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Roadtrekingmike

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  1. Roadtrekingmike
    This is the time to “come up to da UP,” as the Yoopers like to say.
    The flies and mosquitoes are gone, so are the crowds and the whole peninsula is bursting with bright yellows and reds as the annual fall foliage change explodes the hardwoods into jaw-dropping displays. And the sunsets are to die for.
    This year, the color change is later than normal. We came up last Thursday and it was just starting. As we head back downstate today five days later, it’s clear that its moving fast now. This coming weekend and next should be peak times. Jennifer and I love the UP. This is our third extended trip up here since February.
    Yes, that’s right. I said February. we drove the Roadtrek up and camped out at Tahquamenon Falls with 28 inches of snow on the ground and minus 8 degree Fahrenheit temperatures. No problem. You can see what that was like here.
    And we came back up a couple of months ago during peak bug and biting fly time. It was still beautiful – as this shows – but much more uncomfortable.
    This trip is our favorite. And we used it to visit our favorite campground – the beautiful Twelvemile Beach National Parks Service campground on Lake Superior, part of the Pictured Rocks National Seashore. Located 15 miles west of Grand Marais off Alger County Road H-58, this no-hookup 36-site campground is located on a high sandy plateau above Twelvemile Beach, one of the most remote and beautiful stretches of Lake Superior you will find anywhere in the UP. Half the sites are generator free and that’s where we headed, selecting site #25.
    With our all electric Roadtrek eTrek and its solar power, we needed no such noisy power source.
    It got cold. The first frost warning of the year for the UP was issued last night. When I got up at 3 AM to use the bathroom, the outside temp read 35 degrees. Our Webosto heater was adjusted to give us a perfect 62 degree inside temp.
    This is a very hard park to get into – during the summer. This late into September, we had lots of lakefront spots to choose from. This is bear country. So if you come here, keep a neat campsite and use the bearproof food storage units.
    There are pit toilets here, fire rings and picnic tables. The campground connects to several hiking trails.
    Over the next few weeks, well have reviews and stories about various places to visit up here that will help you plan a trip to the UP next year. But if you want to squeeze in a trip yet this season, better hurry. Most campgrounds shut down for the winter in October. Some, like Twelvemile Beach, shut down Oct. 1.
  2. Roadtrekingmike
    All my life as a journalist- for more than three decades – I’ve been on deadline.
    The presses would roll, the red light on the studio camera would blink on and, that was it. I had to be ready. Done. No more time.
    So the clock ruled my days. I was single-mindedly focused on finishing, getting to press time or air time. Then, I could breathe a little… and get ready for the next day.
    It was a wild, crazy, fun, frustrating and high-adrenaline occupation and I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.
    But last year, as I neared retirement age, I couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of life NOT on deadline.
    That’s how I have been living the past 18 months.
    I have to admit, old habits are hard to put aside.
    “Why are we in such a hurry?” my wife Jennifer asked on our first multistate trip in our new Roadtrek back in the spring of 2012. I was 600 miles in on the first day and getting crabby. I wanted to make 800.
    “Because….,” I started to reply. Then I blanked. I couldn’t come up with a reason. I didn’t have to do 800 miles. In fact, there was no reason to be on the road as long as I had been that day. There was no deadline.
    That was the first lesson I learned on the first day of the first trip.
    It’s one I have to keep re-learning.
    There is no hurry. The journey is just as important as the destination. Getting there is, indeed, half the fun.
    The RV life is about being mobile, on the open road in our Class B motorhome. And it has taught me how to decompress.
    So many times in my journalism career, I’ve flown over the country, chasing some story, heading somewhere, fast, on deadline. I’d look down below from 35,000 feet and see a green and brown blur. Now, behind the wheel and on the ground in our Roadtrek, I’m discovering the beauty beneath the blur. It is a magnificent land and being on it, instead of above it, is both soothing and stimulating.
    I never thought I’d end up in an RV.
    But in so many ways, it’s been the perfect choice for Jennifer and me. Not only are we able to connect with each other, we’re meeting other people and learning things I never did standing in front of a camera using the land as a backdrop for my standup, or pushing a pencil in a reporter’s notebook.
    When you stop living on deadline, your eyes open wider.
    Life becomes an adventure of serendipity.
    Like the bit of history we picked up on a summer trip north to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the southern shore of lake Superior. Standing on a wilderness bluff next to a towering sand dune called the Log Slide, we learned that in the 1880’s lumberjacks slid 100-foot white pine logs down the dunes to the water, where they were gathered into huge booms and floated seven miles east to the town of Grand Marais.
    That sent us to that town and a delightful but seldom-visited little museum tucked away in a building once used as the post office. We spent an afternoon looking at old photographs and learning how Michigan’s lumber era was as lucrative as the California Gold Rush of the same era.
    In Gadsen, Alabama, we found a campground located on Black Creek and right next to the awesome 90-foot Noccalula Falls. There, instead of rushing back to the road the next morning, we lingered again over local history when we discovered the first statue of a person jumping off a cliff. The statue is of the Cherokee princess Noccalula who, according to local legend, plunged to her death after being ordered by her father to marry a man she didn’t love. It is made entirely of pennies collected from local school children in the mid-1960s.
    And on a trip back to our Michigan home from Florida, We decided to pull off the interstate and travel the two-laned US 127, which roughly parallels I-75 north through Tennessee and Kentucky, anywhere from 10 to 50 miles to the west. We leisurely made our way through scores of small, picturesque mountain communities and ended up at the Big Bone Lick State Park in northern Kentucky, about 35 miles south of Cincinnati. There we dug into America’s prehistoric past, learning about the bones of mammoths discovered there submerged in muck. President Thomas Jefferson has fossils found there in his personal collection.
    Those are just three examples about things I’d never have seen if I were still living on deadline. But because we were in our RV, staying right there, far from the look-alike chain hotels that cluster around the freeway interchanges, we were able to experience fascinating places that wouldn’t even have caused a blip on our GPS.
    Then there are the campfires and the people we meet sitting around them, the help and suggestions they give us about living in a motorhome. There are the bicycle rides on trails and roads we’d never ride if we weren’t able to haul our bikes on the back of our Roadtrek. And the special walks we take with our Norwegian Elkhound, Tai, who travels with us but would have to be left at home if we were hoteling it.
    We’ve driven 42,000 miles in our Class B RV since March of 2012 and living out this motorhome adventure.
    I may not be living on deadline anymore. But I’m still a journalist at heart, this time telling the stories I want to tell about people and places I’d never experience if I wasn’t out there in my RV.
    I look forward to meeting you down the road.

    Noccalula Falls near Gadsden, Ala. The statue commemorates a lovesick Indian maiden’s legendary plunge over the falls. The statue was made from pennies collected by schoolchildren.

    Jennifer and our dog, Tai, walk in a UP Michigan sunset along Lake Superior.
  3. Roadtrekingmike
    Yellowstone National Park is a captivating place. It grabs the soul and pulls us back year after year. At the top of every RVers bucket list, it is a place so majestic, so wild and big that it calls us to return, to explore, to get to know the diversity of its land and animals over and over again.
    Some RVers make annual pilgrimages. Some volunteer as workers or hire on as temporary employees at the various concessions and park businesses. Anything to spend as much time there as possible.
    A few, a very fortunate few, live there. Deby Dixon is one of those who – while technically not really living in the park year round – comes about as close as possible. She lives in and keeps her RV – a travel trailer – just outside the park gates and spends weeks at a time camping in the park in a tent. When she’s not camping, she drives in most every day.
    Deby is a former police officer now turned wildlife journalist and photographer. Jennifer and I met her this summer at Yellowstone, our second visit in a year to the park. We were camping at the Pebble Creek campground and hanging out in our Roadtrek, with the sliding door open, waiting for a black bear that had been browsing in a meadow directly across from us to step into better view. Alas, the bear instead headed back into the trees.
    But then Deby passed by on her way out of the campground. She stopped, backed up and came over to check out our Roadtrek. Jennifer had met her earlier and so the two chatted. I gave a quick tour of the Roadtrek, which Deby thought would make a great vehicle for her.
    She was camping a few spaces over in her tent.
    She had been in that tent for close to a month.
    This was in early July. When we returned home, I looked her up and have been a fan of her work ever since.
    Debby, injured on the job as a law enforcement officer up in North Carolina, took up photography to illustrate articles she was writing for various publications on national parks. She loves all the national parks and has visited and photographed many. The photo above is a self portrait taken last year at Mt. Baker, looking toward Mt. Schuksan in North Cascades National Park where she worked as a photography volunteer.
    Her love of the national park wilderness and the animals that live there started after a month-long camping trip to Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in 2009. The experience dramatically changed her life.
    “I no longer could stay home in the city,” she writes. ”I sold everything and moved into a 1970s model, 17-foot-travel trailer (since upgraded to a newer 21 foot trailer) and left on a journey to see the parks.”
    But since the fall of 2012, she’s been pretty much living at Yellowstone, writing about and photographing wildlife, especially the fragile wolf pack that hangs out in the Lamar Valley. She knows each wolf’s history, it’s parents and siblings and the story of its struggle to survive. You’ll learn all about that in our Q&A below.
    She keeps her travel trailer in Gardiner, at the park’s Northern entrances. Last winter, she rented an apartment there off season but made her way into the park every time she could all winter long.
    Since the snow melted, she’s spent a lot of time camping at Slough Creek or Pebble Creek, getting up most mornings at 4 AM and heading to her favorite vantage points in Lamar Valley in the northeast part of the park that is home to bison, black bears, grizzly bears, coyotes, badgers, otters, elk and wolves.
    She will typically stay out there till mid or late morning, return to camp to edit her photos, maybe answer some e-mail, work on her photography column for National Parks Traveler magazine and then update her Deby Dixon Photography Page and a new one, strictly about the Park, the Yellowstone Daily. By 5 PM or so, she’s back out in Lamar Valley, or wherever the animal action happens to be that day. Sometimes she will hike off to favorite spots to just sit and wait to see what animals show up. Often, she’s not back at camp until way after dark.
    Divorced, she has four grandchildren and two sons who live in Idaho. She travels and camps alone but has many friends at Yellowstone, fellow photographers and animal watchers. There’s a whole community of like-minded people who spend as much time as they can at the park. You’ll see them in the various pulloffs around the park’s perimeter roads, usually with spotting scopes. Most are equipped with their own two way business band radios that they use to share sightings and pass along tips about what animals are where.
    Deby is well respected by the other photographers, and park rangers as well, even though she has no official connection with the parks service.
    “She’s a great photographer and she’s driven by a genuine love of the animals and the park,” the Pebble Creek campground host told me. “Everyone around here looks up to her. She is very dedicated. Has to be to keep the hours she keeps taking her pictures.”
