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Into Colorado

From Antelope Island we spent the night in Green River, Utah at Green River State Park. Lovely, big sites! We spent the next night at Valley Sunset RV Ranch in Delta, CO. Not bad for a very small campground, and it was inexpensive to boot! We then arrived into the Taylor Park area, our destination until tomorrow.

We are attending the Taylor Park UTV Rally, an annual get-together that has been going on since 2010 or so with a hiatus during COVID. It is a very casual affair. The rally provides access to a dry camping area (for a fee), an evening program with lots of door prizes, a few vendors of SxS specialties, and lots of people knowledgeable about the area. As usual, we chose to go out by ourselves after picking the brains of some of the experienced folks. We just drive a lot slower than most of the enthusiasts who have big, fast machines.

Thursday we drove to Tincup and then to Pitkin via the Cumberland Pass at over 12,000’. Fun little almost mining ghost towns with a few hearty residents. The pass had incredible views. There was so much dust though! It hasn’t rained, really rained, for a long time.

The day started with a lovely sunrise.

Tincup is only 6 miles from the campsite. They have had some bad experiences with OHVs I guess.

All the buildings I noted were out of log construction. Some were new, some very old, and some in-between. It was a busy mining town many, many years ago.

We left Tincup to head up a mountain valley. Beaver sign was everywhere. There are two dams in this picture.

Beautiful beaver meadows along every stream

Cumberland Pass is a famous trail. It can be driven in passenger vehicles, but it is probably best in an OHV. We climbed and climbed.

See that road on the hillside? That’s where we go

The sign said 12,015’ but my GPS said 11,980. Either way it was really hard to breath.

Pitkin is also an old mining town with only a few residents plus some rental cabins. Like Tincup it was mostly vintage log buildings, but it is larger than Tincup and more prosperous. There were two restaurants. We went to one with green chili burgers and huckleberry margaritas.

We came by via the Slaughterhouse Gulch trail. It was a bit rougher, but quite doable. Didn’t get many pictures because we were mostly just in the trees.

By Friday my sinus problems were getting serious. We left at 8:00 am and went to Tincup for breakfast at French’s. Lovely meal. We then headed up to the Texas Lakes trail. We had a bit of a false start when we encountered a water crossing we just didn’t think we were big enough for. We ended up taking an alternate but longer route. The pictures got fewer and fewer as I was feeling worse and worse. The combination of dust and no air was really getting to me. We did see a lot of mule deer this day though. It helps to be the first folks out and about. We saw 12 different deer in various little groups. I am going to post a really bad picture of one that was bedded down maybe 10 yards from the road. Please forgive how bad it is. By this time I just couldn’t get out of the rig, and the RZR vibrates whenever the motor is on.

Luckily I did get some GoPro footage. This is looking at the reservoir from near where we are camped.

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Today (Saturday) I am even worse so no RZR riding for us! We took a big pickup truck trip up and past the reservoir then backdown the opposite side and into Gunnison on gravel roads. Really nice.

A view from near the outlet at Taylor Reservoir.

We leave tomorrow morning. My sinuses aren’t getting much better, but I am dosing myself with every type of allergy relief and cough medicine I can manage. I do fine if I don’t move, but walking around every a little bit starts me coughing again. We will be heading to Lake City to do the famous Alpine Loop, so I am working hard on getting better.

A sad Great Salt Lake

Ummm. Looks like I didn’t publish this! Better late than never.

We had a lovely trip to the Salt Lake City area, and Antelope Island State Park was just as lovely as ever. As I expected, the campground was almost empty. There are around 60 campsites – some dry camping, some with FHUs, and even 3 really nice little cabins. I think the most we ever saw occupied were 9 sites, and that included the 3 camp host sites! This is what we saw as we looked out of our site.

We just hung around the camper on Friday when we arrived. Saturday we went shopping for more fabric for the oven mitt class I am teaching in October. Nice shop called Sew-N-Save with a great selection of fabric. We had lunch at the little Thai cafe in Syracuse. As before, we enjoyed the food and had plenty for dinner on Sunday.

