We headed for Mount Rushmore at an early enough time to get there, look at it and move on, but then some other stuff happened. We went though the Wyoming landscape of low pastel hills (I think this must have been a formidable mountain range a million years or so ago), passing lots of grazing cattle, oil wells, and those little mini-wells that I ( Read more... )

It was an easy 3 and a half hours from Butte to Gardiner, and we were settled into our campsite there by early afternoon. Gardiner sits right at the north gate to Yellowstone, and the Rocky Mountain Campground sat up on a bluff and overlooked the park. Pretty neat. We could sit at our picnic table and look at the salt-and-sage colored cliffs with ( Read more... )

I've been out of internet access, so I have to say this late.  Hope it was a good one. 
Meanwhile, I think you should know that because of you, I've noticed every post office we've passed. 

We had a wonderful day yesterday, and then it all sort of collapsed. We started driving through a stretch loaded with silver mines, which was so cool. I don’t know why I thought so, there wasn’t that much to see. A few tidy structures set up against the mountainsides that look like work sheds, but they are the entrances to silver mines, and somehow ( Read more... )

DId you know that there's a town in Washington named Twisp?

We stopped at the Spokane KOA, which was pretty expensive, and the first big disappointment. It had a big pool, and a playground with lots of features, and even a separate doggie playground. But I wonder if these things were put in by earlier owners, and the current proprietor has had had trouble keeping the place up. The lawns and tress were ( Read more... )

We took the coast road northwards towards Astoria, which was pretty, of course. It was also bumpy, which made the rig bouncy as a bucking bronco. Who needs the rodeo? We’ve got the road-eo.

We stopped in Cannon Beach for lunch. The place was swarming with people and dogs and kids. It’s a very pretty town, but how come American beach towns all look ( Read more... )

Spent the first day sitting on the beach in the lee of rocks, watching The Boy engineer lakes and locks from the outlet flow of a creek that emptied onto the beach. And we watched a seal hunt in the breakers. At first I thought it was a piece of dark driftwood or something, but it seemed to move the wrong way. Shouldn’t driftwood be propelled ( Read more... )

We headed out of Portland towards the Coast on a beautiful day. The Willamette Valley is special to me. It’s so lush, paved with creeks and vineyards, orchards and nut groves, berry patches, fields of all sorts of good things to eat, dairy farms and nursery farms. Even the occasional wheat field. It makes me think of the phrase “land of milk and ( Read more... )

We wound up having quite the All-American Fourth, and it was great. We met Beautiful daughter’s family and in-laws for a picnic in a park at lunchtime. Potato salad and KFC, babies playing on blankets, toddlers on swings, kids playing catch and running all over. Comfortable gossip over lemonade and apple juice and all that. The sun played hide-and- ( Read more... )