, we had to climb the steeply high
Teton Pass and fight gravity coming down the west side. Fortunately, we found a slightly more circuitous route. 

US-26 follows the Snake River on the flanks of other, less tall, mountains and passes through some just-beautiful country to boot.

The Freightliner repair shop (Tiffin coaches are built on Freightliner frames) was friendly and kind and even had three paved and nearly flat RV parking spaces at the rear of their huge parking lot complete with 50 amp electrical service.  Since we didn't require any wet services, they said, “No problem,” and we camped there several days all by ourselves while they worked us into their schedule, corrected John's ignorant diagnosis of the leaking fluid, ordered a new water pump shipped, installed it and the new hoses for the heater core, not the power steering. Forty feet in front of the engine that makes that heat, this device warms the toes of the driver and co-pilot in cold weather. (The “house furnace” is a different system entirely.)  So it was not as critical a problem as we had thought at first.  And what's another wad of cash down the money pit?  Especially as it included repairing a noxious, dangerous exhaust leak under the bedroom.

So we explored in our Honda, freed of its towing leash, to find Idaho Falls' falls thoroughly tamed and harnessed for power. John found it interesting that this town had

made riverside walkways and parks as Grand Rapids, but has not yet evolved the GR plan to put the rapids back (undoing all the 19^th Century work of knocking the top off Heritage Hill; we guess the great-grand-parents of today's athletic younger people didn't think to have fun shooting the hydraulics in sturdy plastic kayaks.

On the advice of one Freightliner service tech here in Idaho, we toured north to the town of Heise,

just across the Snake River at the edge of those mountains, to eat “the very best pizza in the world” (his words). It was good, but we think we may have tasted better. As our GPS track shows on the topographic map, the Snake River provided a very, very distinct transition from those higher elevations to the many square miles of flat rolling hay and potato farms to the south. We drove a touristy sight-seeing route, wishing we'd seen the actual potato plants. John doesn't know if their blooms are pretty or not, but Prussia's Frederick the Great thought so a few hundred years ago; when potatoes were brought back from the New World, “he forced his subjects to grow them.”

We learned that, the next day, after traveling 30-miles to Blackfoot, ID, to the Idaho Potato Museum where the Official Greeting is shown here.  

And you envied our fun last month at “The World's Only Corn Palace!”

Nearly everybody's heard of Idaho Potatoes, thanks to a very focused and highly creative series of advertising campaigns. (Your Mr. Potato wasn't just an

innocent childhood toy!) In this context, Russet potatoes really have no other name; it's either an Idaho Potato or it's just a tuber. Seriously. “No other growing area has greater name recognition than Idaho Potatoes.” (82% worldwide!)

The museum charged 11-bucks (senior rate) for the two of us to learn that

datum, see the tools used by long-ago tater growers and today's tater farmers, be exposed to comic books that promoted Idaho Potatoes, and many, many other factoids.....

....such as How To Make Your Own Potato Gun (under a more politically correct name) and even an electric clock powered by a potato! (Actually, that last one is pretty much old-hat for grade schoolers ever since the low power digital clock chips appeared; the potato generator technology also is featured in the computer game Portal II.)

We reluctantly left the excitement in what used to be Blackfoot's Union Pacific train station to return to our coach and find the techs needed yet another day. Okay. We found a scenic drive north of Heise, starting in Ashton, ID, which bills itself on the road into the town as “The Seed Potato Capital Of The World.” This unexpected trip extension just keeps getting cooler and cooler! More vast potato fields east of Ashton and

Marysville, transitioning to craggy mountainous terrain along the Mesa Falls Scenic Byway. It runs past Idaho's First Ski Resort at Bear Gulch (now defunct) and allowed us to have lunch at the only falls in the entire state not employed for irrigation or hydroelectric power --or so the sign claims.

Freightliner interrupted our exciting education (both of us consider this unexpected Idaho visit to be one of the more memorable highlights of our entire trip!) to say the coach is done. It's a Friday afternoon. We arrived there just before closing time to pay the bill and received permission to continue the parking lot campout since they were closed for the weekend. We had laundry and shopping and minor housekeeping that kept us busy.

We had missed seeing the Craters of the Moon National Monument in last year's trip and wanted to check it out this year, since discovering we're close. That's next.

The Tetons

We wandered into Teton territory 28 years ago with our kids and a pop-up camper behind our GM van since it's just south of Yellowstone.

John wasn't all that impressed then, but as we discovered this year, his younger self had not seen the entire Teton National Park. He feels a lot better about it now. Also he's corrected the mistaken impression Hollywood's cowboy movies left with him.

He had thought Jackson Hole was a small canyon nestled into a mountain's flanks where

black hatted outlaws had established their own criminal town. Stupid Hollywood. Never believe anything you “learn” from a movie! Our Bonanza fantasy about Nevada's Virginia City was destroyed last year.

Other signs explained (because the National Park Service all but eliminated every bit of information in this Political Pandemic) that Jackson Hole is a fifty mile long north-south valley –a graben– that fell while tall mountains thrust up to the west and lesser mountains climbed on the other side. 