In the afternoon we decided to drive out towards Greer Ranch, an historic homesite on the island. We have been in the builds a dozen times, so we didn’t stop there, but we drove the dirt road south of the ranch to see how far we could get. The lake is so, so, so low! We ended up driving almost to the end of the island. Of course, the island is no longer an island; it has become a peninsula on the south end, and the road ended up about a mile from where the salt flats began that connect it to the mainland. And of course we saw bison! The nursery herd has broken up into a number of smaller herds scattered on the east side of the island. In this picture you can see the green that indicates seeps or springs. This side of the island has a lot of both which is, of course, why the bison prefer this side. Also notice the fence in the salt flat edge of the island. This is fairly new. When the island really was an island, the bison stayed put. The lake has now gotten so low that there was concern they would just walk away. So up went a bison proof fence around the east and south end of the state park. So sad.

On the way back to the west side where we were camped, we were lucky to see one of the fabulous reflections the lake is known for. Pretty nice!

Sunday I had a great time visiting my old church (First Presbyterian Salt Lake City). It is a big gothic church in the downtown area, and it is undergoing a resurgence with a new pastor. The church has been know for its music program for years, and we were lucky enough to be there on jazz Sunday. Have you ever heard jazz played on a massive pipe organ? I got to! Larry Blackburn is the organist, and he adapted a version of “When the Saints.” Never thought it could be done, but Larry (as usual) knocked it out of the park. I got to see a number of old friends, and Kevin and I went to lunch with a couple of them. We got back to the motorhome, and we both took a nap.

This is what our view was this morning as we got ready to leave. We drove through the city pretty easily, and we are now in Green River State Park. Tomorrow we spend the night at a private campground in Delta, CO before heading to the Taylor Park UTV rally.

Heading to Salt Lake City

After the night in Burns, we spent one night (again) in the Mountain Home Elks Lodge lot followed by three nights in the Jerome Elks Lodge lot. We planned the time in Jerome to do some RZR riding in the Sawtooth Mountains near Magic Mountain Ski Resort, and it was a fabulous ride.

We started in a forested area.

Ride Through Woods

There was a variety of road/trails in the area. One type is called a shelf road. They are basically just a bulldozed trail in the side of a steep hillside that drops off steeply on one side. This one was pretty mild, but it does show how they work.

Shelf road

Interestingly enough we also saw this occupied, but quite rustic, cabin. We didn’t see anyone around, and of course we didn’t get too close, but the flag in front was new and waving.

We saw hundreds of animals! Well they weren’t too wild, but we did encounter a large herd of sheep being moved. We never saw the shepherd, but we saw a guardian dog and a sheep dog. Note in the video how the sheep split around an obstacle then come right back together.

Sheep moving

We saw the herder’s wagon, and didn’t he pick a lovely place to put it!

Sheep herder wagon

Of course there were more than just sheep. Note these folks watching us.

More wild animals!

There was just a lot of beautiful scenery.

The trip was around 40 miles, and we took 4.5 hours to do it. That included lunch at a lovely shady spot that I didn’t get a good picture of.

I thought I would add a picture of what the parking lot looked like. In the winter I bet it is MUCH busier with skiers! You can also see the ramps Kevin uses to put the RZR back in the truck.

On Thursday we visited the Minidoka National Historic Site. It is the location of what is more appropriately called a “concentration camp” rather than the innocuous term of “internment camp.” May we never forget the stain on our nation when we rounded up people based only on their ethnicity and locked them away for years. Oh, wait, doesn’t that sound much more current than WWII? The camp was huge, with thousands of people and probably around 100 housing units. Each of the buildings like the white one below held 6 families of between 3 and 8 members.

We would have done more, but we ended up having to take Minnie to the vet. She has obviously not feeling well, and she had lot a lot of weight. After a few hundred dollars of blood work and an ultrasound, she was diagnosed with probable pancreatitis. Lots of meds over the next few weeks, then a revisiting of her blood work.

Today we are at Antelope Island State Park in Utah. Gorgeous, and hardly anyone here! The water is turned off to the entire island, so only the hardy folks are camping.

Ray Benson Sno-Park (again)

Oregon has a number of Sno-Parks designed for cross country skiing and snowmobiling, even dogsledding! Some are open for other uses in the summer. Ray Benson is very popular with both the OHV crowd and the water sports crowds who can’t get a reservation at the nearby lakes. We arrived on Thursday afternoon, and it was beautiful. Here is the view from under our awning.You can barely see the Hoodoo Ski Area to the right.

