QC03-06 Pacific NW here we come

September 9, 2010 (Thur) Franktown, CO to Meeker, CO (266/4061 miles) 53/76° - It was clear and we could see the Rockies this morning. What a beautiful place to have a house! Thank you Jer and Kim for sharing your view with us - and, of course, your facilities and most of all, yourselves. We had a great time.

Our first stop was the King Sooper (a supermarket) for gas where a very friendly local swiped his membership card in our pump giving us a 3¢/gal discount on our gas. Then we headed for Meeker, CO following Lee and Frannie. We, Mark and Joy, missed the turn to the interstate around Denver and found ourselves in the heavy commuter traffic. Actually it wasn't bad by New York City standards and we didn't lose much time at all. When we met Lee and Frannie at the the Grizzly Creek Rest Area in Glenwood Canyon, it turned out that they hadn't gotten there much before we had. In spite of the detour it was a spectacular drive through the Rockies - especially through the canyon. The canyon is hard to describe and impossible to photograph, the walls are so close and so high, But what a ride!

After eating lunch we took off separately and met again at the Walmart in Rifle, Co. Lee had some things to pick up for their weeks in the wild and we can always find something we need there. As we were about to leave a big two trailer FedEx semi-truck came into the parking lot. It was fascinating watching him make the very tight turn into the lot. We didn't think he was going to make it, but he did and we pulled Q into a tight turn toward the exit road where the FedEx truck was then making a turn into the parking lot proper. We heard a loud bang and looked over to see that a large nearly round boulder (decoration on the corners of the grass islands at the end of each parking row) under the near side of the second trailer. It was big enough (larger in diameter than the truck's wheels) that it held the rear wheels up off the ground. Instead of stopping, the truck kept going causing the wheels roll up the boulder, almost tipping the trailer over! If they had topped the rock it would have gone over for sure but the wheels slipped off and the trailer slammed back town onto the rock. This happened several times and each time we thought the trailer was going to go over. It didn't and the driver finally became aware of what was happening and stopped. In addition to pulling the boulder off the island, his tight turn had knocked over a sign that read "No Trucks".

The campground in Meeker is really a parking lot with a few electrical outlets, some of which worked - ours didn't - for overnight RVs. The $15 a night fee provides some loose change income to the Meeker Chamber of Commerce. We walked the very interesting little town and had dinner in the Meeker Hotel, frequented in the past by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Gary Cooper and Billy The Kid.

Q065534 Meeker, CO Municipal Park dry $15

September 10, 2110 (Fri) Meeker, CO to Riverdale, UT (328/4389 miles) 50/69° - It got a little chilly during the night. Since we were going to take showers, we turned the furnace on for a few minutes to warm things up before getting up at 6:30. Lee and Frannie's dog, Red Bone, has been favoring his right front paw for several days. They decided to have it looked at this morning so we said our good-byes and they went off in search of a Vet. After tending to Q's sanitary needs and fumbling around for a the best route west we finally settled on SR 64 and got under way.

The mountains were behind us, but the scenery was no less beautiful. What we were watching pass by cannot be easily described. It was the type of scenery that looks spectacular in real life but falls horribly flat and uninteresting in pictures - unless take by professionals. And to make matters more frustrating, the most photogenic scenes came along when there was no way we could pull over to take the pictures. Even so we got a few for our memory book.

We crossed the state line into Utah at 11:39am and almost immediately the landscape looked more "Utah". It took on the red cast and butte dominated skyline seen so ofter in advertisements for Utah. It was all very beautiful. It is amazing to us Easterners how there can be so much undeveloped land. We would travel for miles and not see a single man-made object except for the road and an occasional passing car or truck.

At one scenic pull-off we met a young couple who was bicycling across the country. Not being journalists, we neglected to ask many important questions. We did learn that they had started in New York city and that he had grown up in a small town near Syracuse, NY (he knows where Fayetteville is), but questions like when did they start out and what is their destination city were left unanswered.

