Forensic crime scene investigations pretty much started and stopped with the brand on a horse in those days. Motive had to have been present. I bet they knew how to start fires, and there was already a lot of fire in the vicinity. My verdict:
Read More… and they are better with ketchup.
Read MoreThe Ojibwa casino is only a few miles from Marquette, a lovely town in its own right, but it’s not the home of Marquette University in Milwaukee. One of the most colorful characters of all time won a NCAA basketball championship for that other Marquette. Al McGuire, coach of that ’77 team, was always good […]
Read More“The basic deal is you are paid $5 a night to camp there … I could learn to like this place!”
Read MoreYou see roadside memorials in nearly every state, but Montana uses them to teach a message. The state pays for and installs the identical crosses, but people are allowed to adorn them with flowers, teddy bears, or Miller Lite six-packs as they like. The message goes on the official state highway map: “Learn from those […]
Read MoreAfter getting fleeced by the AirStream dealer in Anoka we were too stunned and wounded to drive any distance, so we set out for Eau Galle Lake’s Corps of Engineers campground near Spring Valley, WI. It’s only 70 miles and should have been a piece of cake, but the signage was below sub-standard. Our GPS […]
Read MoreI should say something more about the Minnesota in our rearview mirror. Other than temperature, Minnesota is unbelievably similar to Louisiana. There’s a lot of water and wetlands. Water means a lot of biting bugs when it’s warm. Both states are fairly flat; no mountains in either, at least not where we drove through. After […]
Read MoreLeech Lake Campground is so clean, so manicured, and so beautiful that it’s hard to believe they don’t spray the deer flies and mosquitoes. Maybe it’s a food chain thing. Dragonflies depend on mosquitoes as a food source; certain birds love to chow down on deer flies. But couldn’t an exception be made for just […]
Read MoreIt is 745 miles from the Custer Battlefield to the Leech Lake campground in upper Minnesota. We drove it in three days, passing through Theodore Roosevelt National Park, camping in Dickinson and Fargo, ND. Teddy’s park is just a greener Badlands, Dickinson is in the heart of the Dakota petroleum fracking renaissance, and Fargo was […]
Read MoreWe couldn’t wait two weeks for Billings AirStream to get the parts to fix our heat pump, so we drove on. Little Big Horn Battlefield is only 65 miles southeast of Billings, so we went. Like at Gettysburg, seeing the terrain helps understand the battle, the decisions made by key commanders, and how unlikely some […]
Read MoreThe air conditioner quit in Challis, but with lows in the 40’s and 50’s, we haven’t missed it. Now that we have to cross Montana and North Dakota in a heat wave, there will be times when we need A/C, which means a trip to the AirStream dealer in Billings. We’re keeping our fingers crossed […]
Read MoreGlacier belongs on everybody’s bucket list, and the sooner you see it the better. Photos from 150 years ago show that there were then 150 active (moving) glaciers. Today there are only 25. Two of them, Jackson and Blackfoot Glaciers, are visible from a distance on the Going to the Sun Road. The others are […]
Read MoreWe drove the Red Sled into Glacier to hike the Cedar Trail. There is plenty of parking near the trailhead, but this is the peak season, and we found no space. “Every cloud has a silver lining” and here the benefit of road construction is ten minute gaps in on-coming traffic. We used that gap […]
Read MoreThe state and Federal campgrounds were fully occupied July 5th and 6th, but we were not among their occupants. Fortunately the Kalispell Wal*Mart had a few openings. We camped there those nights, reloaded our provisions and bought a small, highly portable charcoal grill. Wal*Mart is nothing less than a life-saver for full-time RV’ers. Glacier is […]
Read MoreThe people who had parked empty trailers at Cottonwood Monday and Tuesday showed up Wednesday night. Our park was beyond capacity — many sites had more than one trailer or RV on them. We were going to roll north on Independence Day anyway, and this made it easier. Cottonwood and the Salmon River are wonderful, […]
Read MoreSunday there was music down by the swimming hole. Four young fellows unpacked their guitars and a mandolin to sing for the girls splashing around. Here they are: decent, clean-cut lads playing something they all knew the words to. Randy Jackson would not have found them “pitchy”; their voices were pretty good and the playing […]
Read MoreSummer here has one sure advantage over spring: cowboy baths.
Read MoreMy Crankshaft Value (the number of vehicles wanting to pass) had approached double-digits when a Harley rider blasted past me and the first four in line behind me. He was passing us blind coming into a left-hand mountain turn. As I wondered if he’d become a hood ornament it struck me that there goes one of way too many guys on the planet whose colei outweigh his gray matter.