    Over the past couple of years, her almost daily stories and photos have captivated thousands who have discovered her animal advocacy journalism and wildlife photography. You, I am sure, will be among them once you check out the links to her Facebook Pages.
    Here’s my Q & A with Deby:
    Q: Why is Yellowstone so important to you?
    A: Because Yellowstone is a massive and diverse eco-system that has everything in nature that one could want – from the high peaks and sub-alpine meadows to the rocky desert sage. There are wide-open spaces, meadows and valleys and thick evergreen and conifer forests, along with lakes, streams and creeks. And then there is the scary mystery of the thermal features that constantly capture my imagination. I mean, if Yellowstone blows, I will be amongst the first to go as lava fields and plumes of ash spread. And then there is the wildlife, their lives, their interactions and their untimely deaths. For a wildlife/nature photographer who likes to write stories, Yellowstone has almost everything. Everything except the Tetons reflected in the Snake River, another favorite national park just to the south of Yellowstone.
    Q: Why have wolves captured my heart?
    A: Over a year ago my son asked me what I knew about the wolves and what kinds of experiences I have had with them. At the time I had seen a collared black wolf cross the road in front of me in the Tetons and four wolves hunting elk on Willow Flats in Teton National Park. Before seeing the wolf hunt prey that day, I had been anti-hunting because I couldn’t stand to think of animals being killed in any way. However, while watching that hunt by the wolves, during which the elk rallied and saved a fawn but sacrificed a cow, I suddenly realized that this was the world the way it was intended to be.
    Food was put on this earth for all of us and if we all just took what we needed, like the animals do, then there would be plenty. Hunting was simply a way of gathering food. Unfortunately, my son hates wolves and he proceeded to fill me in about these “vicious” animals. So much of what he said did not ring true but I had no way of know that for sure and so I kept my mouth shut. But, the conversation with my son weighed heavy on my mind and in my heart and so when I got the opportunity to spend a winter in Gardiner, MT, next to Yellowstone, I made the learning about wolves my mission. My slate was clean and I was eager to find out what the truth was about wolves, even if that meant that my son was right. But, I got here, to Yellowstone, and found a difficult situation in that those naturalists who watch over wolves are not fond of photographers and so the opportunities to see and learn were few. And, unknown to me, the wolves were being hunted when they stepped outside of the park. In fact, Yellowstone wolves were being targeted to be killed. Both situations were baffling to me because, obviously the lives of the wolves were in danger while people who could advocate for them were being pushed away. My determination was great and I preserved in my goal to learn the truth about the wolves – did they kill for sport? Do wolves prey on people? Are they killing all of the elk? Where are the elk? Those questions and many more. I learned that most of what my son, and other wolf haters, believe is not true or is greatly exaggerated. And, in the three years I had been visiting Yellowstone, the changes in the eco-system that was once ravaged by thousands of elk standing around without fear of predation, were apparent. Plus, Yellowstone had more moose then had been around for a long time. But, the thing that got to me the most was that there were people in the world with so much hate in their hearts that they would target wolves that lived in a national park and brought research, education and viewing opportunities to millions of people. These wolves had touched many lives and people came to Yellowstone from all over the world in hopes of seeing them. The wolves rarely left the park and had no history of killing livestock at that time, yet hunters were using carcasses, urine and puppy calls to lure them across the national park border so that one man’s bullet could take one wolf away from millions.
    This, to me, was incomprehensible then and still is, nearly one year later. In the past year I have watched the loss of key wolves have a devastating effect on their family member’s, making them struggle to survive. I have had wolves stop only a few feet from me and look into my eyes and even had one appear on a cliff above my head, look at me and then lift her head to howl at the full moon. I have seen their struggles and felt their hearts. They are only trying to survive, just like you and I. I have stood and watched as researchers retrieved a female wolf’s body from the forest, after she was killed by other wolves, and seen puppies play. I haven’t seen it all in the wolf world, but I have seen a lot. Wolves have made me happy, sad and angry when they killed a favorite animal or a coyote’s pups. They are not perfect, but neither am I. The wolf hunt is on in Montana again, longer this year, basically allowing hunters to do whatever is necessary to kill a wolf. Once again wolf haters want to kill collared or favorite Yellowstone wolves and once again I don’t understand. The Montana government is pandering to a small group of loud, hateful people who don’t have their facts straight and I can’t understand why any government would condone that type of behavior. The problem is multi-layered because the watching of the wolves while in the park, and showing them to the public, has made the wolves accustomed to people and cars, making them easy targets for the hunters. Just recently my favorite wolf, the first one to look into my eyes, 820F, was killed in Jardine because she was bold around people and had no fear. She was not aggressive towards people but she was bold and was not easily hazed away. And so, because she was so habituated to humans, she was shot and killed, leaving behind two puppies. My heart was broken and it will be broken again, when other Yellowstone wolves are killed by hunters who want to take them away from the world. I believe that much can be done to change the future of the remaining Yellowstone wolves and so I photograph them whenever possible and share their stories with the world. I have turned wolf enthusiasts into avid wolf lovers, just by my photos and stories. And if I can continue doing that, one person at a time, then there might be hope that the wolves will survive long into the future. Because they belong to this earth.
    Q: How will you spend this winter?
    A: At the moment I plan to spend another winter in Gardiner where I will have access to the Northern section of Yellowstone on a daily basis. Just how that will happen is up in the air at this moment but there are a couple of options for me to consider. A little over two years ago I sold everything and purchased a small travel trailer so that I could spend my time at national parks. The trailer is not suitable for winter living and so I was able to find affordable, and wonderful, living accommodations for last winter but have been back in the trailer since April 15. When you met me I was camping in the park, in my tent, so that I could be closer to the wolves and be there to see the puppies when they finally emerged from the dens. I spent a month in the tent before returning to my trailer in Gardiner where I am now living. I hope to spend more time editing photos and writing stories for a couple of books that I hope to have completed towards the end of next year. In other words, this journey is expensive and I need to make it pay so that I can continue.
    Q: Do you get lonely out there?
    A: Yes, but not often. I do not have anyone at hand to tell the stories of my day, which is why Facebook and blogging is so important to me. For a number of years I didn’t blog and found that my stories were lost from memory because it is only in the re-telling or writing that they become a solid piece of history. If I go out into the wilderness and see five wolves playing but can’t share the moment with anyone, then it is lost. The magic is gone. With Facebook, I get to tell whoever wants to read about the wonders of Yellowstone or any other place that I happen to be visiting. There are times when I crave close companionship and a conversation but my life is over-flowing with wonderful adventures, along with photos to edit and stories to write. I have no time left at the end of the day and my lifestyle is not conducive to close relationships. I don’t even know what movies are playing or what the top ten songs are, so conversation would be limited to bears, elk, moose, wolves, etc. Still, I think that maybe someday the right person will come along. I have been single for over 20 years and while I don’t look for anyone, I haven’t given up.
    So there you go. Now you know Deby Dixon. Her Facebook Pages are:
    The Yellowstone Daily at facebook.com/TheYellowstoneDaily
    and …
    Deby Dixon Photography at facebook.com/debydixonphotography
  4. Roadtrekingmike
    I love kayaking. Except for occasional rental places I find in our travels, though, it’s pretty hard to do while Roadtreking.
    I’ve been tempted to get an inflatable kayak but, well, I want a real one, with a composite body. The problem, though, is how do I carry it?
    My friend Gary Hennes from Minnesota has solved that problem with a roof mount and a Hullavator mechanism that effortlessly lifts the kayak up to the roof of his 2006 Roadtrek RS-Adventurous.
    He got his from a local outfitter near his Minneapolis home, from a competitor of the folks who made the demonstration video below.

    He got his from a local outfitter near his Minneapolis home, from a competitor of the folks who made the demonstration video above.
    Gary’s rack is from Yakima but the Thule Hullavator works with it just fine, he reports. He has it all mounted on his 2006 Roadtrek RS Adventurous, starting just ahead of the roof vent and continuing back a little past the front edge of air conditioner.
    On it, he carries a Current Designs 14′ Kestrel kayak and sometimes, in a separate rack on the other side, a We-no-nah 16 1/2 foot kevlar Advantage canoe.
    I’m sure Gary will watch the comments here and be glad to answer any more questions. The photos are of his setup. The video demonstrates how it all works.
  5. Roadtrekingmike
    In the latest edition of How We Roll in our RV, Jennifer and I answer a question from Sarah in Omaha, NE about how we clean it, inside and outside.
    Jennifer says she uses Clorox Wips inside, along with wood and leather cleaner. But has us both excited is this mazing KAYWOS (Klean Anything Without Streaking) cloth …
    It is great at removing bugs, road gunk, bird droppings, dirt and grime from the exterir of our RV. In fact, without soap or water, we in essence cleaned the whole RV with the cloth, which is reusable. You wet it, wring it dry and start cleaning We both demonstrate in the video.

    The cloths can be washed but let them air dry.
    They also clean mirrors and glass and I use one for my computer screens as well.
    They are available really cheap at http://www.roadtrekingstore.com/kaywoscloth.html.
    Do you have a question about How We Roll in our RV. Just send me an email at openmike@fmca.com.
  6. Roadtrekingmike

    Top 5 RV Joys

    By Roadtrekingmike,

    On this Labor Day weekend, we’re in Southwest Georgia, after driving down from Michigan last week with some fun stops along the way. We plan to take our time going home, too, enjoying the freedom that our little Roadtrek eTrek RV gives us.
    After almost two years of this lifestyle, Jen and I are finding ourselves on the road more and more. We were at our Michigan sticks and bricks home for less than a week all August. We just turned 30,000 miles on the new eTrek we picked up in December!
    When we think back about the past two years, we can cite lots of things we enjoy about RVing. Here our our Top Five RV joys:
    1) We can go anywhere, anytime – Freedom is what the RV life is all about. It truly is our home on wheels. We have it loaded with clothes and essentials, pots, pans, bedding. We only need an hour or so to be packed and ready to head off. By now, we have everything down to a system. Packing, unpacking, setting up, tearing down.
    2) We have a small house but a big yard – That is the slogan on one of the T-shirts and sweatshirts we sell but it says it all so well. It’s like the whole country is our front yard. We can set up on seashores, rivers creeks, the mountains, the woods… it’s all ours to enjoy. We just open the sliding door to our Roadtrek and we are surrounded by nature. We tend to choose out of the way places off the commercial campground circuit. The most spectacular vistas are just out our windows. Our Roadtrek gives us a home with lots of acreage.
    3) We have found great new friends – From rallies, our Facebook groups, face to face meetings with readers and folks who have seen the interactive map on the blog chasing us down and showing where we just happen to be, Jennifer and I have so many new friends who share our love of adventure and the open road. The RV community has been the biggest surprise we’ve had. I think of Stu and Winona, Jim and Carolyn, Shari and Dave, Kristi, Tim and Carole, Dan, Kathy and Les, Laura, Steve, Ginny, Lisa and Bill, Tom, Laura and Ken, Bill and Karen, Cheryl, Alan, Robert and a whole bunch of other people who have come into our RVing lives this past year or so and we feel really blessed. Sharing the road with like-minded friends is such a joy.
