The Jello was Shaken Today......again!

We were heading towards Poverty Flats down Overton, Nevada way to chill for a few days, but chilling wasn’t on the menu down in that neck of the woods, it was going to be in the mid 90’s over there so we made a change in plans and detoured down to Kanab, Utah and the Grand Plateau RV Park for tonight. It is only in the 80’s here and with full hookups we can run the air so these Northerners will survive. Tomorrow we are planning on heading around to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, to a little spot we took our horses to about 8 or so years ago. The weather is supposed to be in the mid to high 70’s, high 20’s for you Canadians, so that will be great weather for a little boondocking and chillin’.

The place we are at tonight is a nice spot under some pretty nice red rocks.

Salt Lake City is an INTERESTING Drive

Today we wandered on out of Shoshone-Bannock territory and headed southwards on I-15. The plan was to hit Salt Lake City sometime in the late morning and see how the traffic treated us. Our strategy is to find a transport truck and tuck in behind him in a centre lane and just meander our way along. Most folks don’t like following those big trucks, probably because they block the visibility, but my opinion is that they make great road clearers, and you can actually keep a safe distance back from them without the other folks forever cutting in front of you and occupying the space you need to stop if anything untoward should happen. That said I have always said SLC is about a ¼ mile wide and a hundred miles long, so it is a little stressful. As it happens we set the cruise for about 8-10 MPH slower than the traffic around us and they just flew by giving us all the space we needed. Never had to touch the cruise the entire trip through. We slipped into the Wally World in Orem, Utah to do our re-provisioning, it was a big parking lot with lots of room for our big outfit. With that done we got back out on the road. As we had been coming south we had been discussing our planned visit to the Moab area. It seems that every RV’er on the planet is over there and sites are hard to come by, even if you are inclined to pay someone $150/night to park your own home. We couldn’t come up with a landing spot over there so called an audible and decided we would keep heading southward into Nevada. Brenda’s CRPS is flaring up and sometimes a little CBD cream can help with that, and with Utah not being a weed friendly state we decided Nevada was our next stop tomorrow. Today we are holed up in Fillmore, at the KOA here. Pretty nice spot, far enough off the highway to be quiet and a good spot to fill what needs to be filled and empty what needs to be emptied before we slip out into a desert somewhere tomorrow. Stay tuned and hopefully you will know where that is just a little bit after we figure it out.

Just an interesting side note, as we have been coming south the price of Diesel Fuel here in the USA is higher than in Fort McLeod, Alberta. The first time we paid less than we did in Fort McLeod was here in Utah, and from all reports it is climbing back up once we leave and head into Nevada and Arizona. Now on the surface our prices look higher but with the exchange figured in, it is Alberta and their UCP government that are giving their citizens a break on the cost of getting to and from work.

Hanging with the Shoshone Bannock folks

Today is a sitting still day. We over did the traveling yesterday and decided that we would just hang here with the Shoshone Bannock folks for another day before re-starting our journey southward. As usual there are things to do around the RV, those who RV know that is a constant struggle to keep things working well and do the occasional upgrade as well. That will keep me out of trouble while my travel partner recuperates from our long drive yesterday. Well, as the day went on I didn’t get everything done that I had planned on, but I did lighten our load a little by sorting through some baskets that have just been collecting stuff for the last few years and disposing of it all in the bin here at the campground. That and sorting out some storage areas that needed a little organizing. Other than that I wandered about the campground and visited with some of the other folks coming and going here, so just basically made a nuisance of myself. I did see a few interesting plants and played with my camera there.

The plan is to get back on the road tomorrow and get a little further south and maybe even venture into a grocery store for a little reprovisioning trip.

A Little Further Down the Road from Dogpound

Early to bed last night so early to rise this morning. We wanted to stop at Duty Free to pick up some smokes for Brenda so we arrived at the crack of 7AM there. They were better than 50% off from the normal price at home, so she was a happy camper. Then it was off to see the Customs fellow at Sweetgrass to see if there were going to let us in this time. No problem he said, just make sure you take your wife home with you when you go next spring. Didn’t ask about food, or much of anything, except for weapons, but being lawful citizens all ours are locked up in the gun safes for the winter. We will have to depend on an overdose of pepper spray for our personal safety should that become an issue. We had a beautiful sunrise over the Sweetgrass Hills to welcome us to Montana,

and then it was off down I-15 for a long day of driving. What with the weather being good we were able to stay right on the Interstate and not take the Whitehall cut-off that avoids the high country north of Butte when there is inclement weather. We fueled up in Great Falls, Dillon and here at Fort Hall, Idaho where we are enjoying the hospitality of the Shoshone-Bannock people in their RV Park for the night. They have a nice facility here and although we usually find a spot to boondock somewhere enroute it was a long day on the road and probably not worth wandering around to save a few bucks.

Well That's a Wrap

and we are off on another adventure. We came scampering home from the American SW about 43 months ago, we were running from a virus and here we are almost four years later and it still hasn’t caught either of us. We crossed the border after a run north that was almost surreal, the only vehicles on the road from Salt Lake City north were packing Canadian license plates and I hope all those folks fared as well over the intervening years as we did. Life brought us some ups and downs but all in all it was OK. We had a pretty good summer at Dogpound North this year and concluded that we should do what we could to extend it. After scrambling around the past week or two getting ourselves and the rig ready we were packed and ready to roll late this morning. We wandered down to Milk River and are holed up in the local campground here for the night and will cross the Medicine Line first thing tomorrow morning. It seems that we are not the only folks running for a land south of Winter as this spot is chuck full of RV's. The weather is great today and predicted to be good for the next few days so that should give us the option of meandering southward in a more relaxed fashion than our usually pell mell race for someplace below the Frost Line. We left home today with water onboard not antifreeze so that is a good sign. It is just a 4 or 5 hour leisurely drive from DPN to here, so we are breaking in Brenda slowly. Tomorrow I expect we will cross early, and then make tracks across Montana, looking for a nice spot to pull over for the night. Not exactly sure where we will be tomorrow, and the day after that is a long, long, long way in the future for an RV adventure so time will tell where we end up and if I get my fingers in gear maybe I will share it with you folks.