And there were butterflies! Thousands and thousands of California Tortoiseshell butterflies had recently hatched, and they were busy feeding, or at least according to Oregon websites. The first picture is of a few hundred hanging out in a damp tire track. The video is from under my awning again. Click it to watch in full screen mode.

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Friday we took a 24 mile RZR trip. I must say I am not impressed with Oregon as a UTV location. The rules are onerous; for example, a narrow UTV like ours (50” wide) is allowed on ATV (50”) trails in other states, but not in OR. No driving even on many USFS double digit numbered roads is another example. And then the riders! Very poor trail behavior – driving too fast, blasting around blind turns, etc. We enjoyed the ride, but decided that would be it in Oregon. I will give you a couple of pictures and a video though. The video was taken on the way to the top of Cache Mountain where there used to be an old USFS fire watch tour. Of course it was burned by vandals a number of years ago.😢

Burn scars still have beauty with Mt. Washington behind them

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Since we had plenty of water and the RZR was SO dirty, Kevin used his handy dandy electric power washer on it. This was the real deal job – he completely unloaded everything and washed it all. Sorry for the fuzzy picture.

We take a lot of gear with us since we ride by ourselves a lot. Extra gas, extra water, food, clothing, repair kit and tools, an InReach emergency notification system, even gear to stay the night if we get stuck. Once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout!

Saturday we decided to join the crowds sightseeing, but in the pickup. I didn’t take many pictures, but we had a nice ride. We drove through a bunch of heavily forested areas before reaching the Columbia River. We drove along it quite a ways, and we tried to see some waterfalls, but it was not to be. It is prime tourist season, and everything was so crowded we didn’t get to see the falls. I did get one drive-by photo, but that was it. Note to self: Stay away from popular tourist areas on absolutely beautiful Saturdays! We had done the waterfall drive a few years back though, so it wasn’t a critical miss.

To summarize about the Sno-Park, it was fine until Friday when multiple large groups of people came in. The groups were noisy by themselves, and then the OHVs they brought with them were worse. I wouldn’t have minded noise before 9 or 10pm, but we had motorcycles roaring until 11pm on Friday and a generator that ran until well after midnight. There was also a lot of yelling from the groups. It wasn’t like this the last time we were here, probably because the weather was so hot. This weekend the highs were 80 or less, so no need for AC. Yet another lesson learned.

We packed up this morning and drove to Burns, OR where we are spending the night at a small place called Cindi’s RV Park. It has 6 sites, FHU, and costs the princely sum of $35! We are catching up on laundry and some cleaning. We have pretty much planned the rest of the trip until we go to the ayatollah Park UTV Rally beginning 13 August. More on that as it happens.

True Topper install then a week on the Oregon coast

We left Tillamook to get an upgrade done to the motorhome. We decided to add True Toppers to the rig. They replace the slide toppers with a unique method to clear off the slide tops as they come in. No more noisy slide toppers! We spent Sunday 20 July until the morning of 23 July in their yard and shop. It took more than 2 days to do the work as it is quite extensive. It also required the awning be moved down a few inches which was surprisingly difficult. The shop did a really good job, and I am looking forward to getting some serious wind to see how it works. Astonishingly it has been remarkably calm ever since!

We then decided to head to the Oregon coast to get out of the awful heat. The temps were mostly in the mid 60s for highs and low 50s at night – lovely! We stayed at the Florence Elks Lodge downtown for convenience. One day we headed north on the coast driving to Newport. We had lunch at a fabulous place called South Beach Fish Market. I had the most fabulous halibut and chips I have ever had! Highly recommend!

Make sure you turn the sound up for the videos. I love the sound of the ocean.

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I love the way the fog is climbing the mountain in this shot.

And you can’t see the rocky shores of Oregon without seeing a lighthouse (or two).

The north coast is very rocky. We were there at nearly low tide plus the swells were quite low, so some of the splashing you normally get along the rocks wasn’t very visible this trip. We did get to see some of the standard sights including some sea lions sunning themselves plus some others fishing off the shore.

Another trip we took was south. Around Florence the coast is sand dunes. They are everywhere! Behind the shops, trying to overcome the side streets, everywhere! It is a really popular area for dune riding on ATVs, motorcycles, and UTVs. Kind of makes sense since this is the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area.

