The Long Way Home (Part two)

It was the Labor Day weekend and we were back on American soil.  Our exodus from Canada was thru Hells Gate.  Many a traveler will drive 60 miles to avoid that route thru Canada, not sure why.  We had no problems and found it very enjoyable.  The dry desert like conditions were no issue for us at that time of year.

Entering U.S. soil was at Sumas, WA.  It was getting late in the day and I had hoped we'd make Seattle before days end.  We checked a couple of camp grounds and they were full, finally we decided to call it a day and spend the night at a TSA truck stop.  The following day we headed for Walla Walla, WA.  We had spend a sleepless night in Seattle and was eager to find a place to rest and relax for a few days.  Our return to Tennessee would take several weeks as we had a few stops we wanted to make along the way.

The drive from Seattle to Walla Walla was thru the mountains of southeast WA.  It was a dry and barren landscape, lots of apple farms and hills of grapes for wine.  It was funny to see the vast amount of dry lands and to see a strip of greenery, that was the apple farms or the wine groves that dotted the many hillsides.  I was looking at the beautiful hillside wineries and thinking of one of my favorite movies, "A walk in the Clouds".  I could see the characters come to life and it was romantic to imagine their lives as it was played out on the screen. This was wine country and apples as well.

 

 

We made our way to the RV Resort in Walla Walla.  It was a nice park and we would spend several days there, resting up and touring some of the local wineries.  I couldn't get over the statues at the Resort, they were of animals.  We had spent three months in Alaska, the animals we saw were real and very much alive and very aggressive.  To see them in stone was funny, for these would never pose a threat to anyone.  I walked around and snapped a few pictures, but it just wasn't the same as taking pictures of the real McCoys.

 

 

The next several days were spent resting up and taking life a little bit easy.  I had driven a lot of miles from Alaska and I was tired from it all, all I wanted to do was to catch up on a few hours of good rest.  Driving  is something I don't mind doing, I can do it for long hours, but there comes a time when I get the urge to just sit around and enjoy the long days of doing nothing and going nowhere.  That usually doesn't last long with me before I'm ready to see what's around the next corner :)  We did venture downtown Walla Walla, like most towns, not a lot going on there.

Kathie and I made several trips to the local grape growers.  We learned much about wine and how it is grown.  I think Kathie also sampled a lot of the juice of the stompers as they smashed and crushed the grape into the tasty wine.  We made several stops and she always left with more that the usual samples.  Me, I'm a beer drinker and I was only too pleased to let her sample for both of us.  She was having fun and I was happy as I "heard it thru the grapevine".  I would have been happy to just sit and eat my fill of those ripe grapes :)

 

 

 

Finally it was time for us to once again get on the road.  We were driving thru southeast WA and northeast OR.  The golden straw fields lay before us, acres and acres of yellow straw, large piles of the large bales stacked high waiting to be trucked away.  I was thinking of what a rich man  Rumpelstiltskin would have been if only the millers daughter could have spun the straw into gold.  But we know that to be impossible, still if it could have old Rumpel would have owned all of this.

We would make several stop overs before reaching our first destination at Bryce Canyon Nat. Park in UT.  On the way to Bryce we traveled thru the Red Rock Canyon.  We made a lot of stops to take photos and marvel at the beauty of such natural sites.  Our stop at Bryce Canyon revealed the Hoodoo's, large rock formations of lime and granite.  Over the thousands of years the lime has washed away and left the strange rock formations called Hoodoos.  We spend a couple of days among the Hoodoos and even ventured into the valley floor for a closer look.  It was a walk in the extreme heat, down and back up hundreds of feet in evaluation.  By days end we were ready to call it a day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our next stop was Zion National Park in UT.  It was less that a 100 miles from Bryce and the trip was down thru Candy Rock Mountain.  We enjoyed the drive and couldn't help but to notice the rivers and streams looked much like thick chocolate milk.  A lot of rain and the release of the local dam had the waters filled with silt.  The locals complained of the COE releasing the waters and killing the fish.  I didn't see how anything could have lived in all the mud that was washing down stream.