    4) We have our own comfortable bed to sleep in – Honestly, we think we sleep better in our Roadtrek than just about any place else. Even home. Certainly hotel rooms. We need not worry about bed bugs, dirty rooms, mold or any of the other variables that make staying in hotels and motels so unpredictable. We prefer our own germs to stranger germs. Know what I mean?
    5) Our dog is always welcome – We’re not fanatics about our dog but we do like his company. That’s why we have a dog. And he adds to the joy of traveling. We don’t have to board him every time we go out of own. We can take him with us pretty much everyplace we go. Not always. There are times when we have a story to do or a place to vsit where we can’t take him when well leave him with friends or family. But generally speaking, where we go, Tai can go. That, we believe, is as it should be.
    Okay…those are our top five reasons why we like to RV.
    What would you add?
  7. Roadtrekingmike
    In central Kentucky, the Mammoth Cave National Park is not only a geological wonder that is unequaled in scope, it is also a great getaway for a long RV weekend, with a terrific campground, beautiful scenery and bike paths through a heavily forested area of gently rolling hills and the lush Green River valley.
    Located 15 minutes off I-65 at Cave City Exit (Exit 53) or Park City (Exit 48), the park encompasses 53,000 acres. But it is the 400 miles of caves beneath the surface that make it so dramatic, the largest such cave system in the world. It is probably even bigger. Cave explorers believe there are a couple hundred more miles under there still to be discovered.
    We visited the park in late August and the crowds were way down. Our ranger-led tour had 10 people. Just a couple weeks earlier, before school resumed, the same tour routinely had as many as 120 visitors.
    The vast chambers and complex labyrinths as deep as 250 feel below the surface are amazingly accessible, though visitors should be in reasonably fit condition. There are lots of steps – our tour of the New Entrance part of the cave starts with 243 steps straight down, on very narrow metal stairways built for the park service by a company that specializes in designing stairways for the cramped quarters on submarines.
    The New Entrance to the Mammoth Cave system is a lot older that it sounds. First excavated in 1921 and enlarged and enhanced repeatedly through the years, it begins with a bus ride over the top of the cave to the New Entrance. An path works its way to the bottom of a depression – an old sinkhole, really – and ends before a steel door.
    From there, you enter the cave, heading down the stairs, winding around huge rocks and sandstone formations, sometimes only a couple of feet wide. The tour includes a dramatic series of domes and pits, large trunk passageways, and a short journey through dripstone formations. You see and learn about stalactites (deposits that drip down from the ceiling) and stalagmites (deposits that rise upward from the floor) and view an impressive formation dubbed “frozen Niagara”that looks indeed like a frozen waterfall.
    Our tour lasted about two hours. My favorite time came when, deep underground in a wide cavern, the ranger turned out the subdued lighting that illuminated the pathways and walls. Total, complete darkness ensued, so dark you could not see your hand in front of your face. The ranger had everyone sit still and be silent. There was total silence, too. I swear I could hear my heart beating, the blood running through my veins. I know, I have a vivid imagination.
    This was just one of a several cave tours offered by the park service. It covers not quite a mile and goes up and down about 500 total steps. It has a constant, year-round temperature of 54 degrees.
    As we left the tour, we had to walk over a special decontamination platform that looked like a soft treadmill. That’s to sanitize out shoes and help prevent White Nose Syndrome, a fungus that has resulted in the death of over 5.5 million bats in the eastern United States.
    I saw only one bat in the caves, though 40,000 or so are said to live in the complex.
    We wish we had at least another day or two to have stayed at the park. We would have done all the other tours, as well.
    We had Tai, our Norwegian Elkhound, with us the day we visited. For $2.50, we were able to rent an outdoor kennel for him. We brought his water bowl and he had ample shade and actually, after a couple of yips when we walked away to go on the tour, seemed to enjoy it.
    We also visited the 105-site campground, just a quarter mile from the visitor’s center. Each site offers a paved parking area, a picnic table, and a fire ring. The campground has restrooms, fresh water, a dump station, garbage dumpsters, and a recycling station.
    Only three of the sites have hookups. For the others, there is no electricity or water.
    If you want full hookups, the routes to and from the park off I-65 have numerous commercial campgrounds.
    We’re seriously considering a return visit in early October when the hardwood forest around the park will be in full color. We’ll take out bikes, though bike rentals are available from the front of the campground store.
    *Spelunking anyone?
    *spelunking – Exploring cave systems, sometimes called caving or potholing
  8. Roadtrekingmike
    We were on I-69 a few miles north of I-94 in Michigan, headed off for a 10 day swing through Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. We came close to ending it on our first day.
    Bang!
    Like a small explosion, a tire on a huge semi-tractor rig blew, just as we were about to pass it. Instinctively, I braked and swerved left onto the shoulder, just as a huge chunk of tire came careening into my lane, right about where the windshield would have been if I hadn’t hit the brakes.
    In my rear view mirror I saw other tire parts behind me.
    It was a narrow miss.
    Jennifer and I breathed deeply, thanked God for sparing us and realized how bad it could have been.
    All the rest of the drive down south, we both started paying attention to the huge chunks of hard rubber that are strewn all over our highways.
    As I type this, I’m at a picnic table at our campsite for the night along I65 north of Nashville. I just finished Googling the problem and found that debris littering the highways and interstates of North America causes over 25,000 accidents and at least 100 deaths each year in the United States and Canada. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reports that blown tire pieces are the number one road debris.
    The tire safety experts say this is the worst time of year, when high temperatures cause the most stress on tires. As we’ve been driving the past two days, the temps have been in the upper eighties and low nineties and seemingly every mile of toad has shredded remnants of 18 wheeler truck tires on the highway — called “gators” in the trucking industry.
    The origin of gators is in dispute, especially the idea that most gators come from capped or retreaded tires. Retreading is a process that saves money by shaving down old tires to their casing and attaching and bonding a new exterior.
    “On these extremely hot days, the adhesive that holds these treads together gets hot enough that they lose adhesiveness,” said David Decker, director of operators at Western Truck School in West Sacramento, CA, in an article I found in the Merced Sun Star newspaper.
    It’s easy to see why retreads are in use. New truck tires cost $600 or so. Retreads $200.
    Despite the critics, a 2008 study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that showed retreaded tires were no more likely to blow out than new tires.
    But with such much debris on our roads, somebody needs to be working hard to curtail the problem. If that’s happening, it isn’t evident on the roadways.
    I have a great deal of respect for professional truck drivers. I know the vast majority of them take good care of their rigs and would never cut corners by using inferior or dangerous tires.
    Accidents do happen. Truck tires do blow. But they blow a lot. Just look at the debris.
    I think we need to make reducing those blowouts a top highway safety priority. The problem is serious and it is costing lives.
    Meantime, be careful out there and stay alert.
  9. Roadtrekingmike
    Two-and-a-half weeks of the Great Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2013 in two-and-a-half minutes – that’s the just-finished movie version (see below) that highlights the recent Roadtreking caravan that was our family vacation to Colorado this summer.
    We traveled in four vehicles: My Roadtrek eTrek pulling a 21-foot travel trailer, followed by a Roadtrek SS driven by my son and, following us all, my daughter and her family in an SUV.
    We made a great circle tour of Colorado. Here are some of the highlights of our trip out and back: climbing Pikes Peak, visiting Garden of the Gods, Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the Colorado National Monument, Glenwood Springs and the Rocky Mountain National Park.
    And don’t forget that nine feet tall Iowa corn!
    Can’t wait for next year!

  10. Roadtrekingmike
    One of the main reasons people buy RVs is because they like to travel with their dogs.
    But the fact is, not all places are dog friendly. If you want to bring your pooch along, you need to make some adjustments.
    On our big Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2013 out west, we traveled with six adults, two kids and three dogs.
    You need to understand, our dogs are big dogs. Their heads are the size of most other RVers pets. The lightest among them is my Norwegian Elkhound, Tai. He weighs 70 pounds. Next was my daughter Wendy’s Goldendoodle, Charlie, at 75 pounds. Then came my son Jeff’s part St Barnard and husky, Sequoia, who weighs 120 pounds.
    We went everywhere we wanted to go but we encountered several places – usually in National Parks – where dogs were not allowed. That required some dog juggling. One of us would usually volunteer to get dog duty, staying back at the camp or in the RV watching the dogs while the others went sightseeing.
    Most typically, dogs are not allowed on hiking trails that would put them near wildlife. Dogs are naturally protective of their people. So are animals of their young. If a dog spots a mama bear on a hike, its’s going to bark and growl. That only antagonizes the bear. So you can see why the Park Service has that rule.
    Still, there were several places, even a couple of trails, where dogs could go. They can be walked around the campsites, on the main roads and in parking lots and we never were at a loss about where to walk the dogs.
    Most beaches prohibit dogs. Most, but not all. We have found several beaches in our travels with Tai this year where dogs are allowed near the water. Usually, if you ask around at the campground, you’ll learn that almost every community has a no leash dog park, often with water access for the pups to play.
    The dogs are also people magnets. Almost everywhere we went on our family vacation, people flocked to meet the dogs.
    Not everyone likes dogs, however. At Rocky Mountain National Park, my daughter had Charlie on a leash at one of the overlooks, where dogs are permitted. A loud mouthed woman in a passing car rolled down the window and screamed at the top of her lungs, “No dogs allowed.” That was not true. Dogs are allowed in most of the public areas, just not on the backwoods hiking trails.
    It is easy to understand why some people are upset about seeing dogs. Just look around at the ground in rest areas and campgrounds and you’ll see the reason. Dog poop. Inconsiderate dog owners – slobs – who refuse to pick up their pet’s waste. We always travel with a plastic bag in our pockets and we always clean up after our dogs. But so many pet owners don’t. And that gives all dogs a bad name.
    We also always keep our dogs on leashes or, at the campground, tied on ropes. Sequoia and Tai are pretty calm. But they will gladly chase a deer if it passes by. Charlie is a barker and there were many times when we put him in time out because he was too excited by all the people walking past. We also kept him inside my daughter’s trailer until late morning, so he didn’t wake other campers with his excited yips and barks.
    The sun is a big issue for dogs. They sweat only through their mouths and they always need shade. At camp, even on cloudy days, we extended awnings to give them a cool place, always with a bowl of water close by. Tai and Charlie liked to hang out under the trailer. Sequoia preferred the shade of a tree. Dogs are social animals and they like to be around their people, their pack.