This view looks south from Signal Mountain; the Tetons are just off-camera to the right.  The valley is home to the Snake River and others that fill with snowmelt waters in the spring. Not so much now in September, although one NPS Ranger remarked that five inches of snow had fallen just this Labor Day weekend. The storm was short-lived and our temperatures were in the 60s and 70s with lows comfortably above freezing most of the week we were here.  Grand Teton is the largest of the glacier-topped mountains between Wyoming and Idaho. 

While the valley floor is quite high, about 6,500 feet above sea level, the peak of Grand Teton soars twice that height into thin air.

We took a couple scenic drives in our Honda “toad” and even had a lunch on a shore of picture-encouraging Jenny Lake where we met

 a Park Volunteer, Bill Apel, who told us yellow is the predominant fall color in this high country. He said the only red color (and, really, it was more like a dull rust) comes from clusters of sumac bushes on the hill- and mountainsides.  The air is just too thin for the oaks and other hardwoods that Michiganians are used to.  Of course by far, the overall color is green from the needles of the lodge pole pines and other high altitude firs.

One of our scenic drives also took us up the Teton Pass. As we later learned, it is not the only way to get by the mountains nor even necessarily the most scenic, but it sure is beautiful –and steep in its own right.  Neither of us was entirely comfortable meeting the speed limit on the curves, and Debbie

is always antsy when the dropoffs march right into the shoulders.  “Slow down!” you might suggest.  How about as slow as these cargo wagons in this historical picture?  The caption dates this photo at “early 1900's.” About a full minute after reading that, both of us snapped our eyes wide open in astonishment.

The 1900's were our times, both having been born in the first half of the 20^th Century. We thought of it and ourselves as so modern, but––! In the early 1900's, our Grandparents –people we knew!– were older children, even teenagers!  And once again, John recalled his shock at learning that Old West Legend Wyatt Earp had died when John's own father was already nine years old!

If nothing else, these past two years of touring the other part of our country have shown us that History is not so old!

These days, of course, the valley is frequently traversed by regional and private jets on the approach to KJAC's runway.

 

We also should mention that, here at the first of October, we are more than halfway through the time allotted for this trip and we thought we were at the Western Terminus. Except that–– going over the Teton Pass we found ourselves in Idaho!  Yes, we look at maps, but we really had no concept that Idaho was just over the mountain. Really.  This is important; keep reading.

We ate out again, too. Debbie should not learn that John thinks she's mellowing. The Bird is a beer and burger place south of Jackson city. They had a stout called “Ruckus” that we both liked from a brewer in Melvin, thirty miles distant. They also had imaginatively named and pleasingly complemented burgers that disappointed us for being served between halves of some type of thin roll (for burgers?!). And raw-meat-Debbie thought hers was overcooked anyway. Well Done John disagreed.

We had parked the coach in the Gros Ventre campground. Both Google and The Bitch call it, logically enough, “GROHSS VEN-terr.”  But it's really French, from a people who never had managed to learn how to spell properly, throwing in extra letters all over the place; they would say,  “groh-VAUN,” n'est-ce pas? (...which is pronounced nay-PAH, isn't it?)

How that name happened, in an area famed for the Mormon architecture of the still preserved farm buildings is a mystery to us.

Original iconic photo by praise winning Debbie

Anyway, back at the coach, we noticed a wet splotch and an active drip behind the front bumper. It was red, like transmission fluid, but we knew that just couldn't be because the transmission (and the engine) are forty feet behind the front bumper of Bry RV. Looking at the dirt encrusted tubing and where it went, we deduced it probably was power steering fluid and called the nearest Freightliner repair shop where the Service tech also thought it likely. We went out and bought a quart of the recommended fluid to top off the power steering reservoir.  Then we we learned the big metal canister holds wayyy more than a mere quart and also is forty feet behind the front bumper. Then John checked the dip stick and it seemed okay. So far, so good.

The Freightliner place is in Idaho City, Idaho. This is how we learned there is another way to get by the mountains because we didn't really want to push our house-on-wheels up a curvy ten percent grade and try to keep it from falling down the other side, especially with power steering we didn't trust. So, our Trip has been expanded with another full week farther West than intended, but it was an educational week. And fun, too.

Stay Tuned for the next chapter.

{and the repair bill....}

––

Real West Again

 

John's old Garmin handheld GPS continues tracking us as we follow our noses west from the Missouri River's Big Bend Dam...

...to find ourselves suddenly on an Alien Planet!

Debbie had driven us westward along I-90 from the Missouri River while John slept in the passenger seat. Approaching Wall, SD (home of Wall Drug!), she turned left for five or six miles and life changed.

The Buffalo Gap National Grassland is the location where the buffalo still roam while the deer and the antelope continue to play and pioneer sod home roofs are cut from turf that is, at places, feet thick. We parked the coach close (but not too close) to the edge of a precipice along the free camping US Forest Service Road #7170 and went to bed.

The morning showed us at the very abrupt edge of a new day.

We recall the sharp surprise we both had found when we had trucked our three kids into here back in '92. Nothing –nothing– in our previous lives had prepared us for seeing this stretch out before us.