Q065862 Camp Walmart, Riverdale, UT (north of Salt Lake City)

September 11, 2110 (Sat) Riverdale, UT to Meridian, ID (360/4749 miles) - The Riverdale Walmart is one of the nicest places to park that we've encountered. It's quiet - meaning no fast, muffler challenged cars or motorcycles roaring past, no trucks with engines running, no trains blowing whistles, no street sweepers cleaning the parking lot at ungodly hours. We thought we might have a problem with aircraft noise from the nearby Air Force base but only one plane attempted to land on top of us. And the view beyond the stores around us was of mountains - when it was light enough to see them.

After a good night's sleep for both of us, we were up at 6:15 and on the road by 7:25 (45° clear). As we left the City we saw a road sign for the Golden Spike National Historic Site with no indication as to where it was. Several miles up I-84 later we came across the exit. It turned out to be 40 miles out of our way but the detour was well worth the time and gas. Today being Saturday, we saw the full reenactment of the ceremony surrounding the driving of the golden spike to signify the completion of the country's first transcontinental railroad. The narrator and volunteer "actors", one from the audience, were in period costume and worked their way through their scripts with very few stumbles. The replicas of Central Pacific's Jupiter and Union Pacific's No. 119 locomotives were decked out in authentic, bright  colors. Beautiful! They puffed across the desert and met in front of us where the ceremony took place.

Although it started out cold this morning, 41° when we got up, the day warmed up considerably. It was 66° as we ate our lunch in the Golden Spike NM parking lot (Q had been sweltering in the Utah sun) and well into the 70s by the time we pulled into the Walmart parking lot in Meridian (near Boise), ID. The manager there said, when we asked him about spending the night, we could stay up to 3 nights. We said we only needed to stay 1.

Q066222 Walmart Meridian, ID

September 12, 2110 (Sun) Meridian, ID to Yakima, WA (360/5109 miles) 51/87° - As we lay in bed waking up, this morning, we were prepared to rate this Walmart one of the better ones. In addition to the very friendly management, there were relatively few loud muffler incidents and none after 10:00 or so. The parking lot was big and quite empty where RVs were allowed to park. 15 minutes later we were scrambling to leave as fast as we could. As we were in the process of converting bed room to living room a big white pickup truck pulled into the space next to us - strange in itself since there was a whole parking lot to choose from - so close that it was a wonder its extended rear view hadn't scraped along Q's side. Looking out the driver's window, Mark could see that if it were to move another 6 inches forward, its rear view mirror would seriously damage Q's rear view mirror. It was too close by 3 inches! Mark also saw that the driver was staying in his seat. The fellow, quite heavy in the stomach, didn't seem interested in us - we didn't feel particularly threatened (a bit nervous maybe) but we did wonder if he might be taking exception to the Obama sticker on Q's rump. Since he was just sitting there - drunk? high? tired? oblivious? distracted? - there was no way of knowing when he would pull out, taking our mirror with him. We decided to abandon our morning routine and head for a rest area. We stopped at McDonald's for some coffee on the way out of Meridian but the rest area wasn't very far - just across the state line into Oregon. There we finished our bed-to-living conversion, got dressed and fixed and ate our breakfast before moving on.

I-84 is under construction in several very long stretches and we passed two accidents - one where the vehicle was so badly damaged that it was hard to say whether it was a car or a pickup - it apparently rolled several times. There was also a serious backup in one construction area. Chatter on the CD indicated that some yo yo had a flat tire on his trailer - utility as it turned out - and had stopped in the middle of the barricaded, single lane road to change it - rather than going on to where he could pull off the road.

The scenery through Oregon was mostly rolling knobby brown hills - for miles. No trees. just dried out grass with some sage brush mixed in here and there. It often looked very alien, like a Martian landscape, and like in Idaho, there was constant long vistas with high mountains in the far distance.

We've stayed in Sportsmen State Park every time we've been in this area. It's a nice little park, and very popular with the local community on weekends.This time we won't be visiting the Chinook factory though. Trail Wagons is out of business - some five years now.

Q066582 Sportsman State Park, Yakima, WA #44 dry $21.00 B