    We also used the Roadtrek as a big dog kennel. Our 24-foot eTrek is fine for Jennifer and me and Tai. But add Sequoia and Charlie and the aisle got pretty crowded. The dogs didn’t mind because the air conditioning kept things comfortable. We never left an animal in the Roadtrek without a human tender. Can you imagine how horribly hot and dangerous it would be inside an RV if the AC stopped working?
    Dogs are also prohibited from most stores and buildings. When shopping, we’d leave the dogs with one person for a few minutes. Then someone else would change places, so we all could shop and the dogs always had a human with them.
    Like people, dogs need breaks from long driving down the interstate. But be aware of where you walk them in rest areas. Dogs are often prohibited in picnic areas, again, because of the inconsiderate actions of those who don’t clean up after their animals.
    Be careful where you walk them. In the west and south, poisoness snakes are often in the underbrush just past the green grass. Ticks are also a problem in spring and early summer. In February, Tai picked up two ticks from a five minute walk in a per exercise area at a rest stop along I-75 in Tennessee.
    Those are some of my observations after a couple of seasons of RVing with dogs. How about you? What tips can you suggest? Use comments below.
  11. Roadtrekingmike
    Is there anything more exciting about leaving on an RV Trip? Anticipation fuels each mile. Excitement about what lies ahead runs high. The sights are new, the day’s drive full of expectation.
    Conversely, is there anything more mind-numbing than the drive back home? Been there, done that syndrome kicks in. The vacation is over. There are so many miles to go on a road we’ve traveled before.
    On return from many a previous trip, Jennifer and I would resolve ourself just to drive. To get home as fast as possible. We drove 728 miles home from Branson in one day after attending the Roadtrek rally this past May. We’ve driven 20 hours straight home from Georgia. Twenty-four from Florida.
    But as we finished the Great Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2013 – our two and a half week trip to Colorado – we determined to do things differently.
    I was towing a travel trailer that my daughter, Wendy, husband Dan and granddaughters Hua Hua and Rachel (and Charlie their Goldendoodle) used. They were following behind our Roadtrek eTrek in our Honda Pilot. Son Jeff had left a few days earlier because he and wife, Aimee, needed to be back at their jobs on Monday.
    Our trip from Colorado was a giant circle tour of the state, starting at Colorado Springs, working southwest to Mesa Verde, up through Telluride, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, on to the Colorado Monument and finishing in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Except for a small slice of Wyoming, our return route was pretty much the same as our going out route – I-80 straight across the corn belt of Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana to our Michigan home.
    I had planned to take three days to return, using the time to catch a couple of attractions on the way back. But those darn Rocky Mountains had a hold on us and we stayed an extra day.
    It was so hard to start back. Our exit from the state took us out US34, Big Thompson Road east from Estes Park. This little stretch of highway was like a final message from Colorado, asking “are you sure you really want to leave?” presenting us with some of the most beautiful scenery we’d seen anywhere. Bordered by the Big Thompson River and walled in by massive canyon walls, it was the perfect mountain drive. You don’t make good time on Big Thompson Road, especially towing a trailer around those steep curves. But you do enjoy every minute of it.
    We had a pair of walkie talkies that we used to communicate between vehicles. That helped with the boredom of the return drive. We delighted in the bison we saw after entering Wyoming from Colorado and the stark but equally beautiful contrast of the range land to the mountains we had just left. Then came the lush green and endless cornfields of Nebraska and Iowa, the tassled tops waving like an undulating sea in the wind. Beautiful.
    I found AM radio stations and listened to small town announcers fret about dropping corn and wheat prices in the increasingly dry weather as they speculated on the chances for rain and the quality of this year’s crops. You can tell so much about an area by listening to AM radio. Even the local advertisements are entertaining.
    We stopped at rest areas to walk the dogs and to have lunch together. Along I-80, Nebraska and Iowa have great rest areas, spaced about 25 miles or so apart. Except for the rattlesnake warning signs in western Nebraska, there were pleasant spots for the dogs. We kicked on the rear air conditioning in the Roadtrek and all of us – four adults, two kids and two dogs – squeezed into the back of the Roadtrek for communal meals.
    Wendy researched and found two great overnight spots for us for the return trip.
    In Nebraska at Exit 312, we stopped at the Mormon Island State Recreation Area, a quiet, very clean and spacious little campground right on the northeastern side of I-80. Named for the winter stopover used by Mormon emigrants heading westward, the state turned the ”borrow pit” used to provide fill for the interstate into a swimming lake, complete with sandy beach.
    We had a campfire and made S’Mores. I like my marshmallows on fire, burnt to a crisp, which the girls delighted in providing so they could “watch Grandpa eat fire.” I delight in making them laugh so I devoured way to many flaming torches of gooey sugar puffs until it was time for them to go to sleep.
    n the morning, we liked the place so much we lingered over another picnic table breakfast of bacon and pancakes. There were only one or two other RVs in the whole park. Most of the grounds were empty. But the park maintenance guy decided that he needed to start cutting the grass right where we were, instead of at the other, vacant end. His unmuffled mower shattered the calm of the place and stopped our conversation, kicking up a cloud of dirt and grass clippings that started to drift onto our food.
    Jennifer waved her arms and chased him away and we all laughed at the riled Mama Bear as the lawn cutting guy retreated to where he should have started anyway.
    Further west at Exit 284 in Walcott, Iowa, we stopped for an obligatory visit at the massive Iowa 80 Truck Stop, which proudly proclaims itself to be the world’s biggest. There is a full blown food court there with a slew of fast food restaurants and one sit-down restaurant that boasts a 50-foot salad bar and room to seat 300, as well as truck displays, a sprawling truckers warehouse store with everything from clothing to CB radios and the cleanest restrooms you will find anywhere along the Interstate.
    Our last night was spent just over the Illinois border, where, four miles from Exit 19, we found the delightful Geneseo Community Campground where owners Craig and Shari Weber runs one of the cleanest, neatest little campgrounds we’ve ever seen. The restrooms and showers look like they are part of a home and the wide grassy and shaded spots are just a stone’s throw off a bike path that follows the Hennepin Canal connecting the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. Hua Hua and I walked the dogs along the path in the morning and marveled at the huge lily pads in the canal, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
    Then, six hours later, we were back in Michigan.
    Jennifer and I stopped at Jeff’s house and Kalamazoo for dinner and drove the last two and a half hours under a huge full moon. She popped us a bag of popcorn in the Roadtrek microwave and Tai , our Norwegian Elkhound, scootched forward, between the driver and passenger seats, perfectly positioned to catch the popcorn that dropped as we passed the bag between us.
    About 10 p.m., we pulled into our driveway.
    It was a surprisingly relaxed and peaceful drive home from Colorado. Partly because we shared it with family. But mostly because we decided to savor each mile, looking around, stopping when we felt like it and marveling at the countryside.
    So this RV trip – The Great Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2013 – has come to an end.
    The Roadtrek is unpacked. Laundry is now done The lawn has been cut and on Monday we set out on our next trip, visiting a few Southern states.
    Thanks for virtually riding along with us on this adventure.
    See you out there ....
  12. Roadtrekingmike
    I’ve switched smartphones and it’s all because of RVing.
    I now use the Samsung Galaxy S 4. I traded my iPhone 5 in at my local Verizon store and now am tasked with learning a new system. I feel a little guilty about it. I have been told that the iPhone I bought at 6PM EST on June 29, 2007 was the first one sold. It was part of a TV live shot I was doing and I had stood all night long, first in a long line. Working with the manager of at AT&T store, we arranged for me to be standing at the counter and my credit card was processed at 6:00:08.
    Regardless, I have loyally bought and used every iPhone since then. But over the past year, as innovation with the Android operating system began to ellipse Apple’s, I began to have smartphone envy as I saw some of the many features available on newer models. The Galaxy S 4, with it’s much larger screen and 13 megapixel camera (compared to the iPhone’s 8 megapixels), was an immediate draw. Add to that wireless charging, a much tougher glass display, 2GB of RAM (double the iPhone’s) and a faster CPU and slightly more apps than Apple has and the appeal was very strong.
    Probably the final straw for me was my iPhone battery was starting to fail. A full charge only lasted half a day. But the battery on the iPhone is not user accessible. I had to send to to Apple to be replaced. What a needless hassle. The battery on the Galaxy S 4 can be easily replaced by the user.
    Even though a new version of the iPhone will be coming by Christmas, it’s not here yet. The Galaxy S 4 has all these features I want now.
    The decision was made.
    I rely on my smartphone more than ever because of all the RV traveling I do.
    I especially like the Allstays Camp and RV – All Campgrounds app. Yes, I know, there is an iPhone version of it. But because I use this app so often to find Walmart’s, campgrounds, dump stations and the like, I found myself squinting at the iPhone screen a lot. It’s much easier to read on a Galaxy. I’ll write more about my favorite RV apps in a later post.
    I use my smartphone all the time. For email from readers of this blog. To update our Facebook Page and Facebook Group. To tweet updates on Twitter. To take and share photos and video and to stay in touch with news while traveling.
    I also travel with an iPad but, truthfully, it’s a bit too big for me while on the go. Jennifer may use it for checking maps but we prefer the smartphone for convenience.
    So my iPhone is gone.
    Jennifer still has hers.
    But I’m spending the next couple days getting used to the Galaxy and the Android operating system and enjoying the learning process. I love playing with tech gizmos.
    One of the coolest things is the way the Galaxy 4 lets you wave your hand at the screen to accept calls with Air Gesture, read content by tilting your head or phone with Smart Scroll and preview content by barely touching the screen with Air View. It can be touch free.
    I’ll put the new smartphone to good use starting next week when we head west on another RV adventure.
    Meantime, how do you use your smartphone?
  13. Roadtrekingmike
    I now understand what John Denver meant by his song: I’ve now been Rocky Mountain High.
    And like Denver, who penned the song shortly after moving to Aspen to celebrate his love for his new state and the awe-inspiring mountains, Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park made me want to sing, too. If I could only have caught my breath. For there, somewhere well above 12,000 feet, a quarter mile up a tundra bordered trail from an overlook off Trail Ridge Road , were three Bighorn Sheep, standing like sentinels and looking out at the same snow covered peaks that I was.
    I zoomed in for a closeup with my new telephoto and felt so at one with them, the mountains and the whole Colorado experience we had been living the past two weeks that, had Jennifer asked, I would have gladly sold my Michigan home and moved there. Immediately.
    Fortunately, she didn’t ask. At that altitude, she, too was having trouble catching her breath.
    But trust me, if you’ve never stood on top of a mountaintop in Colorado, you have no idea what you were missing. Go listen to Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, which, is, by the way, one of Colorado’s two official state songs. The other one, to save you asking, is Where the Columbines Grow. And they also grow in those Rocky Mountains.
    But Denver’s line in the song about “coming home to a place he’d never been before” is exactly what the Rocky Mountains made me feel.
