Speculator, NY

ESP Brewing Company in the morning

Another travel day. I pick out a New York state campground, Moffitt Beach Campground, in the Adirondacks near the town of Speculator which we have traveled through numerous times.  We are on RT90 most of the day. I had no planned stops except for the campground.

Mañana, that is our boat name

At one point in the afternoon I need a rest stop and we stop at the Erie Canal Heritage Park on the interstate. Must have passed this a few times without noticing it.  Small museum and the remaining stone work of one of the locks from the second iteration of the canal opened in 1853. The original canal build around 1820 was only 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide. 

Lock 51

Lock 51 back in the day

In Rome NY we get off the interstate and head through the Adirondacks. We stop at Moffitt Beach Campground and I naively assume at the end of summer it won’t be too full. Labor day weekend, wrong. 250 sites and I am told they are full. The employee at the entrance tells me of another place close by where we can boondock, when one of the women in the office yells they have one site available for tonight. Site 238. It is on the far end of the park and right on the lake. A very nice site on the water and near the bathrooms and showers. Man, I live a charmed life sometimes.

Campsite #238

Can hear loons in the distance

Our last night traveling on our Alaska road trip. We will be home tomorrow around noontime.

Amherst, Ohio

We get up, make coffee and head out. We stop for breakfast at Panera Bread. Our one tourist stop today is at Indiana Dunes National Park.  We stopped here about 13 years ago when it was called Indiana  Dunes National Lakeshore. In 2019 it became the 61st National Park, so of course we had to stop to update the Park stamp in Linda’s Park Passport book.

Hiking up Mt Baldy in 2012

Top of Mt Baldy in 2012

We also stop by Mt Baldy which is a very tall sand dune, part of the state park. They no longer allow tourists to hike up the dune.  Too much foot traffic is contributing to the movement of the dune. It is starting to over take the adjacent parking lot.

We have lunch in the parking lot and I figure out where we are going to stay tonight.  I find and interesting Brew Pub on Harvest Host in Amherst Ohio. They also have a good food selection, may Brew Pubs do not. We meet another RV couple heading west for a couple weeks and have and enjoyable conversation with them.

Rockford, Illinois

Sunny start to the day

Today is a traveling day, no tourist stops. We drive east on RT90, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. I had considered  returning north of Lake Michigan over the upper Peninsula the way we came out, to avoid the midwest heatwave. Since the temperatures were dropping back to seasonable, south of the Lake, we stay with the southern route home.

Quickly run into fog, nice for driving east into the sun

We stay at Rock Cut State Park in Rockford, a very large state park. Unfortunately the website address is the administrative offices, which are on the opposite side of the park from the Campground, causing us to drive a couple extra miles to get to the correct entrance.  Inexpensive and we have power. Still a little warm and we run the AC for an hour or so.

Adrian, MN

We get up at 6:30.  Linda heads immediately to the bathroom/showers nearest us and I head over a few minutes later. I walk into the men's bathroom and hear someone is in one of the two showers.  I thought it was odd for anyone being there so early in the morning, with so few customers. Then I notice a familiar hair dryer on the counter.  In a low voice I say “Linda” and she answers. I tell her she is in the men’s bathroom. No one else around to care. I hop into the other shower. My wife isn’t the most alert when she first wakes up in the morning.

Dear when you see these you are not in the Ladies bathroom 🙂

To get on the road faster, we stop 20 minutes down the road at a McDonalds in Sturgis for breakfast.  For our mid-morning break wew stop at Wall Drug. 13 years ago when we drove west on RT90 there were signs for Wall Drug starting more than 300 miles to the east.  Not too many signs for Wall Drug coming from the west. I guess they think tourists only drive in one direction. We stop for a brief visit, I think we are good for another 13 years or more. Wall Drug is kind of like the “South of the Border” for western bound tourists.

Wall Drug

Lots of Highway reconstruction on sections of RT90, reducing traffic to one lane in each direction. Much of the rebuild is cement. Much of what we have been driving on today is cement and very smooth, not the usual click click of the expansion joints. The construction is called “Continuously reinforced concrete pavement” (CRCP). There are reinforcement bars in the cement, which eliminates the expansion joints.

Sacagawea Statue over the Missouri river

 We cross from South Dakota into Minnesota a Sioux Falls.   We stop 30 minutes later at the farming community of Adrain and stay at the Municipal RV Park. Very nice, large facility and relatively inexpensive. Not very many transient RV’s here today.  Although Linda does find her last of the 50 state license plates she has been searching for, Maryland.  She stops to tell them they are the last state in her 3 month search.

Spearfish, SD

 

We had an after sunset thunder storm come through last night, with lots of wind following for a couple hours. The RV was bouncing around a bit. This morning was clear and calm.