Read MoreWe pulled out of Marsing and drove 130 miles to Hagerman to a Passport America campground, High Adventure River Tours. It was a $15 a night with electric and water hookups. The sites are pull-throughs with grass and shade trees. The showers were clean. Nobody expects scenery from Passport camps. Monday we left Hagerman […]
Read More“I figured it out! The power drill: it was one of Diane’s cats. He urinated on our bedspread, not once, but two or three times.”
Read MoreAfter two days boondocking it’s time to recharge the batteries. We moved into Marsing, Idaho to a Passport America participant on the banks of the beautiful Snake River. This camp is pretty good, and while the river is too cold to wade-fish, and too shallow to bank-fish, there is a mulberry tree with a load […]
Read MoreThursday, June 20, marks our long-awaited Airstream repair day. We need a new set of steel steps (they fought a curb, and the curb won). Our screen door latch wore out, and with the rivets and all, fixing it is way beyond our capacity. And then there’s the water heater and its intermittent refusal to […]
Read MoreWe took time off in Glenn’s Ferry, Idaho to rest and wait for our Airstream appointment in Boise. Idaho does more for the over-62 set than most western states, which is to say, something. Idaho gives us half price on their state campgrounds Monday through Thursday, which puts this nice, roomy water and electric hookup […]
Read MoreCraters of the Moon is about halfway between the Grand Tetons and Boise. It’s volcanic, like Yellowstone, but it’s very recent, with its eruptions coming several times only 2,000 to 15,000 years ago. Craters is fresh and gritty with nothing but lava soil and little rain; plants have a tough time making a living. The […]
Read MoreGrand Tetons is a more physically active version of Yellowstone without the geothermals. Instead of picnic tables, you will see miles and miles of bike paths – paved, which are by and large curb-protected from road-hogging RV’ers. You will see lots of horse trailers, car-topped kayaks, and canoes just the way you won’t in Yellowstone. […]
Read MoreGeothermal features are practically unique to Yellowstone, but the mountains, streams, alpine lakes, and wildflowers may be at least as good as the other Parks. All national parks are busy in the summer but this one is very near the top. People come to the ‘Stone for a reason, I figure because they believe they’re […]
Read MoreExcept for wolves, reintroduced here 20 years ago, nothing has been hunted by man within the bounds of Yellowstone Park since 1872. The upshot of this has been that shy and hard to spot species are now comfortable around people. Consider the buffalo. Our ancestors hunted them right up to a knife’s edge of extinction. […]
Read MoreYellowstone is the world’s first national park and perhaps the only land in the USA that has never been fenced or farmed. It has mountains, clear rivers, deep lakes, four kinds of conifer forest, valley meadows, and is the world’s most active geothermal site. Wildlife abounds. It’s the geothermal features that make this place famous. […]
Read MoreWe camped Monday in the Newton Creek campground, 14 miles from Yellowstone’s East gate. We chose a sunny site alongside the cold, clear and noisy Shoshone River. This will be our base of operations for our forays into the eastern part of the ‘Stone. The moment we arrived I noticed fresh buffalo chips on […]
Read MoreSunday night we boondocked at the Cody, Wyoming, Wal*Mart. We spunt $150 on food and bear spray. The former should last us at least a week, and the latter, one would hope would last a lifetime. It was a nice 40 mile pull to Newton Creek campground just outside the East Gate of Yellowstone Park. […]
Read MoreThis will be our tenth and final night in the Bighorn National Recreation Area. The weather faired off today with sunny skies, light breezes, and a high around 70. Tomorrow we will pull Kat’s Cradle to Cody, Wyoming, where we’ll camp at a Wal*Mart and restock our provisions. Early Monday we’ll move out for Newton […]
Read MoreIn a few days the wildflowers will bloom. Meanwhile we enjoyed the scent of all those evergreens, sages, and other fragrant greenery. …. This was a fine day for introspection, if only because the slow rain made walking a drippy proposition. Kat checked our tape library and pulled out a Prairie Home Companion tape from 1985
Read MoreThere is neither cell phone reception nor camp Wi-Fi in Horseshoe Bend. After a day or so one realizes that this is not normal and that others may not understand the situation. We found a spot three miles south that gets two bars, and the next day we visited the highest point on a road […]
Read MoreThere’s a beaten track from our campsite down to the lake. We’ve made the hike a couple of times and I get the feeling I’ve seen some of these rocks before. Recognizing strange rocks could be a sign of something wrong upstairs, maybe even advanced age. When I realized this, I knew why they were […]
Read MoreThe sun rose and burned through the clouds lingering after the rainstorm. We had suffered no hail damage and the benefit of the rain is already visible on this near desert-scape. Dog, Kat and I scouted around the east side of our campsite — there are no campsites at all east of us. We found […]
Read MoreWe need to get to Lovell, WY on our approach to Yellowstone. The plan is camp at Horseshoe Bend in Bighorn National Rec Area until after Memorial Day. We had a choice of highways. One route is advertised as safe, scenic, less grade-challenged. The other was cleared of ice and opened for traffic yesterday. But […]
Read MoreSunday night we dry-camped at Cabela’s in Rapid City amidst a rain storm. A 35 mph wind blew in a cold front making it a relief to pick up our mail and drive west into The Black Hills. Dark Green Hills is more descriptive, but there are some very large, very dark boulders dotting the […]
Read More. Dave, retired police chief of Allentown, PA, now acting Campground Manager, beat on our trailer’s door about six p.m. with news that big hail and tornadoes were highly possible. We should go to the Visitor’s Center.