    You just want to stare and stare at them. Breathing the clean, cool air and watching the sun and shadows move up and down the mountains. We came into the park from Estes Park., on the east end, and like lots of other people, took Trail Ridge Road up and through the 415 square mile park. That was our only complaint. There were way too many people. And half or more of those we sw were from somewhere other than the United States. Our favorite was a group of some 30 motorcyclists from the Netherlands, riding rented Harleys.
    Trail Ridge Road has been dubbed the “highway to the sky” and it is, in just about every book of best drives you’ll find, in the Top 10. It winds 48 miles between Estes Park on the park’s east side and Grand Lake on the west. Eleven miles of the highway travel above treeline, the elevation near 11,500 feet where the park’s evergreen forests come to a halt. As it winds across the tundra’s vastness to its high point at 12,183 feet elevation (where we saw the Bighorn Sheep) , Trail Ridge Road (U.S. 34) offers visitors thrilling views, wildlife sightings and spectacular alpine wildflower exhibitions, all from the comfort of their car.
    I loaded up everyone in our Roadtrek – four adults, two kids and two dogs – and we had no problems on the road.
    But almost every overlook has a path or hiking trail running up or down or out into the wilderness. Besides the sheep, we also saw several herds of elk.
    There were traffic jams around every overlook. But as we lingered and the day wore on, the crowds seemed to thin. By the time we stopped to picnic at Lily Lake, it was much less congested.
    We would have loved to camp at one of the four campgrounds in the park but even six weeks out, we were unable to get a reservation.
    The only place around where we could get space was at the KOA in Estes Park. What a disaster that was. At $56 a night, our “campsite” was on the side of a gravel road, hard up against a berm and maybe 10 feet from those Kamping Kabins that KOA also rents out. It was one of the worst campsites we have ever experienced. Dusty, crowded and more like a parking lot than a campground, we were miserable.
    ven the spots not on the road/parking lot were very close together. We witnessed a near fistfight when the smoke from one camper’s cigar riled up his neighbor.
    I complained to the owner and he acknowledged that I wasn’t the first who got stuck with one of those side of the gravel road spots. But he candidly explained that if he were to do away with those roadside spots his profit would drop by $20,000 a year and, for that price, he could live with the complaints.
    Eating out on the picnic table was like eating in a dust bowl. The kids had no place to play outside the RVs except the street, or way down and around in the small playground. The dogs had to lie in the dirt. You couldn’t open the RV windows without dust coming in.
    We had no other choices. Every other campground in the area was booked up.
    We arrived on a Friday night and gathered everyone up in the Roadtrek and headed to a nearby city park, where we found picnic tables and set up a grill. On Saturday, after touring the park, we walked around Estes Park until dark. Anything to avoid spending time at the KOA.
    Wendy, Dan and the girls went horseback riding into the foothills of the Rockies.
    I did enjoy an impromptu visit from two readers of this blog, Sarah and Tim, who live in Estes park and saw that we were in their area. They drove up and down the KOA streets until they found where we were parked. We talked about Colorado and, specifically, winter in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Tim, who is a curator at the museum there, told me that in the spring, when Trail Ridge Road is plowed out, it is not unusual to have them bordered by 35 foot tall snowdrifts.
    It snows every month in the park. Even August.
    Back to the Rocky Mountain High theme. If you are planning to visit the Rocky Mountain National Park and you are a flatlander, not used to altitude, give yourself some time to get acclimated. Start at lower altitudes and slowly work up. Elevation is an integral part of the park experience. The park is all above 7,500 feet, so don’t do strenuous activities until your system has adjusted. Even driving at high elevation can affect sensitive individuals. Just ask my daughter, Wendy.
    Altitude sickness symptoms include shortness of breath, fatigue, dizziness, nausea, rapid heartbeat and insomnia. All of us in our family group felt at least one of those symptoms. Drink lots of water and if the symptoms are severe, persist, depart for lower elevation.
    But most of the symptoms ease after a couple of days of acclimation.
    But if they don’t, you will be so awestruck by the beautiful scenery, that you forget about them.
  14. Roadtrekingmike
    One of the things about traveling by RV that makes it so much fun is the serendipity, the unscheduled things that you just happen upon and, in the moment, take advantage of because, with an RV, you can.
    Such was the town of Glenwood Springs along I-70 180 miles west of Denver, home of the world’s largest hot springs pool.
    The hot mineral water has been drawing visitors from all over the world since 1888, when a resort and original spa officially opened for business. But even before that, the Ute Indians made yearly pilgrimages to the springs which they considered to be sacred.
    lenwood Springs was originally known as “Defiance”. Defiance was established in 1883, a camp of tents, saloons, and brothels with an increasing amount of cabins and lodging establishments. It was populated with the expected crowd of gamblers, gunslingers and prostitutes. Wild West legend Doc Holliday of the Gunfight at the OK Coral fame spent the final months of his life in Glenwood Springs and is buried in the town’s original Pioneer Cemetery. Suffering from tuberculosis, he hoped the healing waters would extend his life. President Teddy Roosevelt spent an entire summer vacation living out of the historic Hotel Colorado near the springs.
    Today, the hot springs have been turned into a community swimming pool. For$18, you can spend the day in it. The big pool is the size of a football field and is 90 – 93 degrees Fahrenheit, all year long. A
    smaller therapy pool is between 102 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit and has bubble chairs and submerged marble benches. There are two water slides and a kiddie pool.
    As the kids, in laws and grandkids swam in the hot springs pool, Jennifer and I dog sat Tai, Sequoia and Charlie in our Roadtrek eTrek, running the air conditioner full blast in the parking lot. It was a tight squeeze. The outside temperature was in the low nineties.
    It was in Glenwood Springs after the hot springs swim that we said goodbye to Jeff and Aimee, who had to return to Michigan for their jobs a little earlier than the rest of us. Daughter Wendy and Dan Bowyer and granddaughters Hua Hua and Rachel remained with us, staying in the 21 foot travel trailer we are hauling with our Roadtrek.
    We overnighted at the Glenwood Canyon Resort RV Park, located right off the next exit east from the spa on I-70.
    A spot with full hookup cost us some big bucks. There is a $54 campsite fee that covers two people, and then they charge $5 for every other person over five years of age and $5 per dog. Our total bill was $84, plus tax. Yikes. This is a pretty ritzy area and the even the camping fees reflect it.
    But it is also a resort with deluxe cabins, white water rafting, zip lines and a nice restaurant/bar.
    Best of all, the resort and it’s RV park is right on the Colorado River, surrounded by towering canyon walls. Tenters, Class B and C RV owners will want to take spots on the lower level, along the river, which flows white water fast ten feet away from your spot.
    When we checked in at the front desk, I noticed a bunch of earplugs, free for campers.
    “For the river noise?” I asked, amazed that someone wouldn’t like the sound of rushing water.
    “No, the trains,” answered the clerk.
    Right on the opposite side of the river is a railroad track that, during our stay, carried three high speed trains in the middle of the night. Mercifully, they don’t sound their horns. But the noise would definitely wake all but a very sound sleeper.
    The river is a great place to fish. A young boy from Texas had a stringer full of large rainbow trout.
    We walked down to it at night and sat on a picnic table, mesmerized by the swift water flowing past, sparking like diamonds in fading rays of the setting sun.
    Jen and I had planned on unhitching the trailer and going back to the hot springs to swim, leaving Tai with the with rest of the family. But the canyon RV campsite was so alluring and the river so strong a draw that we just stayed and stared at the beauty of the place.
    We spent just one night in the area. Though unplanned for us, it was a great decision.
    If you’re coming this way, plan it. You may even want to spend two nights.
  15. Roadtrekingmike
    Quick now, when I say we visited the Colorado National Monument, what did you think?
    Unless you’ve been here and seen it, I bet you thought is was a statue of some sort, didn’t you?
    I know I did when my daughter, Wendy, first insisted we include it in our list of ”must sees” during our Great Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2013.
    The monument is not what we expected.
    It is nothing short of stupendously beautiful, a long stretch of spectacular rock monotliths cut deep into the sandstone and even granite rock formations that make for sheer-walled, red rock canyons following the undulating twists and turns of the Rim Rock Drive that traverses up and down and through the preserve for 24 miles.
    That’s what the Colorado National Monument really is – a preserve, located just west of Grand Junction, CO and south of the mountain bike mecca of Fruita. It offers panoramic views of towering red rock structures with almost two dozen spots to pull over for photos. There are also lots of hiking trails.
    We stayed in the James M Robb -Colorado River State Park a quarter mile south of I-70 at the Fruita exit. The park has five sections, but only the Fruita section and the the Island Acres location 15 miles to the west offer camping The National Monument is another half mile down the road. There is also a great dinosaur museum nearby.
    t takes about two hours to see the major sights on the monument drive, though three hours is probably a better minimum amount of time to devote to your tour.
    There is an 80 site campground on the monument grounds, though there are no electric or water hookups, something my newbie son and daughter and their families need their first time out. If it were just Jennifer and me, we would have stayed up in the campground. But we have no complaints about Colorado State Parks. We’ve been very impressed with the ones we have stayed at.
    We did our drive through the monument in a mid afternoon. Then we found a great Mexican restaurant in Fruita with an outdoor patio that let all off us eat there with the dogs tied up at our feet, under the table. Usually, we have to take turns babysitting the dogs and one or two of us have to stay in our air conditioned Roadtrek while the others shop or eat. So it was a real treat to all be able to eat out together.
    So know we know: The Colorado National Monument is not a statue. It is a place, run by the U.S. Parks Service just like a National Park.
    If I had my way, I’d give it a new name: I’d call it the Colorado National Treasure.
  16. Roadtrekingmike
    I bet many reading this have not heard of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. It’s probably not on many RVer’s bucket list.
    It should be.
    Invariably, it is compared to its more famous Big Brother, the Grand Canyon. But while the Grand Canyon is deeper (6,000 feet at its greatest depth) and longer (277 miles), the Black Canyon of the Gunnison is an amazing tourist attraction for RVers that is often overlooked because it isn’t surrounded by highly commercialized parks and campgrounds that cater to big box Type A RVs.
    While there are a few campsites that have electricity along Loop B – where we stayed – there are no flush toilets and no water hooks and no dump stations in the national park.
    To get to the campground or the best canyon views, you have to drive a very steep mountain road off Highway 50 east of Montrose. There is no cell service, Wi-Fi or Internet – which for me meant that when I updated this blog each day I had to drive down the mountain almost into town to get a decent enough signal to upload my photos.
    But we were thrilled by our stay there.
    Black Canyon is incredibly deep and sheer, with plunging cliffs, soaring buttresses and a thundering river. At Warner Point, it’s deepest, it measures 2,722 feet. It stretches for 48 miles across southern Colorado, 14 miles of which are in the the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and six of which are easily accessible by a paved road along the southern rim. The steep walls shadow sunlight and the canyon walls appear dark, even black, hence the name.