Didn’t get a chance to go for a swim

Campground hosts, watching us leave

Our goal today is to head east on RT90 and visit The Devils Tower National Monument.

After an hour or so on RT90 we come upon blackened grass lands that eventually go on for miles on both sides of the highway. Even the pavement shoulder was blackened in places. A quick internet search tells us this was from the “House Draw fire” three days ago that was started by lightning and burned 163,000 acres and was 40 miles long.  It closed RT90. No one was injured.  Fences were destroyed, posts burned, barbed wire on the ground.

House Draw Fire

Red stripe across the highway is airdropped fire retardant

By noontime we arrive at Devils Tower. Since it is the end of the summer season it is not too crowded. Hate to think what it was like a couple weeks ago with Surgis. As we start to leave a line of thunderstorms is approaching the area. 

Linda and friend

Not too close

We head to Spearfish, South Dakota in the Black hills to stay at a large RV Park, Chris Camp. Lots of sites, but mostly empty. With two swimming pools I assume it gets lots of families with kids at the height of summer. Today it is very quiet. 

Buffalo, WY

We get up early to drive back into Cooke for breakfast, but find only one “restaurant” open. Even though this town has a number of hotels/motels, apparently you can only get lunch and dinner. We stop at a Cafe, the only place open.  We get coffee, but are told they will not have breakfast sandwiches until 8:00 when more help arrives and we can order then. We get a pastry and sit down with our coffee to wait and use their WiFi to get the weather forecast. There is no cell service in this town. 8 guys walk in and order sandwiches and then another 10 or so people walk in and do the same. We said the hell with it and left.

As we start up the road to the Beartooth highway we see free range cows on both sides of the road. And like yesterday with the Buffalo we have to wait for one group to cross the road.  The drive over the Beartooth is quite impressive. Miles and miles of it above the tree line in alpine tundra. Temperature gets down to 42 degrees. the campground host last night said snow was forecast up here tonight.

Top of the World

We stop so I could take some photos of Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area. As the name says it is only open in the summer, but they did not get much snow last winter so it was not even open last June. It is a bowl that fills with snow blowing over the ridge, much like Tuckerman's Ravine in New Hampshire.  They run a T-bar here. I don’t know what would be scarier skiing down or riding the T-bar up. Its all diamond or double diamond skiing.

We get to Red Lodge and have a late breakfast at Marli’s, where we had breakfast last June with Scott Luria, my retired doctor, that was bicycling touring last June, starting in Vancouver, CA.

Marli’s, regulars

Stop at Billings, Costco for gas and a nap, as Linda goes shopping.

We have slowed our eastern progress just enough for the high temperatures in the plains to moderate. I would like to go to the Devils Tower National Monument and Linda would like to go to the Badlands. It had been too hot, but might be OK by the time we get there, now.

Tonight we stop at Mikesell-Potts Recreation Area County Park Campground on Lake De Smet. What a great find. We have a site right on the water, $15 night and we can see the cell tower from here.

Yellowstone, Cooke

East of Butte we get off RT90 and head to Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park.  I had considered staying at the campground there but assumed they would be full. Turns out not to be the case. The campground is in the valley, but it is a couple mile drive up the mountain to the cave. We were able to get the last two spots on the 10:30 tour.

The trail to the mouth of the cave is a 300 foot rise and a 1 mile hike. It is getting rather warm, so I am looking forward to getting into the 48 degree cave. Well, it was a 2-½ hour tour and fairly strenuous for a commercial cave. 600 steps, 500 down and 100 up. Very interesting, very tight in places, even had to slide down on our butts in places to fit through.  Glad I wore a hat, saved some head banging.

Hike to Cave

Candle light, used in tours 100 years ago

These guys really need haircuts

Bats

We decide to have lunch at the Cafe there and split a BLT on toasted sourdough bread, best one we have ever had. Linda makes a point of letting the cook know. A state park Cafe, what a surprise.

We had a BLT recently at a road house type restaurant in Alaska and we received two slices of wonder bread untoasted with a strip of bacon and some lettuce. It was so bad it was funny. 

My plans were to drive to the north entrance of Yellowstone and drive out the northeast entrance and boondock for the night just outside the park.  Our plans for the next day is to drive the Beartooth highway to Red Lodge the next day. We tried to drive in the opposite direction back in June, but it was going to be closed, because it was going to snow that night. We did drive up part way that day before until it started snowing in the afternoon.

We got to see many herds of buffalo driving through northern Yellowstone late in the day. Even had to wait for one herd to cross the road in front of us.

Buffalo at rest

Fox out for an evening stroll

We leave Yellowstone and drive through Cooke, the town just outside the entrance.  We find a National Forest Campground with lots of vacant sites. With our Senior Pass its only $10, what a deal.