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Day 18 - Craters Of The Moon - Wed. July 2nd, 2025

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 Last evening, I took the boys to the trout pond we found the night before and they quickly caught a few. Liz took the girls to the nearby river to splash around a bit. Wednesday was another travel day for us, and we prepared to bid Idaho goodbye. We visited the complimentary dump station in Ketchum, which was provided by an RV grant from Uncle Sam. I haven’t written much about the nuts and bolts of this type of thing, but the importance of a suitable dump station cannot be understated. While all are similar, they are almost never created equal. Some have faulty hose nozzles. Others have short hoses that barely reach the inflow/outflow. Some have wonderful spring extention arms that provide for a gravity assisted downward flow of water through the hose. It’s the little things. The best dump stations are the free ones, and we were happy to find one in Hailey. Since there was no-one lined up behind us, we all took showers and refreshed ourselves for the day. While the rest of the fam...
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Day 17 - Andrew Journeys To The Mountaintop - July 1st, 2025

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 Andrew woke up this morning shortly after dawn and scaled the mountain out behind our camper. Roughly 1100 feet above the valley floor of Taylor Canyon, a small rocky peak stands above the pine and meadow slope descending from it. It was here that Andrew stood, weary after battling an incline much steeper than the ones he was used to back in Ohio. A grueling two hour journey, his triumphal ascension was accompanied with a bit of soul-searching, as he contemplated the possibility that his many admirers had overestimated his physical prowess. Finally at the summit, he wiped just a single bead of sweat from his formidable brow. Our hero captured the moment through the wonder of color photography. My, what a sight. Far below, in the lower right of the next photo, behold! A single white dot that is our camper.
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Bonus Video - Dust-nado

One thing you see a lot throughout the west are dust tornados. I think they are called Dust Devils? This is one of the biggest I’ve seen.
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Day 16 - Found some more trout! - Monday, June 30th 2025

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After all the travel this past weekend, we had a bit of a low-key day today, hanging out around the camper. I worked quite a bit and we tried as best we could to beat the heat. It’s not nearly as bad as the desert was, but 84 degrees in the sun still warmed up the RV pretty good.  Liz found a laundry mat that doubled as a dog wash, so she took our increasingly dusty Great Pyrenees dog Salem for a bath to reset his coat to white again. After dinner, we wanted to explore where the dirt road next to us went, so we piled in the van. We soon found a little park further up the canyon with a little trout pond that seemed to be very well stocked. That set off the kids to begging to go back and get the poles, but I wanted to find some worms first so we made a quick trip into Ketchum. The Big Wood River flows by the road there so we made a quick stop to check it out. Finding it too wide and fast for the kids to fish, we grabbed the worms and headed back to the pond. It was a bit like catchin...
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Day 15 - Shoshone Falls - Sun, June 29, 2025

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 After leaving Sequoia around 1 pm yesterday, we stopped briefly in Fresno for groceries, then began the long haul toward Idaho. We called it a night when we got to the Donner Pass eastbound I-80 rest stop around 9:30 pm.  The actual Donner Pass site where the legendary expedition ended tragically is a few miles south of this, and while it would have been interesting to see the site in person, it will have to wait until next time. The rest stop is infamous in and of itself, as my Google sleuthing uncovered a creepy ghost story on Reddit about the restrooms there. Thankfully, we slept peacefully with no ghosts or creepy people disturbing us, and shortly after dawn, continued northeast on I-80.  Before we continue, I pulled this winter photo of the Donner rest stop from Google. This mountain range is no joke. Take a look at the height of that snow!  The interstate took us out of the mountains and into the desert yet again, as we passed Reno, Nevada. We soon passed Lov...
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