A picture taken looking south toward Florence

I am a fan of the little donuts they were selling in the parking lot

One of the things we learned is that the county park at Winchester Bay has all kinds of fabulous camping available. There are a large number of dry camping sites that are non-reservation. I think we will definitely stay there the next time we come to the area. We spent all kinds of time in the area, and we saw another lighthouse!

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And I finally finished my Christmas quilt top. My kids bought me a fat quarter bundle of Christmas fabrics for my birthday in November. As said they had noted I didn’t have a Christmas quilt, and decided I needed one. They were right! I worked on it off and on during our winter trip, but I managed to finish it this week. I will press it at home with the Laura Star steam pressing system. It is the best way to get flat seams, and I have totally gotten spoiled with it.

Made with fat quarter bundle from my kids

I also finished the June and July Kona Block of the Month kits. I was remarkably late with this, but I really do like this blocks. They are all big blocks with lots of pieces. You can make them with just half square triangles, but the enjoyable part is trying to figure out how to use different block types to minimize seams. For example, there are a lot of flying geese you can use instead of two HSTs. Now I just have get ready for the August block in a few days. And I am much happier with the July and later color scheme. Each month there are 40+ squares of a specific color palette. We choose from the package each month, and the others will be used for borders and sashing. I am also signed up for a class on various border options that can be used for this class quilt or other quilts.

After the joys of the coast we moved to Springfield, just outside Eugene. Again, we are staying at an Elks Lodge here, a place we have stayed before. Still hot here, but there is supposed to be cooling down in the next few days. I also got to visit a quilt shop in Springfield, Jean Marie Fabrics. Lovely collection of fabrics in a very crowded shop. I am beginning to collect fabrics for the oven mitt class I am doing at the Rocky Mountain Motorhome Association rally in October. I need 1/2 yard for each kit that will make 2 oven mitts. I found a fabulous fabric with red, yellow, and green chilis on it, plus another with miscellaneous produce on it. Those are the types popular for kitchen stuff.

We will stay here until Thursday morning when we will head back to the Ray Benson Sno-Play area. This time I sure hope it is cool enough to do some UTV riding! It was too hot the last time we were there, and I wasn’t feeling too well. I am still having a bit of incision drainage which is problematic, but it is getting much better.

Tillamook Monday through Friday

The trip from Sisters to Tillamook was about the worse driving I have ever had todo on the motorhome! Lots of very narrow lanes winding through the forest at a speed of 35-40 mph for over 100 miles. Ugh. We are definitely going back that general direction a different way! By the time we got to the Elks campground , I was exhausted. It took quite a bit for me to recover, so we decided to only do a bit of sightseeing. We went north a bit to Garbaldi to take the Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad between Garibaldi and Rockaway Beach. It was only 10 miles up and back with a short break in Rockaway Beach, but it was enjoyable and relaxing.

A brief video out the window.

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The train was crowded since this was prime tourist season. The open car was completely full, but we wanted a more comfortable seat, so this is the car.

Not the engine that moves, but a pretty one for pictures.

And of course there was definitely some more sightseeing from the road.

On Wednesday we went to the Tillamook Air Museum. What a fabulous place, a pretty unexpected diamond. The museum is in an old blimp hanger from WWII, and it is amazingly huge. Eight full sized blimps could fit inside. Astonishingly it was built almost completely of wood since metal was precious during the war. It was full of all kinds of stuff besides just airplanes. They had a big collection of cockpit training mockups.

A closer view of one of the training modules

They had some old WWII items of course.

Did I tell you think is BIG??

On of the other surprises was a huge selection of military models . I have never seen such a fabulous collection. There were models of specific battles, examples of all kinds of bases and posts, and included lots of other forces in addition to just US forces, both enemy and ally.

Turns out I got a complication from the breast surgery after the trip to the museum, and we ended up going to the Tillamook ER. Nice people, but it was interesting that pretty much everything was done with paper instead of computers. Luckily they used Epic, the medical record program the rest of my medical folks use so it was easy for them to get my data. I just needed a minor procedure, and we were out in less than 3 hours. I called my surgeon on Thursday morning, and he said just follow the ER instructions. It was irritating, but not serious.

