My post-surgery exam showed everything was good, so we headed out of Iowa on Wednesday morning. First night we stayed at Lake Manawa State Park just inside the Iowa border with Nebraska. It is an old oxbow lake with a pretty new campground we have stayed in before. Moderately priced with widely separated sites, it was a good overnight stop. Thursday night we stayed in the Cabela’s campground in Sydney, NE. It is still too hot to think about going without air conditioning! But by Friday early afternoon we were in Wyoming at the USFS Vedauwoo Recreation Area. This is another favorite spot, and we spent two nights there. We even got the same campsite we had two years ago. Here’s a video showing our site.
Here is a video from the RZR showing what the dispersed camping area is like. Note this is the weekend before the Independence Day holiday, so it was already getting crowded.
There were lots of flowers, but almost all of my pictures came out blurry. Obviously I wasn’t holding still well enough. I did get a nice picture of wild roses and a cute little ground squirrel that posed for me.
We drove through a number of areas that had been logged, and the resulting meadows were a riot of color. I wish my little iPhone could capture the colors better.
We crossed a little stream on one of our adventures, and the water looked lovely and refreshing. There was a small bridge designed for UTVs to cross, and we paused to take a nice look.
Most of the times our maps don’t let us down, but this time they did! We had quite an adventure running out of trails that were posted open, and even losing one trail completely due to lack of use. Oh well, the RZR backs up pretty easily!
After two nights at Vedauwoo, we continued down I-80 to the Mirror Lake Highway (WY/UT 150) south of Evanston, WY. Thirty miles from the interstate we stayed at a large dispersed area where cross country skiers start their winter treks. It is known as the “Yurt” because the state puts up a big yurt here in snow season. We stayed two nights here too, meeting up with old friends from the RVForum.net who happened to be camping 30 miles away in a USFS campground. Steve made steaks and potatoes on the grill, and we had garlic bread and a Cesear salad to go with it. I made a nice peach cobbler for dessert, so we were all pretty stuffed.
We spent Tuesday night at the Elks Lodge in Mountain Home, ID. Nice people at the bar, and the camp area was very quiet. Wednesday we spent at the Fairgrounds in John Day, OR. We had reserved a site that was plenty long for us, but it was overhung with very low branches so we didn’t fit. Kevin found a camp host who got us moved to another site where the roof wouldn’t be rubbing branches. Starlink was pretty awful though due to the trees. Oh how spoiled we have become with fast internet (just about) everywhere!
Tonight we had landed for the holiday weekend at Big Pines RV Park just south of Crescent, OR. The Central Oregon SXS Club is having some group rides, and we are going to join them. It seems like they do more gravel roads than trails, but the country is pretty so we will survive. It is raining now, and a big thunderstorm is just barely passing us by (so far). It ought to help keep the dust down tomorrow!