 

 

 

 

Our entry into Zion was by way of route 9, straight thru the park.  The Park road is a state highway, restricted by height and length. Several tunnels are along the route and the Park Service controls them.  The max height is 13' 1" and the max length is 50'.  There is an additional cost for an escort thru the tunnel.  The tunnel is small and an RV must drive thru in the center of the road.  The traffic is controlled and one direction at a time lead by the Park Service.

 

 

 

 

 

While at Zion we couldn't get a spot in the Park CG so we opted to stay a few miles south along the Virgin River, at a nice RV Resort with plenty of everything needed for an enjoyable stay.  I actually extended a day because they provided cable and I could see the first episode of SOA, the final season.  While there we encountered a flash flood due to a seasonal storm that was coming out of Mexico.  It was the first hurricane of the season, washing out I-15 and stranding travelers.  The Virgin River rose 25' and we were endanger of it coming over the burm at the CG.  Route 9 washed out and was covered with rock and mud slides inside Zion.  At it turned out the extra day was needed to await clean up so that we could get out by way of route 9.  Once able to leave we headed for the Grand Canyon.

The entrance into the south rim of the Grand Canyon was by the eastern gate.  I had not entered from this direction before.  We made several stops to take pictures before the darkness fell across the canyons.  The views of the terrain is always changing, clouds, sunshine and the time of day.  The sun was low in the west and a lot of our pictures were dark even with the light still good.  Our stay in the Canyon was only to be overnight.  There were many stops on our route and we still had hundreds of miles yet ahead of us.  We settled into a campground in the town of Tusayan.  It wasn't much for the cost but typical of what you find close to a large attraction such as the Grand Canyon.  We set up our camper and returned to the park, staying as long as we could.  We were surprised when darkness fell and we were unable to see anymore.  That was at 7 PM and we figured it wouldn't get dark until 9 or 10, were we shocked when at 7 PM it was total darkness in the mountains of the canyon.  We should have known that we weren't in Alaska anymore with those long hours of light.

 

We were up early and making ready to get back on the road.  Our stop today would be at the Petrified Forest and the Painted Dessert.  I was in hopes we'd be there around noon and have plenty of time and then on to Albuquerque for the night.  Our arrivals were always met with a time change along our return route.  During our trip up we gained four hours in all.  Now on the way back we had lost two of those hours.  Leaving Alaska we lost an hour and then in Utah we lost another one.  To our benefit Arizona doesn't switch to daylight savings time or any other change.  They are always on the same time zone.  Our arrival into the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert turned out to be an all day event.  Once we got there and started taking pictures we slowed to a crawl.  There was just to much to see to be in a hurry.  We also discovered we were driving part of the famous Route 66.  I expected to see Buz Murdock and Tod Stiles in their light blue 1960 Corvette.  The years and colors of the Corvette changed with the series and the years.  About the only color that wasn't used for the car was red!  We stayed behind the camera lens and before we knew it the day was over.  We made our way as far as Grants NM. before calling it a night.  It was 9-11 and the bridges and overpasses had first responders with their, police cars, fire trucks and EMS units along with large American Flags.  We blew our horn and waved, they were on every overpass over I-40 as we made our way east.  We were 70 miles west of Albuquerque and as far as I could go.  It was already after dark and I was tired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the morning came I was ready to get started again.  It seemed that we still had over 1300 miles to go.  I had planned to be in Mobile, AL. by the 15th of September.  We had to adopt some sort of  schedule if we were to make it.  I didn't have anymore stop offs that I wanted to make.  There was plenty along our route we could have stopped and spent time to see but we had a lot of miles to get to Mobile.  Plans were to spend a week in Mobile visiting with my side of the family, before that would happen we had to first get there.