    The National Park Service runs frequent programs during the day for visitors at many of the canyon overlooks, teaching about the geology and history of the place. At night, in a charming little amphitheater between the campground loops, they put on evening shows several times each week during the summer season. All six adults, two kids and three dogs in our group attended the “Predator or Prey” talk one night, learning that you can tell which of the two an animal is by the placement of the eyes.
    “Eyes on the side, they run and hide. Eyes in front, they hunt,” we learned.
    Our row was given a bear skull as an example to hold and pass around. Tai, our Norwegian Elkhoud, was dozing when it went by. He did a quick doubletake and leapt to his feet, his eyes bright with desire. Tai is a predator.
    Later, when all the dogs caught whiff of a mule deer nibbling on the scrub oak on the edge of the amphitheater, their classification as predators was triple confirmed.
    The mule deer were all over the campground, day and night, wandering from site to site, paying little mind to people or dogs. There are also bear in the area and bear proof food storage boxes are located by each site.
    The hiking was spectacular. Located right off the campground was the Rock Rim Trail, which has you walking along the very edge of the canyon. At 8,500 feet, even a couple mile hike can be exhausting, especially after mid morning when the temperatures begin to climb.
    At night, the high desert quickly gives off its heat and we all slept comfortably with just the windows open.
    All of us took turns using the car to drive the six mile access road and get out at the numerous overlooks, located from a few yards to 600 plus yards from the road. Each view was different, yet equally breathtaking, with the swift moving Gunnison River twisting and turning far below.
    The mountain road that takes you to the campground is steep but can handle every type of motorhome, including Class As. I saw several driving the rim road and making leisurely day trips out of the drive. The 88 camping sites on the south rim all have tables and fire circles with grill tops. The rangers do not recommend any RV over 35 feet in length. There are three loops for camping. Only Loop B has electric hookups, at $18 a night. All other spots are $12 a night.
    There are also 13 sites on the North Rim. But the south has the most accessible views of the canyon.
    The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is another reason why we so much appreciate out National Parks. If you plan an RV trip there, budget three days to fully explore it.
    You can actually float down parts of the Gunnison River on a ranger guided pontoon boat tour. To get there from the campground you make 45 minute drive down the East Access Road if you have a car. It’s a very steep drop in elevation so check with the ranger for the latest conditions. They do not recommend vehicles longer than 22 feet try that drive.
    If the boat tour appeals to you, but you want to drive your motorhome to the boarding spot, you need to get back down the mountain to Highway 50 and head about 30 miles east to milepost 130.
    We didn’t have tome for the boat trip this time.
    Notice I said this time.
    Jennifer and I want to return to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Its that cool. And next time, we’ll also see the canyon from below.
  17. Roadtrekingmike
    Man we got high near Telluride!
    At 9,500 feet in elevation, the Matterhorn Campground just south of Telluride, CO was the highest place we’ve overnighted yet on this Great Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2013. Son-in-law, Dan, noticeably felt the effects of the altitude and all of us noticed a bit of dizzyness on exertion, especially when hiking.
    The Matterhorn Campground is just off Colorado Highway 145, about an hour and a half’s drive from our stay at Mesa Verde National Park. Run by the USDA Forest Service, it has 28 spots and we chose two offering full hookups for Wendy and Dan and the granddaughters in the travel trailer and Jeff and Aimee in the Roadtrek SS.
    Jennifer and I put the eTrek in one of the dry camping spots.
    The campground also has showers and flush toilets, though the showers were a bit challenging, bursting out blasts of scalding hot water for 20 seconds, then abruptly shutting off until you waited six seconds and then pushed the button again. When I say scalding hot, I mean hot enough to make you howl if they hadn’t shut off when they did. Man, too hot is just as bad as too cold.
    We loved this campground, nestled in a valley and surrounded by panoramic views of the mountains in all directions. On the day we arrived snow had fallen on one of the mountain tops to our east. Right from the tent area of the campground runs the Galloping Goose Trail, a 15 mile trail great for hiking. The trail features over 20 footbridges, winds past historical landmarks and through the deep gullies of Uncompahgre National Forest—some of Colorado’s most beautiful scenery. And the famed Lizard Head Wilderness is only about 3 miles away.
    The big attraction in the areas is the nearby town of Telluride, described by locals as “the new Aspen.” To get to Telluride, we are advised by the campground host to drive up 145 to the nearby Mountain Village ski and golf resort community and take the free gondola ride into town. Since that was the only place I could get a solid Internet connection, I opted to stay in the Roadtrek in the parking lot while the rest of the family rode the gondolas.
    It’s a pretty cool service, free transportation that is supposed to take 13 minutes. Wendy and Dan took their Goldendoodle, Charley, the youngest of our three dogs and an energetic ball of energy that is game for anything.
    Sequouia, Jeff’s 120 pound part St. Bernard and partMalamute, is 12 and with, Tai, our 70-pound Norwegian Elkhound, opted to stay with me in the air conditioned Roadtrek.
    While I cranked out work on a fast 4g signal with the two dogs, the others found themselves stranded. Their gondola just stopped and hung there, swaying in the wind 6,000 feet above the valley leading to town and sweltering in the sun. While the adults and kids groaned, Charlie’s long tail thumped out a happy rhythm as it hit the side window of the gondola. He was with all his favorite people and all close together. What gets better than that? Maybe a little breeze but, hey, Charlie was happy anyway.
    They stayed like that for more than a half hour getting hotter and hotter. The first I learned about it was when I saw Wendy and Jeff updating Facebook about their plight.
    y the time I reached them on the phone, I offered to drive into Telluride and pick them up in the Roadtrek for the return trip. Jeff, Jennifer and Aimee readily agreed. Once on the gondola was enough for them.
    Wendy, Dan and Rachel considered it all a grand adventure and, with Charlie, took the gondola back to the village, where they had left their car. Hua Hua rode back with us in the Roadtrek.
    The town is very dog friendly so we brought all three of ours and even had them sit with us while we ate in the patio of a little restaurant area used by a nearby Mexican and Middle Eastern restaurants on Colorado Street. Our dogs looked downright shabby compared to the oh-so-upscale dogs of the well heeled Telluride residents. The “in” dog in Telluride is the massive Burmese Mountain Dog. If you have to ask how much such a pooch costs, you cant afford it. A puppy of average pedigree starts about $1,500.
    Telluride is a former silver mining camp on the San Miguel River that has great winter skiing and is a very popular Blues and Brews Festival each fall. Lots of Hollywood types have made their way here and have no problem shelling out $3 million for a vacation home on the edges of the box canyon that the town is built in.
    We walked the streets, stocked up on groceries and headed to the northern end of Main Street for a look at the spectacular 365-foot Bridal Falls.
    Then it was back to Matterhorn and quiet night beneath a stunning star canopy that takes your breath away, though at that 9,500-foot elevation, there was not much breath you could get. But even if you weren’t at such an altitude, those Colorado stars will get you high all by themselves.
    This is why we RV.
  18. Roadtrekingmike
    If you like driving your RV, drive it in Colorado.
    Look at the photos.
    Around every corner is another great, sweeping vista.
    Today, we drove about 80 miles from Mesa Verde National park in the far southwest corner up Highway 145 to the Matterhorn Campground in the San Juan Mountains a dozen or so miles south of Telluride.
    From the semi-arid canyon country to alpine forests, the drive couldn’t be prettier. Even towing that new AmerLite Travel Trailer I bought from American RV in Grand Rapids, MI before setting out on this family vacation, my Roadtrek eTrek barely strained at it pulled us up to about 9,500 feet.
    Before leaving Mesa Verde, son Jeff and I hiked the Prater Ridge Trail that climbs high above our Morefield Campground campsite following the the rim of Prater Ridge, which separates Morefield Canyon and Prater Canyon and offers commanding views of the Montezuma Valley. We got high up on the trail when a fast moving mountain thunderstorm with lightning sent us scrambling back down.
    The storm stayed up top of the ridge and last night, a spectacular quarter moon peeked down at us. Our granddaughters gathered up every kid in the campground and we had the S’More party of all S’More parties last night. It’s amazing how fast kids become friends on a camping strip and how a campground becomes a neighborhood each night, with folks strolling around, looking at the other rigs, talking about the day and the next adventures, sharing tips and enjoying each other’s company as if we were lifelong friends.
    Then morning comes and the neighborhood vanishes as the RVs pull off to all points on the compass.
    Today, we made the drive to Telluride, where we’ll spend one night before heading up to Gunnison and the Black Canyon on Monday.
    The Matterhorn campground we chose for the night is on a small loop off Highway 145. There are 28 campsites with four of them offering RV hookups of water, electricity and septic. We let Jeff and Aimee in the trailer and Wendy and Dan in a borrowed Roadtrek SS Ideal use the full hookups. Jen and I are dry camping in a great spot nestled into the woods on the slope of a mountain just across from them. Our eTrek with its solar power and diesel generator lets use every appliance just like we were plugged in.
    There is no Internet in the Matterhorn Campground so I’m now parked in the Roadtrek with two of the dogs while everyone else in the family took a gondola from the Mountain Village resort development to check out Telluride. There’s a great 4G signal here so I wrote this week’s newsletter, uploaded some photos and fired off this quick post.
    I’m thinking I really need to bite the bullet and invest in a satellite Internet system. I’m missing some big time family fun because of spotty cell phone Internet.
  19. Roadtrekingmike
    The people who live in southwest Colorado have big smiles on their faces these days.
    Us, camped for our last day in the knock-your-socks-off beautiful Mesa Verde National Forest before moving on to Telluride and a few more spots, not so much. t
    The locals are grinning because the risk of wildfires - which devastated the region last year – is way down now. We’re not quite as appreciative because our plans were altered by a day of mountain monsoons.
    We had planned to do some video and still beauty photos of our Roadtrek eTrek navigating the winding mountain roads overlooking spectacular valley and canyon vistas.
    Before setting out, I had to move the travel trailer my daughter and her family is using from their full hookup site to a dry camping spot across the road. That went fairly easy as I hooked it up to the Roadtrek and then backed it into a new spot. Im getting used to backing the trailer now. Not good, but used to it. Close enough to at least get the job done.
    Then my son moved his borrowed Roadtrek SS Ideal across the street, too. A balky sofa bed motor that has given us trouble since we left Michigan a week ago completely stopped working and we spent two hours playing RV mechanic until we got the bed to once again go down.
    Then, the bright blue skies suddenly rolled up and the dark grey cloud rolled in… and emptied.
    First the rain came from the west. Then it circled round and came from the east. It slammed into us in wind-driven sheets. The temperature dropped from the mid seventies to 49 degrees. This at 4PM, and in a matter of 30 minutes or so.
    So we have spent the last few hours watching the storms move over the mountains. Pretty awesome, really. The lightning strikes are longer and brighter the thunder more booming as it reverberated through the canyon.