Debbie wondered aloud what it must have been like for the pioneers, crossing days of grassy plains, to suddenly run into this end of the world wall. Maybe that's how the town was named?

Well before the last dinosaurs died, this area had been a seabed for dozens of millions of years,

accumulating all the layers of organic debris that swimming and walking life sent to the bottom. When geologic forces raised this part of the world and drained it –and then erosion happened, too– the various layers of sediment took on colors depending on what bits of whatever had formed them.

We weren't really looking for fossilized dinosaur left overs although several signs remind you not to steal such things, but report them to the paleontologists who might find possible valuable clues to the universal question of Why We Are Here.

On the grasslands themselves we found it was nearly Autumn. You can tell where the creeks are by following the aspens, which are pretty much the deciduous trees that take to this 3,000 foot elevation. We found Pronghorn and the Bighorn Sheep in abundance.

 

These guys greeted Debbie on her morning 

walk near our coach one morning.

The Badlands has two obvious loops you can tour in your car, stopping

at turnouts to see vistas or even walk among it all. Each takes less than a couple hours to complete. Or more, if you stop to study and marvel. One is paved, but the westward loop, along Sagecreek Rim Road, is an unpaved washboard. Our civilized suburban Honda survived while John continues to miss his old Jeep. Also, we dropped into one prairie dog village where Debbie stopped to chat with a community guardian.

She also perched atop a less-than wild Jackalope, a fictional creature of legend: a jack rabbit the size of

an antelope. It's apparently as well known in the West as the Jersey Devil is back East where John grew up, but we're not sure they named a hockey team after this creature. Then again, we're not sure anyone in South Dakota knows how to skate.

You've heard of Wall Drug. Pretty much, it is the town of Wall, SD. It grew to fame before Eisenhower built the Interstate system and the only “main roads” in the country were the US Highways that ran through the 25mph Main Streets of every small town in the way. There are myriad numbers of tourist trap store fronts along Wall's main drag and you can find many, many ways to part from your dollar. That's not a bad thing if your eyes are open. Debbie bought a T-shirt and the quirky side of John parted with two

bucks at a selection of Trump stickers because the middle of America is filled with practical, Conservative grown-ups to whom Black lies and loud Liberals' outright disdain of anything sensibly traditional or patriotic do not seem to matter at all.

A couple side notes:    

John didn't notice this last year when he featured the Junior Ranger field vests

and uniform boonies hats we'd found at Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. (Find the paragraph A not-quite apology to our Number Two Son here.) John assumes someone at Badlands NP didn't get the memo about the school boards railing against prejudicial stereotyping of gender assignments. Or maybe customers still drive the markets in Mid America, in spite of the coastal Socialists' rants.

Also, driving long miles between waypoints out West tends to turn a person introspective. The state of Wyoming has historical points of interest along the road way, such as this one, installed in 1954 along US-26 west of Douglas at a

roadside pullover. The text reads:

Three men named Sharp, Franklin and Taylor and one unknown man were killed by Indians July 12, 1864 where the Oregon Trail crosses Little Box Elder Creek 2½ miles S.W. of here. They are buried 4 miles S.W. by the grave of Mary Kelly who also was killed July 13, 1864.

Having grown up on Hollywood Westerns, we thought such death was a recognized part of the settling process in our history. However, seeing the prominent highlighting of this one seemingly innocuous incident could make one believe it was unusual? Almost makes you want to want to visit the scene to learn more.

But we're on our way to Jackson Hole.

...after Gillette, WY to wash some clothes and empty the black- and gray water tanks that are nearing their brims. Once that is accomplished, the plan is to stop one night at a Harvest Host. A farm, this time, not a winery. Greg and Kathleen Jarvis manage a lot of acreage in Hidden Valley,

which is near Shoshoni (proper spelling –for this town anyway). They'd done Harvest Host for ten years but plan to call it quits because of the floods of people fleeing their West Coast governors who are at least as bad as Michigan's in promoting the Political Pandemic. Nevertheless, the Jarvises were congenial and pleasant, offering whatever we wanted to pick from their smaller vegetable garden between our coach and their huge fields of alfalfa. We enjoyed several grape tomatoes and a few ears of corn on the cob that John liked very much. We also made friends with Ellie the Dog.

Kathleen and Greg are a wonderful, believing couple, and Debbie had a great time speaking with them about God's Word. Kathleen mentioned that her church was having a women's retreat that started on Friday evening and invited Debbie to go with her that evening. It was an offer too good to pass up; Debbie had a great time meeting some of the other women attending the teachings on James 1. The teaching that night was about how we are able to grow and mature when adversity comes our way, and triumph over the circumstances with the great promises of God's Word.

While Debbie was there, John took advantage of a great 4G signal for his bi-weekly game night. Our second night on the farm was exactly the second Friday since Duluth. If you're curious, John's Warlock did not suffer near mortal wounds in the battle with Orcs trying to ravage a village that our band of adventurers had under its protection. And we Leveled Up at the end. John's character gets an additional Spell in his inventory and an Invocation; he chose Agonizing Blast. Wonder were he'll play from in two weeks?

––