Our travels thru New Mexico was an adventure like everywhere else we have traveled.  Our stop in Ft Sumner, NM. was unplanned and unscheduled.  We couldn't help but notice the sign at the towns city limits.  The sign read, "A nice town with an ugly past".  As we pulled up to the traffic light at the crossroads we couldn't help but to notice it looked like a ghost town.  The main street consisted of wood framed buildings.  No sign of life, all run down and closed.  We were now on a two lane secondary road and no longer traveling the interstate.  I saw a gas station and convenience store, best stop and get some fuel as it looks like towns aren't that close together and don't offer a lot.  As  we pulled into the gas station I noticed we had a trailer tire that was going flat.  Out of all the miles we had driven to Alaska and the entire summer there and now the long road back  this was our first flat.  I asked Kathie to go into the store and inquire if they had a tire service in town.  I had a spare and a compressor and plug kit, if worse came to worse I could either change or repair it.  As luck would have it, we were in luck.  Two blocks up on the right, we had the tire repaired.  There didn't seem to be a lot in this town with an ugly past.  We discovered that the ugly past was when a sheriff named Pat Garrett shot and killed a kid by the name of William Bonney who's birth name was William Henry McCarty Jr.  That kid is buried in the towns cemetery under a head stone that reads "Billy the Kid".  Three of Billy's friends are also buried in the plot next to him.  Another dark stain on the towns white satin past is that it was the holding area for the Navajo's and Mescalero Apache's.  The Indians were held in internment camps from 1863 to 1868.

Our next stop would be in Clovis, NM.  We were tired and found a nice little campground just off the highway.  It wasn't crowded and we gladly paid the sum of $25.00 for full hook-ups.  The office was unattended and we placed our cash in an envelope and pushed it thru a slot in the office door.  It had been another hard day with hundreds of miles driven on back roads.  We  didn't notice the trains until they became nonstop.  The endless whistles started blowing half a mile before they got to us and stayed on that horn for a half mile after they passed us.  About the time we started to doze off the screeching and clanging of the iron would  scare the crap out of you.  We finally had to resort to cotton balls in our ears and that did little to dull the constant noise.  It was a very sleepless night, the morning never came fast enough.  During my half awake attempt to get our unit ready to roll I discovered thru half open eyes the massive switch yard full of trains that was less than 200 feet from the CG.  How in the world did we miss that?

It was a hard day made worse with the lack of sleep.  The two lane roads were straight and we made good time.  The day was uneventful until we got to Dallas, TX.  GOOD GRIEF what a mess that was.  Road construction everywhere.  It was bumper to bumper traffic and the construction didn't make it any easier.  Our GPS was of no help as it didn't know how to route us thru the detours or rerouting of the traffic flow.  Without warnings our turn came and went, we missed a left turnoff unable to get thru the traffic.  By the time we were thru Dallas I was ready to shoot JR myself.  No way I'd live in a town that crowded.  I was only too glad to get back on the four lane interstate and get the strays out of the stampede and back on the open range.  It was late but I wanted to get away from the confines of road construction and the masses of crazy kamikaze drivers.  We found a nice little CG in Terrell, TX.  We were back on the big road and from this point we'd make good time.  We were on schedule and within 600 miles of Mobile, with two days to get there.

It was the 14th and we would make Mobile by the 15th with ease.  By days end we would have just over 100 miles to Mobile.  We ended our day at Florence MS.  We pulled into a nice little CG ending our day early.  Tomorrow we'd sleep late and take our time getting back on the road, driving three hours to Mobile, AL.

We arrived in Theodore, AL just after lunch.  That was to be our location for a week while we visited and spent time with family.  We had driven about 4200 miles since leaving Alaska.  Our time with stops and stays along the way had taken us about three weeks.  We would rest here for a week and then on to Cleveland, GA.  In our next blog of the Long Way Home I will share our time in Mobile.

 

 

 

Until then.

Dutch & Kathie.

http://whygodutch.blogspot.com