Since this blog was really active the whole world has migrated from these written epistles to video logs and I can’t convince Brenda that she should be packing a camera and narrating every part of our adventure so you folks will just have to settle for this old fashioned form of journaling.

Well here we are in what is rapidly becoming the end of September. We have been busy around Dogpound North with a bunch of stuff that I won't bore you with here, but rest assured I have been putting the miles on the last month or so. We spent a few days up around the Buffalo Creek Ranch and then down to the J4 at Alliance for a visit with some friends. Once that was all done we figured we probably need to head west and spend some time with our friends on the Island. We took three days to get there, time slows us all I guess. But we did stop for a visit with my cousin, Wally, in Chilliwack, overnighted in North Vancouver and caught up with Heather's world travels before jumping on the boat to find a spot to hole up in on a beach south of Nanaimo. We had a great time visiting with old friends John & Gina Odo. Brenda and them have been friends for a long time beginning in what is a fondly remembered misspent youth.

And we even managed to fit in a lunch with Croft a blogger/RV'er who calls Campbell River home, and Don and Angela Ritter some folks we usually see in Yuma, Arizona where they hole up during the gray months of a Vancouver Island winter.

Then it was time to head back through the Rockies to our Alberta home. It is a beautiful drive this time of year, but unlike the drive out we only lingered a little on the way back so it was just a day and a half affair. Since getting back we have been busy, the trailer is in Red Deer getting a new Goosebox installed, and I have been running the roads between Rocky (Lacey) and Chestermere (Becky) getting in some visiting and helping them with a couple of things along the way. Today Brenda is hard at it turning our apple harvest into pie filling that will be much appreciated sometime this winter. Me, I am just sitting here supervising that operation and contemplating heading south in a few weeks.

Summer Musings

If you came for the pictures I will let you down easy. No cool pics here, but I did think I needed to catch up on what has been happening here at Dogpound North. Since my last update in June we have been doing some mechanical upgrades around the place. Started off with installing a new heating plant. The old one has served us well, but it was put in when we built the house 40 years and was probably state of the art back then, but the art of heating a house has changed significantly over the past four decades. The old natural gas furnace was about 60% efficient and back in the day that was pretty good and gas was cheap and plentiful in those days as well. Well in the intervening decades gas has become more plentiful and not much more expensive, but the wisdom of our government up here in this place we affectionately call "the land north of summer" has made burning gas a much more expensive proposition what with their version of a revenue generating tax they claim is doing a wonderful job of changing the climate here on this planet. Call me a skeptic but I think the facts are actually a little different. Canada is responsible for about 1.6% of the total green house gas emissions on this third rock from the sun. So in reality we could shut off the heat, close the roads and all begin succumbing to hypothermia here in the Great White North and it wouldn't make a whisper of a difference to the global situation. But all that said the point of the story is we are doing our part with this new furnace. It has an efficiency rating of 97%, but it is still burning that good Canadian Natural Gas. The pointed heads in our capital would have liked us to go with some kind of heat pump, but those folks haven't figured out that once it gets down much below zero there is precious little heat to pump in Canada's frozen north. But wait, that's not all. Our home was built in the early 1980's and used the best of the best when it was designed and built, my Dad didn't do anything halfway and this house wasn't going to be where he started. The walls are thicker than usual for that time, and the windows were amongst the best available at that time, but again time takes a toll on all of us, even windows so we ordered new windows, top to bottom, last February and in the middle of July a crew of guys came by and installed 23 super duper triple glazed gas filled windows and a matching pair of patio doors. Amazing what two Ukrainian boys, one who has been here for a decade or more and the other who is just new to the country could do in a short five days of work. They did a great job and although we can't tell what impact the new glass will have on the heat situation this winter, we sure have noticed that these new windows keep the house a lot cooler in the summer, without us even having to pull the blinds. I will drop a couple of photos of the during and after of the window installation in somewhere here.

While the windows were being installed we packed our stuff and spent that time living in the RV across the yard so that the crew didn't have to have us mucking about in their way, and could leave their tools, etc. in the house. They did a great job of cleaning up after themselves and other than those stickers on the windows left nothing behind. The new windows are great but anyone who knows Brenda knows those stickers have been driving her OCD crazy. I have a guy coming tomorrow to do an Energy Audit on the house and once he is gone so are the stickers. Now that all the reno work is done we are hoping to drag our RV out and see a little country for some time this month. It is time to take my Mom home to Auburndale where she will join my Dad, and brothers in her family plot, along with her folks and her brother. Hoping along the way to visit some friends who ranch up in that country as well, and then it is home to daydream about leaving all this energy efficient stuff here to look after itself this upcoming winter. Not entirely sure where we will spend the winter months this year but we are sure hoping the butter stays soft wherever it is. This Blogger app is long past its best before date so rest assured I had paragraphs and sentences in the version I typed, but it appears that is beyond the capabilities of this program now. If anyone has a better way to do this on a Mac machine, let me know and maybe, just maybe I will get more updates done.