    So we have made the best of it. A delight of this place are the deer which are everywhere and pretty much oblivious of people. They don’t even seem very concerned about our dogs, who are now so used to seeing them they don’t even bark. Hua Hua and Rachel drew pictures of them and we have them taped to a cabinet in the Roadtrek until we get home and transfer them to the refrigerator.
    Last night, my daughter-in-law Amy spotted Brown Sugar, a little two-year-old black bear cub abandoned with her brother, Mohawk, by their mother. By the time the rest of us got to the spot, the bear had moved on.
    For awhile this afternoon during the rains, I hung with my two grandaughters in the back of the Roadtrek. I wanted to teach them “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” but Jennifer insisted we change it to “99 Bottles of Pop on the Wall.” It isn’t the same thing. They got bored with that by the time we were in the sixties. So we surfed the net for a while on the park’s excellent WiFi system. Then they went back to their trailer.
    For me, it was a great excuse for a nap.
    The monsoons seem to be lifting and the temperature is starting to rise again.
    One thing about the mountains. The weather changes like a snap of a finger.
    And frowns can turn to smiles just as fast.
    That’s the great thing about RV vacations.
    It’s all good, isn’t it? Check out the rainbow.
  20. Roadtrekingmike
    The Morefield Campground at Mesa Verde National Park is nestled into a scenic canyon some four and a half miles off US 160 from the park entrance. With 267 sites, it seldom fills up. That’s because all but 15 are for dry camping only and of the 15 with full hookups, none accomodate RVs over 45 feet in length. The Class A congestion that turns so many other campgrounds into “tinominium “complexes is refreshingly absent here.
    Each site has lots of space between its neighbors and native Gambel oaks, tall prairie grasses and wild flowers and make for a spectacular wooded canyon that abounds with wildlife.
    At least two young black bears, two year olds recently kicked out on their own by their mother, are frequently seen. One, cinnamon colored, is called Brown Sugar by park rangers. The other is dubbed Mohalk for the band of light fur along his back.
    Campers are told at check in to be sure and put everything away at night, especially and including the white water hoses those in the full hookup sites use. “Their mother taught them if they bite into one of those little hoses, they get a nice drink of water,” said Janet, one of several women who staff the registration desk. “We had one camper who didn’t follow our suggestion and awoke the next morning to find that his water hookup was now a sprinkler hose.”
    There’s also lots of deer in the park who wander freely amidst the campsites.
    I set up the travel trailer for my daughter and my son’s borrowed Roadtrek SS in full hookup sites. In our eTrek, Jennifer and I set up across the street, dry camping.
    The key attraction here at Mesa Verde are the amazing archeological cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people who lived here between 600 to 1300 in structures built within caves and under outcroppings in cliffs. The ruins are the largest archaeological preserve in the United States, scattered across 81.4 square miles. The park was created in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt and there are lots of spots to see them and even crawl through them.
    No one knows why the ancestral pueblo people settled here, in an arid and hot high desert. More mysteriously, no one knows why, after centuries of living here, they suddenly moved. But the sandstone dwellings are amazingly well preserved and the U.S. Forest Service does a great job explaining everything.
    We did the tours in shifts because of the dogs. I dozed with them in a shaded picnic area while the others toured. Then it was our turn and they watched the dogs.
    This is a huge park. To get to the cliff dwellings, you drive 23 miles up a winding mountain road, climbing to about 8.500 feet from the 6500 at the campground level. There are several great hiking trails, too, for all levels.
    Sunsets are spectacular. And sunrises are peaceful in the clear, clean mountain air. With a cup of coffee and your dog by your side, as seen in the photo of my son, Jeff, it does’t get much better…anywhere.
    Wear lots of sun screen up here. The air is thin and the UV rays really strong.
    We’re due to stay here through the weekend, heading to Telluride Sunday.
  21. Roadtrekingmike
    I have a whole new appreciation for my Roadtrek eTrek. It not only allows us to boondock, or dry camp, for days on end, it can haul us up some of the steepest mountains in Southwest Colorado… while hauling a travel trailer.
    Our little family caravan made our way south from Colorado Springs in some pretty dicey driving conditions. Heavy downpours, fog, slippery roads and high altitude. But it wasn’t until we hit US 160 near Wolf Creek Pass when I put the eTrek to the hauling test.
    Some 37 Miles of steep incline and a 8% winding decline made the ascent of Pikes Peak the day before seem like a Sunday drive. It was pouring rain the whole way. The eTrek drove firm and steady, though its’ a good thing the speed limit was 45 mph because that is about all I could get out of the Mercedes 3500 engine hauling our 21-foot AmerLite travel trailer.
    That’s when I remembered why Wolf Creek Pass was so familiar. It was a song made famous by Country music artist C. W. McCall’s humorous spoken-word song of the same name, in which the pass is fondly described as “37 miles o’ **** — which is up on the Great Divide.” In the song, two truckers drive an out-of-control Peterbilt down U.S. Highway 160 over the pass.
    I looked at Earl and his eyes was wide
    His lip was curled, and his leg was fried.
    And his hand was froze to the wheel like a tongue to a sled in the middle of a blizzard.
    I says, “Earl, I’m not the type to complain
    But the time has come for me to explain
    That if you don’t apply some brake real soon, they’re gonna have to pick us up with a stick and a spoon…”
    (“Wolf Creek Pass” written by Bill Fries and Chip Davis, sung by C.W. McCall)
    Here is is if you want to sing along:
    http://youtu.be/xC_onLPc-0E
    It was a real test. The highway climbs to 10,857 feet, smack dab on the Continental Divide.
    I used the Mercedes engine to downshift on the decline. The trailer brakes stunk mightily as they heated up and we had to take a 45-minute break to let them cool down once we reached the bottom.
    My son, Jeff, following in a borrowed Roadtrek SS, had no problems. My daughter Wendy, following in our Honda Pilot SUV, suffered from altitude sickness.
    The rain continued all the way to Mesa Verde National Park. We didn’t get in until very late and got very wet setting up. It was my first test of backing up the trailer. After Wolf Creek Pass, it was a piece of cake.
  22. Roadtrekingmike
    Remember that new Samsung Galaxy 4S that I wrote about two weeks ago -- RVing and My New Smartphone -- Well, that smartphone did a dumb thing: It up and died on me.
    It won’t charge, won’t power up and is totally dead. And I’m in the middle of a two-week RV trip in the Rockies.
    I tried all the reset tricks, like removing the battery. Its certifiably dead.
    Yesterday was the first time in two decades that I was without a cell phone and … I survived.
    I had my calls forwarded to Jennifer Wendland’s iPhone but if you message me, know I won’t get it. And if you’ve been following our travels on that little intetactive map over on the right sidebar, it is no longer functioning.
    It looks like I can’t get a replacement until I get back home to Michigan and my Verizon dealer.
    My iPhone never failed ... ever…the Samsung died in two weeks. Maybe I need to go back to Apple.
  23. Roadtrekingmike
    It was a day of superlatives as our Roadtrek eTrek literally took us to the heights of RVing – climbing Pikes Peak.
    Making it even better because it was our wedding anniversary and we were spending it with family in one of the continent’s most beautiful regions.
    Pikes Peak surely is the most accessible big mountain on the continent, with a first rate road all the way up, despite some hairpin curves with little or no shoulder or guardrails. The only issue we had was on the descent, where at the mandatory brake check around 11,000 feet ours measured 600 degrees.
    We used low gears to help in slowing the vehicle on the drive down but the eTrek is a heavy vehicle and we needed to pull off and let it rest for a half hour. So did lots of others in cars.
    I used the downtime to take Tai for a walk and he chased up a couple of mule deer. He thought it great fun and had a sparkle in his big brown Elkhound eyes that lasted the rest of the day.
    The top of Pikes Peak offers dramatic, craggy windswept views, though we all felt a tinge of dizziness and queasiness, a touch of altitude sickness. Tai loved it at the summit, as did son Jeff’s dog, Sequoia. The temperature up top was 48 degrees. Down below, it was in the nineties.
    Pikes Peak is rich in history and was the symbol of the 1859 Gold Rush to Colorado with the slogan, “Pikes Peak or Bust.” Today, where pioneers and native Americans used to walk, a 19-mile long highway makes its way to the top, carrying half a million visitors each year. It’s a beautiful drive through alpine forests, mountain reservoirs, and rugged rockface beyond the timberline.
    Wendy, Dan and the girls didn’t make it to the summit. Wendy felt ill about the 8,000 foot level and they instead hung around at lower altitudes, hiking and taking photos.
    Off the mountain, we all rendezvoused and visited the spectacular 300-foot tall red rock formations at Garden of the Gods. Several large male mule deer posed for my new telephoto lens. We never would have spotted them had not Tai, his nose already tuned into deer scent from our adventure on the mountain, caught a whiff of them atop a hill at the base of one of the large red formations. We couldn’t figure out why he was so tugging at his leash until someone looked up and shouted “deer.”
    Our base camp for this part of the trip was the pristine Cheyenne Mountain State Park, located just south of Colorado Springs on the eastern slope of Cheyenne Mountain. The park is clean and new, opened in October 2006 and comprising 1,680 acres. Out our west window is the mountain itself. Out our east windows is a stunning overlook of the plains of Colorado and, at night, the sparkling lights of Colorado Springs.
    Literally under us is an amazing military complex, a fortress designed during the height of the cold war to withstand a 30 megaton nuclear hit and allow heads of government from the President on down to live in comfort and run the affairs of the country during an emergency. Today, it remains a very active worksite and houses elements of the U.S. Strategic Command, Air Force Space Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Missile Defense Agency and the Federal Aviation Authority, among others.
    That’s hard to tell in our camping spots here. But we know we are near a military installation. At 10 PM the last two nights, we heard a bugler sound taps, its clear, plaintive sound echoing up from the green-roofed military buildings down in the foothills. This morning, we heard reverie as the sky turned pink. And we’ve seen helicopters doing flight training several times, as well.
    The park is one of the nicest we’ve stayed in anywhere. There are 20 miles of hiking trails, though dogs are not permitted because of wildlife. There are black bears, cougars, coyotes and other critters. The prairie rattlesnake frequents the rocky areas. And a tent full of four young girls near us who are here for a weekend marathon had a scorpion crawl in.
    We’re about 6,500 feet high at our campsites. Days have been in the nineties, with low humidity. Nights delightfully cool to the low sixties.
    Wednesday morning we pack up once again as the Great Roadtreking Family Vacation of 2014 continues and we head off to the Four Corners region and Mesa Verde.
    As I type this lateTuesday night, Jen and I are tucked into the eTrek and the rest of their family aleep in their RVs – Jeff and Aimee and Sequoia in a borrowed Roadtrek SS generously provided by some Roadtrek friends; Wendy, Dan, our granddaughters and their dog, Charley, in the Amerilite travel trailer we just bought from American RV in Grand Rapids and are towing with our Roadtrek eTrek. We wish we had another day or so here. There’s lots more to see in this area.