Thursday we decided to take a drive since I didn’t want to do much. You just can’t beat the Oregon coast. We drove south from Tillamook to Newport taking our time. We stopped by a number of state beaches and took about four hours to drive the short 60 miles. We had dinner at Georgie’s Bayside Restaurant, a lovely upscale place. It was well worth the money.

Today we decided to just hang around the motorhome since I wasn’t feeling well. Kevin suggested we go to Rockaway Beach to get a Pronto Pup, a famous corn dog place. Yup, it was good! I don’t think I have had a corn dog for 2-3 years at least, but I really should have them more often.

I actually have been sewing some. I finished the June block of the month from Kona, and I am almost finished with the July one. I will post both when I get the second done.

Sisters, OR

We had been to Sisters before, but not during quilt week. Wow, is it busy! Here is the fabulous boondock site we found though.

Maybe a half mile from the high school where the classes were held.

My first class on Monday was on quilting with lines. We started with straight lines, then slightly curved lines, then very curved lines, then … I guess you get the idea. I enjoyed the class a lot. It was well organized. My second class was on Tuesday and was for piecing. We used a kit that had a beautifully printed panel showing the Sisters Quilt Show design for this year. The kit also had fabric for lovely little star blocks which is what we really worked on. It used a “Tri Recs” ruler, and what seamed simple was actually pretty slow at the start! I finally got a rhythm established and could do a star in about 25 minutes, having pre-cut all the pieces. My brain was so exhausted by 2:30 on Tuesday I had Kevin come to pick me up early! Recommendation: Plan on having a day to recover between classes. They are so chock full of information it is exhausting!

The kit fabrics are gorgeous. The blocks (unpressed in this photo) are 6 1/2”, so each of this little star points are tiny! And they definitely have a right and left side.

Wednesday and Thursday we just did errands and had friends out for lunch which was great fun (the friends, not the errands!). On Friday we drove the McKenzie Scienic Byway. Absolute stunner, but definitely for the truck, not them motorhome. Lots of ups and down, lots of tight curves. The size limit is 35’, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that size limit to drive it! Here are some pictures from our drive with captions.

Lots and lots of lava! Under these boulders is a solid river of lava

The lichen was a brilliant green. Excuse the picture quality.

This is the old Santiam Pass Toll Road. Can you imagine traversing the lava fields in a wagon?

This small “windows” highlight various points of interest

One of the highlights was the historic Fish Lake Remount Station. It has a long and storied history of many uses, the longest was as a Forest Service muleskinner location. Mules were the primary way to get goods into and out of the remote locations where rangers were stationed. The site was also the summer quarters for the Head Forest Ranger for a number of years. Some of the buildings are maintained by the “Friends of Fish Lake” organization including the one below.

“Caulked boots” means boots with spikes for foresters/loggers climbing trees

Even the old dinner ware was marked with the Forest Service logo.

We had lunch at Clear Lake Resort operated by a USFS concessionaire. The food was good, and the lake was very popular. It is not the headwaters of the McKenzie River after a lava eruption damed the ancestral McKenzie. Deep and cold.

On Saturday we went to the legendary Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show. We got downtown by about 7:30, and quilts were still being hung. There were over a thousand! We wandered around a couple of hours and saw hundreds before it started getting too hot for us. But wow, what a show! This is just a small sampling

Very traditional postage stamp quilt (each block is 1”)

A young boy made this cute Highland cow quilt

The creator of this stunner was standing by the quilt as we came up.

And of course there were paper pieced beauties

At 9:30 as we left, people were just beginning to throng, and I am sure it quadrupled in size before it finished this afternoon.

And I would be totally remiss if I didn’t comment on the town of Sisters. What a lovely place! There are flowers everywhere, and it is a tourist town with beautiful flowers, decent parking, and very few tshirt shops! Instead there are nice little restaurants, art galleries, etc.

We have gotten tired of the heat in Sisters though, so after we went to the show for a few hours, we packed up and went 22 miles away to the Ray Benson Sno-Park. Basically there are just a few huge parking lots you can stay in. It might sound bad, but the temperatures are at least 10 degrees cooler than Sisters, and the view out my front door isn’t bad! There is no one else staying in the lot we are in, and the place is very quiet.

We will stay here until Monday morning when we head into an Elk’s Lodge in Tillamook. The weather there is nice and cool, and it will be a welcome relief.