Read MoreKat wanted to hike some trails so we set out to climb the Cliff Shelf Trail, rated Moderate by the Badlands NPS. Once I was an athlete (Kat still is), but age and injuries have worn out some of my key mobility joints. Moderate sounded Aggressive to me, but we set out to do it. […]
Read MoreSage Creek campground is only about 20 miles from one of our Must-Sees in South Dakota, Wall Drug. We figured to keep the truck and trailer hitched up, visit the little town with the big store, and maybe boondock Tuesday night somewhere on the Buffalo Gap National Grassland. Spring days are longer up north and […]
Read MoreMonday we figured it was time to go a step further in boondocking. We set out for the Sage Creek primitive campground. Primitive typically means there’s a road to it and nothing more. This was kind of true; the road was dirt and gravel, washboard with occasional patches of smooth. Otherwise it was pure primitive, […]
Read MoreSaturday we visited Niobrara National Wildlife Reserve. We were a quarter mile into the park when up there on the ridgeline loomed the silhouette of a buffalo bull: a big boy, for sure. Moments later we saw the whole herd behind him, maybe 100 of them. These bison are more tame than wild so they […]
Read MoreWe are South Dakotans. We got our drivers licenses in Vermillion, despite the best efforts of some circuit-riding DMV vets from Sioux City. They did their best impression of French government functionaries (Ah, thees receipt for your camping does not leest your Dakota address!” “Uh, I paid $5 cash; he had no reason to ask […]
Read MoreAround noon on May 7 the sun came out and we crossed the Big Sioux River leaving Iowa and entering South Dakota. Half an hour later we rolled into Vermillion, SD, home of both the U of South Dakota Coyotes and of the multiple state championship winning Vermillion High School Tanagers. How ‘bout that Tanager […]
Read MoreOn the way to Nebraska City we stopped at a Target to buy a Fuji S4850 camera. It’s more camera than a Point and Shoot but easier to use than a full DSLR. Like everything else, you should read the instructions before trying to do anything useful, hence the delay in this post. And then […]
Read MoreOn May 2 and 3 the weather broke records all over Kansas, including Lawrence. The new temperature record is 43 degrees, both days, and that’s not a Low, it’s a High. The old record predates me, going back to May 2 & 3, 1944. The old recorded lowest High for these days had been 44 […]
Read MoreToday is May 2. Fifty miles west snow is falling. Accumulations of up to half a foot are forecast and we could get some here. In Lawrence it’s 35 degrees at noon with sleet and occasional snow. We need to travel northward, but it’s foolish to pull a trailer over ice. This is our third […]
Read More(The title is borrowed from the Rolling Stones’ 60’s hit, when it rang true for us Baby Boomers. These days it’s tongue-in-cheek humor, befitting retirement.) During Sunday’s excursion to Lawrence the Red Sled told us it was time for an oil change. Ram 2500s have an on-board computer that tracks stop and go miles, highway […]
Read MoreLawrence is home to Kansas University, and with Sunday being warm, clear, and beautiful we decided to ride into town and see the sights. On the way there we passed large fields of purple henbit, a horse munching grass though a barbed wire fence (I looked closely: it really is greener on the other side), […]
Read MoreThe ride to Lawrence, home of the KU Jayhawks, was Kat’s trip all the way. She found the campsite online, drove all 200 miles, and did a fairly good job of disguising her anger at my failures of navigation. I failed with the maps because of a detour that blew up her hand-written instructions and […]
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Life on the Blue Highways 