    I better be careful what I wish for.
    Wendy and Dan, following our RVs in our car, report that it’s been making a funny but intermittent squealing noise. I took it for a short test drive but didn’t hear a thing out of the ordinary. I pronounced it just fine. But Jennifer says my hearing isn’t as keen as it should be. So we’re debating whether we should have the car looked at before we continue on.
  24. Roadtrekingmike
    Now I know how Class A motorhome drivers live. They spend lots of time checking their mirrors, looking for places to park that are big enough to handle their length and…. visiting gas stations.
    As we are towing a 21-foot travel trailer behind our Roadtrek on a family caravan vacation trip to the Rockies, I’ve found towing very easy and parking not so bad as long as I don’t try pulling in to fast-food places with my 30-foot-plus length.
    Truthfully, I’ve quickly gotten used to towing and with 1,000-pus miles under my belt as we pulled into Gothenberg, Nebraska, last night, the only complaint I have is what towing a trailer has done to my fuel consumption.
    Where before my 2012 Roadtrek eTrek averaged 17-18 mpg, towing the 2,780 extra pounds in the trailer has dropped it to 11-12 mpg.
    Still, it’s well worth it to be all together as a family.
    This is now my third trip west along I-80 and I have forgotten how much corn they grow our here in the prairie. And how tall it is, easily eight feet in most fields.
    The biggest challenge we’ve had so far is group sightseeing with three big dogs. Someone always has to stay outside or behind to tend to the dogs.
    The biggest excitement yesterday was having lunch with a bunch of Hells Angels motorcycle club members. About a dozen of them from the California chapter pulled into the same Kum & Go gas station and Subway restaurant we chose west of Des Moines. A guy named Demento told me they were headed to Sturgis in San Diego, and the big motorcycle week doings up there.
    They seemed like nice enough guys. In the Subway, one of them groused that there was a steakhouse up the road and he couldn’t figure out why they were eating at a Subway rather than a steakhouse. One of the other members said they could eat steak tonight and that about ended the discussion.
    Steak sounded pretty good to me, too, but with all the extra fuel expenses, I’m lucky I can afford Subway.
    As we pulled out of the station, we saw an Iowa State Police cruiser backed into the Kum & Go keeping an eye on the Hells Angels.
    We drove 480 miles yesterday from Amana, Iowa to get to this little community, which bills itself as “the the Pony Express Capital of Nebraska” because of a restored station in town that is a great tourist stop. Gothensberg is near the original route of the Oregon Trail and right on the Pony Express route west.
    The Pony Express was in existence a very short time – from April 3, 1860 to late October 1861 and provided the fastest mail delivery between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. As explained by the Nebraska Tourism folks, the whole reason it existed was promotional – to draw public attention to the central route in hope of gaining the million dollar government mail contract for the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak express Company.
    In total there were 183 men that were riders for the Pony Express during this period of just over 18 months. They had to be young, skinny men, not over 18 and must have been expert riders. It was said they had to be willing to risk death daily and that orphans were preferred. Most of the riders were around 20 with the youngest of them 11 and the oldest was in his mid-40s. The average weight was 120 pounds.
    These men worked for $100 a month. The riders traveled for between 75 and 100 miles with fresh horses being provided every 10 to 15 miles. The speed of the horses averaged 10 miles an hour. The mix of breeds included thoroughbreds, mustangs, pintos, and Morgans. There were approximately 165 stations along the route of almost 2,000 miles.
    The cost of a 1/2 ounce letter was $5 when the rides began but by the end of the Pony Express the price had dropped to $1 per 1/2 ounce.
    The end of the Pony Express happened on October 24, 1861. With the outbreak of the Civil War and the lack of getting the government contract and the debt incurred by the owners the route could not be continued. The Pony Express station in Gothensberg is open from 8am – 8 pm during the summer and 9 – 6 in May and September.
    Also in Gothensberg and right off I-80 at the town exit 211 is a sod house.
    Sod houses or “soddies,” as they were also known, were built on the prairies from the sod of thickly rooted prairie grass by the settlers and were forerunners to the log cabins in North America. The sod was used primarily as there weren’t standard building materials such as wood or stone on the prairies. The houses were naturally very cheap to build and surprisingly well insulated but were susceptible to damp and even rain damage.
    The Sod House Museum is a red barn shaped authentic replica of the sod houses built by early settlers in this region and was established in 1988. The lives and working practices of the settlers is honored here with memorabilia and photographs taken during the pioneer era. The inside of the sod houses were pretty sparse reflecting the hard times experienced by the settlers who lived there. The women who work at the musem tell fascinating tales of life on the prairie and its many hardships. Many of the women settlers here, isolated in such big country, committed suicide.
    One story they told us involved a variation of the sod house, lean-to houses carved into the sides of hills. Seemed that sometimes,snakes would some down through the earthen roofs of some of these dugout homes, dropping right on the floor.
    We’ll stick with our RVs, thank you very much.
    We spent the night at the Gothenberg KOA, a pleasant shaded little campground just a half mile from the Interstate.
    Off we go again today, 360 miles to Colorado Springs, CO and the Cheyenne Mountain State Park.
    But first, I better fill up.
  25. Roadtrekingmike
    And the Great Wendland Family Roadtreking RV Vacation is off and westbound, headed to Colorado and the American southwest in a caravan of two Roadtreks, a travel trailer and an SUV.
    Meet the Family
    Since you’ll be seeing and hearing about the six adults, two kids and three big dogs we have traveling in two Roadtrek Class B motorhomes, one Gulf Stream Travel Trailer and an SUV, I thought it might be good to introduce them to you. I should also point out that my third child, Scott, with his wife, Lauri and my four grandsons, live in Georgia and are not on this trip with us. Jennifer and I will be heading down to visit them next month.
    This trip to Colorado and the Four Corners area is made up of:
    Mike and Jennifer Wendland, and Tai, our 70-pound Norwegian Elkhound. You already know us. We’re on our second year of traveling North America in our Roadtrek and all our travel so far have been just us. We’ve wanted to share some of the adventures with our family but were stumped on how it could happen until Jim Hammill, president of Roadtrek, suggested to me a few months ago that all I had to do was tow a travel trailer with our Roadtrek eTrek. I had never thought of that. When I later shared Hammill’s suggestion with Jennifer, she immediately invited our our Michigan children and their families. It made no difference that we didn’t happen to have a travel trailer at the time. The fact that a travel trailer was the breakthrough solution was all Jennifer needed to hear. Now we could do a family vacation. Well, as of this week, now not only have a travel trailer, we bought one from American RV in Grand Rapids. Why did we buy one? Because with such short notice, all the decent rentals were unavailable from nearby dealers and American RV gave us such a great deal that we figured, hey, once the trip was over, we can always sell it and end up having it cost us out of pocket not much more than it would have had we rented one. So, we are now the proud owners of a brand new and very cool 2014 Gulf Stream Amerlite Super Lite 19BHC which we will tow with our 2012 Roadtrek eTrek motorhome.
    Wendy, Dan, Hua Hua and Rachel Bowyer, and Charley, their 60-pound Goldendoodle - Wendy is our firstborn. She is also a journalist by training, having worked and won reporting awards at the Flint Journal and the Detroit Free Press. She is now a full-time stay-at-home Mom, homeschooling Hua Hua, 10, and Rachel, 7, who she and Dan adopted from China. Dan is a music teacher in suburban Detroit. Wendy grew up camping. As a family, we had a pop-up camper, a 13-foot travel trailer and tents. This trip to Colorado and the southwest is all her planning. She has long wanted to visit the region and has mapped out a route that will take us first to Colorado Springs, then Mesa Verde and the Four Corners region of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, the Black Canyon at Gunnison and the Rocky Mountain National Park. Wendy and her family will be driving our 2009 Honda Pilot SUV.
    Jeff and Aimee Wendland and their 125-pound dog, Sequoia – Jeff is our youngest child. He is the SEO Project Manager at Market Pipeline, a web design and development company in Kalamazoo, MI. Aimee is a teacher. Jeff also helps me with this blog and runs the Roadtreking Store website that sells Roadtreking-themed clothing and Class B motorhome accessories. He and Aimee love camping and the outdoors. Most of their experience has been in tents. Jeff has been curious about Class B motorhomes and Roadtreks in particular. So he and Aimee and Sequoia will be traveling in our caravan in a borrowed 2010 Roadtrek SS Ideal that we are privileged to use thanks to some friends at Roadtrek. This will be the first time they have traveled and camped in a motorhome and I’m betting he is going to be hooked.
    Trying to keep together as we head out promises to be a challenge. We all have GPS. I’ve brought along some walkie-talkies and we have mobile phones. Saturday night’s destination was the Amana Colonies and an RV park on the edge of town. The park had no shade but was pancake flat. We had a wide open area all around us and the camground even provided free hardood for campfires.
    The Amana Colonies are pretty fascinating places. They were basically religious communes, founded by German immigrants. The leaders chose the name Amana from the Song of Solomon 4:8. Amana means to “remain true.” Six villages were established, a mile or two apart, across a river valley tract of some 25,000 acres – Amana, East Amana, West Amana, South Amana, High Amana and Middle Amana. The village of Homestead was added in 1861, giving the Colonies access to the railroad.
    Farming and the production of wool and calico supported the community, but village enterprises, everything from clock making to brewing, were vital, and well-crafted products became a hallmark of the Amanas. Craftsmen took special pride in their work as a testament of both their faith and their community spirit. The Amana villages became well known for their high quality goods.
    Today the seven villages of the Amana Colonies represent an American dream come true; a thriving community founded by religious faith and community spirit. Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965, the Amana Colonies attract hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, all of whom come to see and enjoy a place where the past is cherished and where hospitality is a way of life.
    Evocative of another age, the streets of the Amana Colonies with brick, stone and clapboard homes, flower and vegetable gardens, lanterns and walkways, recall Amana yesterday.
    When we checked into the RV park, they gave us tokens good for a pound of homemade German bratwurst at a local meat shop… our first stop before hitting the road this morning.
    We drove a tad over 500 miles to get there and enjoyed our first campfire of the vacation and a gorgeous, starry night in the midst of the vast cornfields surrounding the community. We had a communal dinner of salad, grilled chicken, pasta salad and some hot dogs and, naturally, S’Mores after dark.
    We’re booked at the KOA in Gothenburg, NE for Sunday and then the Cheyenne Mountain State Park in Colorado Springs, CO for a couple of days.
    After that, it’s down through the mountains to the southwest, doing boondocking as we can. Hiking, photography and as much wilderness deep-breathing as possible are on my agenda.
    If you are anywhere near us, we’d love to meet in person. And please pass along your suggestions here as to what we should see.
    Here we go …
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