May 23, 24, 25 & 26, 2024 — Days 69 – 72 Yampa River State Park, Hayden Colorado We’re having a bit of a vacation from the travel. Partly we’re just tired of moving around. Although the last 3 stays were on the long side, the last 2 involved significant car travel to see the sights. Also, it’s Memorial Day weekend. Crowds, traffic, and drunk drivers aren’t our thing. So we’re just staying put. Here’s some short posts. May 23, 2024 We have a few go to breakfasts when we’re on the road. Today it was hardboiled eggs, fruit, a piece of toast with guacamole (or humus) and chopped cherry…

May 22, 2024 — Day 68 Steinaker State Park, Vernal, UT — Yampa River State Park, Hayden Colorado We said good bye to Utah and continued our eastward journey to home. It was I-40 the whole way. This road is pretty normal for the area. It has very little traffic that’s probably because much of the land here is open range. The speed limit is 65mph. Does that mean you could come across cows crossing the highway? Yes. We kept it at 55-57 mph and that made for a pleasant, quiet, cow-free trip. We saw our last Dinosaur. This time it was a whole town! That’s right—there’s a town called…

May 21, 2024 — Day 67 Steinaker State Park, Vernal, UT Today we went back to the Dinosaur National Monument to see the wall of dinosaur bones as well as explore the parts of the park closer to Utah. But, before we even headed out we had a problem. The slow leak in the Jeep’s tire had become a fast leak. We had been loosing about 1psi every few days. After we had topped it up the previous day overnight we lost 11 psi. That’s too much of a drop. We found a tire place that appeared to have good reviews and headed over. We sat in the waiting room…

May 20, 2024 — Day 66 Steinaker State Park, Vernal, UT We had an ambitious plan to do all of Dinosaur National Monument in one day. But some of the things we wanted to see are a 2.5 hour drive each way. We vowed to wake up “super early” (about 6:30AM) and maybe get breakfast at Denny’s in town. Then start driving. We crawled out of bed a little after 8am. Already behind schedule it was then we realized it should be a 2 day trip to Dinosaur. That’s ok, we had 2 days. What else were we going to do? Attempt another visit to Moonshine Arch? (Actually, that was…

May 19, 2024 — Day 65 KOA/Dinosaurland Vernal UT — Steinaker State Park, Vernal, UT Today was moving day. We left the KOA in town and headed out to Steinaker State Park. It was an uneventful 9 miles IF you ignore the rut that the RV drove over as Susan left the KOA. They use shallow channels on each side of road. It makes for bumpy coming and going. This one sent water in the cups for the herbs splashing about. And the Cherry tomatoes took a header when the door opened. They scattered all over the floor like little red marbles. This state park is so much nicer than…

May 18, 2024 – Day 64 Vernal / Dinosaurland KOA Holiday, Vernal, UT Today we headed off to the museum. The one we should have gone to yesterday instead of visiting Flaming Gorge. But you know maybe not. We could now read about the geologic strata having already seen them. Yeah, so we did it on purpose—we’re not changing our story. But first, a “thorough the windshield” shot of the Zion Bank aka “The Parcel Post Bank” aka “the Bank that was sent by Mail”. It’s like a real life version of Johnny Cash’s song, One Piece at a Time. Maybe he got the idea for the song from the…

May 17, 2024 – Day 63 Vernal / Dinosaurland KOA Holiday, Vernal, UT Today we headed north to see the Flaming Gorge area, which is in the very large Ashley National Forest. The drive there was incredibly scenic. We passed lots of different geologic strata. There were descriptive signs all along the highway that named the layers and told what sea creatures, and later land creatures, lived here hundreds of million of years ago. Here’s a photo from the return journey, heading back down. We’ll go into detail later, when we visit the museum downtown. We kind of wished we went there first. We would have better understand what we…

May 16, 2024 – Day 62 Vernal / Dinosaurland KOA Holiday, Vernal, UT That picture pretty much sums up the day: doing laundry, getting groceries and catching up on blogs. Sometimes you have to take a day away from adventure to do “life maintenance.”

May 15, 2024 – Day 61 Antelope Island State Park, Syracuse, Utah – Vernal / Dinosaurland KOA Holiday, Vernal, UT Today was just a driving day, only a few interesting things happened and they weren’t that interesting. We had worried about driving over the 7 mile causeway and getting Clifford covered in bugs just like the Jeep got covered. It’s easy enough to reach the windshield in the Jeep to clean it. It’s a different story with Clifford’s big big windshield. We saw a lot of pretty scenery, it was steep in places, steep and curvy in other places. We drove slowly and made it through ok, of course. Eventually…

May 10-14 – Day 56-60 Antelope Island State Park, Syracuse UT May 10, 2024 We stopped by the Visitors’ Center for the all important fine mesh bug nets. You see, Antelope Island is a special birding place. That’s because the Great Salt Lake is full of brine shrimp. And then there are the brine shrimp flies. The birds eat both the shrimp and flies. Plus the mosquitos which are large enough a traditional mesh bug net will keep them off you. But then you have the biting gnats which totally ignore DEET. (susan here: it’s probably more of a lure than anything else.) So for the next several days we’d…