RZR riding over the Independence Day holiday

We arrived in Crescent at the Big Pines RV Park. Nice place. It is older and obviously family run. The sites are spotless, nicely separated (for an RV park), and they have their own entrance to the UTV trails in the area! It was obvious who was here from the Central Oregon club, and we managed to connect with one of the group’s leaders easily. On the 4th, we went on a group ride to Ft. Rock and back. It was 115 miles (!!!) on mostly gravel roads ridden at pretty high speeds. We took a long lunch break at a bar and grill in town, and then a thunderstorm came in. We just put on ponchos to keep our legs dry and took off on a fast, more direct route to the campground. I only got a few pictures because my GoPro got knocked down and I didn’t notice it until we finished the trip! But here is the little bit I did get.

The first one shows what most of the roads were like – wide graded gravel with minimal bumps.

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And this is the result of passing too close to a tree! The GoPro stayed attached, but it decided to point straight up to the sky. Nice view of the clouds though LOL!

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While the club had nice people, it just isn’t our type of riding. We decided to head out on our own on Saturday. We ended up riding about 60 miles to the town of Odette and had lunch at Manley’s Restaurant. Very nice burgers! Here are some pictures along the way.

And then we got to this:

BTW, I have no idea why this video is in a totally different format than the others! But take a look at just how narrow the trail got to be. Good thing we had a narrow rig!

One of the interesting sites we saw on the way back was this cinder mine. Many of the roads in the National Forest are improved using this red cinder. There were lots of volcanic escarpments and lava flows in the area.

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We took off for Sisters, OR this morning. I had reserved a 50’ site at Cold Springs Campground (USFS), but when Kevin took the truck over to check it out, we couldn’t have gotten in the site due to trees on the entrance. Sigh. We found a boondock site even closer to town though, so I am not too worried. It is going to be in the mid-90s the first part of the week, so having the ability to turn on the generator as much as we want for AC is not a bad trade off.

This afternoon I picked up my credentials for the classes I will be taking this week, and we had dinner at a Himalayan restaurant called High Camp Taphouse. The food was well flavored, but I was expecting a bit spicier. We didn’t regret the stop though.

Tomorrow morning I start classes. We will be here until the Monday after the quilt show. We plan on visiting Bend for some truck work and shopping, plus we will do some riding a few days.

In Oregon

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.

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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.

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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!

Playing catchup with medical issues

We had planned on heading to South Dakota right after Memorial Day, but life got in the way. I am good at getting my preventative medical care, and my mammogram reports have noted words to the effect of “dense breasts … consider MRI.” I decided since I was 70, maybe I should! I have had absolutely no symptoms or test results indicating breast cancer, but surprise! The MRI caught a very small cancer, 4-6mm in size, Stage 0 Ductal Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS). Of course that started a waterfall of appointments for biopsies, consultations with surgical, radiation, and medical oncologists, etc. Crazy. I had surgery on Monday, and the pathology report says there is no more cancer. In fact, they couldn’t even find it in the samples. The thought is the biopsy I had actually caught it all. So we are now planning on leaving on Wednesday and heading to Oregon. I still have an appointment with the surgeon and medical oncologist on Tuesday, but I am feeling very, very relieved!

Since the cancer was so small, very contained, and non-invasive, we did enjoy some time in between all the appointments. It took two service calls before Kevin finally got the RZR power steering warranty issue resolved, so we took a 75 mile trip along the Cheese Country Trail beginning and ending in Mineral Point, WI. It is a rail to trail graded trail that was just beautiful in the midwestern early summer.

Trailside picnic area managed by the local SXS club

Kevin also replaced the convection/microwave in the motorhome. The original one was losing display readability, but it was a pain to get the new one in. Turns out the mounting bracket wasn’t installed correctly originally, so when he tried to use the same screws, things just weren’t level. Ahh, so that’s why there were all these extra screws LOL! He finally got the mounting bracket level, and using screw jacks he got it in the right spot.

And is it even a post without a picture of one of the cats? This is Luna impatiently waiting for Kevin to throw her little ball for fetching.

I also participated in the #NoKings rally in Waterloo. This was my favorite sign, mostly because the doodle looks almost exactly like our old dog.

I also got some of the internet famous Dubai chocolate as a reward after surgery. Yum. Not quite sure it is worth $5 for this piece, but it was very good.

We are now packing for the trip. More when we are on the road.