Tag: Airstream

Adventures from Utah, Colorado, and Kansas

~ Wandering Cindi ~ Leave a comment

This post will cover all of our October travels. I am All of my Alaska posts put me a few weeks behind on our travels.

LZJ Ranch’s Hiawatha Hideout outside of Price, Utah, was our first time at a Hipcamp. Hipcamp is a camping version of Airbnb. Private property owners offer a variety of campsites for people to stay at. This one did not disappoint. Our site sat near old stone buildings from the 1800s and 1920s. There were rock walls from the original homesteaders and building remains from a brothel that was in business in the 1920s.

While Aaron worked, Murphy and I explored the campground. We had the entire area to ourselves for our stay, so Murphy had some freedom from the leash to explore. I also had freedom from holding the leash and was able to catch a few landscape views.

Just before we booked this campsite, I had started reading Pioneer Girl: an Annotated Biography by Laura Ingalls Wilder, annotated and edited by Pamela Smith Hill. This autobiography was not published in Wilder’s lifetime. It gave a more realistic view of her childhood than the series of novels she wrote for children (the Little house on the Prairie series). The reason I mention this is that the campground had old wagons, and that camp in the wild feel, that brought the book more to life as I was taking pictures of the types of conveyances she used in her lifetime.

Here are a few photos of the old buildings…one even had an outdoor shower for those adventurous enough to use it.

We even had three of the ranch’s cows pay us a morning visit.

There were even old tin cans from the 1920’s still in the dirt.

The campground had really cool decorations, and even a roping practice cow.

We had a great stay here in Eastern Utah, but we needed to keep heading east toward Kansas City. We still had to cross the Colorado Rockies before the first snowstorm, which was forecast to happen soon. So we packed it up and hit the road.

This was my first time in Colorado, and I was not disappointed. We spent one night at Rifle Gap State Park, and we both really want to revisit that area again.

It was October, and a big snowfall was headed our way. So we kept heading east to stay ahead of the storm. Neither Aaron or myself wanted to be towing the Airstream in the Rocky Mountains during a snow event. There was already a little bit of snow on the mountains; we did not want to deal with snow on the roads.

Aaron needed to visit another job site outside of Denver. We stopped at our second Hipcamp, this one on a family farm. For whatever reason, I did not take any pictures of our four-day stay there. It was a really nice spot, and the property owners were very friendly. It was an adjustment on the eyes. We were in the plains of Colorado, with no mountains in sight. After Aaron finished his site visits in Colorado, we headed east again. This time, we drove into Kansas. We were closer to our goal of Kansas City, but we still had a couple of days of driving to get there.

As we went down the road, we saw a sign for Salina, Kansas. Aaron’s mom and stepdad had lived in Salina for a while, and his stepdad, Jimmie, was buried there. Jimmie had grown up on the family farm there in Salina. After he passed away, Aaron’s mom, Barbara, moved back to Louisiana. Barbara passed away about seven years ago and chose to be cremated. We have been traveling with a small urn of her ashes with us. We decided to make a detour, pay our respects to Jimmie, and leave the urn with some of Barbara’s ashes there with him. Aaron and I left the cemetery with such happy hearts that they were reunited again after all these years.

Our next stop was in Wakeenee, Kansas, at a Harvest Host. This host was the Prairie Rose Inn, which also had a bar and restaurant. Just across the street was a dog park and a World War II Iwo Jima memorial with an old military jet on display. We parked our home, took Murphy to the dog park, and checked out the memorial and the jet before Aaron and I went inside to grab some dinner.

The shadows on the wall of the sculpture seemed to bring the soldiers to life for me. I am not sure if that was the intention, but it was very powerful to look at.

When we took a seat at the bar to order some food, we saw Space Camper Cosmic IPA. Aaron had to give it a try. He enjoyed the IPA with his dinner while I had a vodka and tonic with mine. The food was great, and so was the service.

After a good night’s sleep, we got back on the interstate and headed to our extended stay outside of Kansas City, Kansas. We were really excited to get there. Our son, Mason, was going to be in Kansas City working with Aaron, which meant we were about to have some family time! We planned to be there throughout November, so we found a Hipcamp that allowed extended stays in Ottowa, Kansas, just outside of Kansas City.

My next blog will cover our November adventures in Kansas with Mason, some horses, and a quick trip to Iowa for Thanksgiving.

Back to Idaho

~ Wandering Cindi ~ Leave a comment

Plans change. A big part of our travels is our ability to adapt to Aaron’s job’s changing needs. We had planned to head east into Wyoming and then south, but he needed to spend time in his company’s office in Fremont, California. So, we headed west out of Montana for one more trip through Idaho, leading us west to California. We decided to check out Massacre Rocks State Park in American Falls, Idaho. That was a really good decision.

Massacre Rocks State Park is situated on part of the Oregon and California Trail, which pioneers used in the 1800’s and early 1900’s to emigrate west to Oregon and California in their covered wagons. This park was named for a fight between the Native American tribe, the Shoshone, and settlers in 1862. The Shoshone lost at least 20 people, and at least 8 people from wagon trains were also killed in this fight. Regardless of its bloody history, the park is beautiful. It sits above the Snake River with hiking trails, a museum, large boulders, and a hilly campground.

There were a lot of rabbits for Murphy to chase. All the boulders and rocks were formed from volcanic eruptions about 14,500 years ago.

Register Rock is part of the state park and is a few miles from the campground and the rest of the park. This spot was a regular stopping point for a night’s or a few days’ rest. Quite a few of the emigrants that stopped here carved their names into a large boulder and other rocks in the area. The rock has a protective shelter built over it and is fenced in so that people do not deface or destroy this piece of American history. I find it amusing that even back then, people were putting graffiti on rocks. It makes me wonder what future generations will think of the graffiti that will be left behind from our age.

The carvings are not easy to make out, and because they sit in a hole in the ground, they are hard to photograph.

The park also has a trail that leads across an interstate to a set of wagon ruts that still exist from the pioneer wagon trains of the past. It was inspiring to see part of the perilous journey thousands took to find/make a better life for themselves. Many, many people died along these trails trying to manifest a better life for themselves and their families. On the flip side of that, the Native Americans who already lived on these lands were displaced, their homes and lands invaded, and lots of bloodshed occurred due to this drive west. Entire cultures were changed and lost. I had lots of conflicting emotions, standing in history, encompassing loss and gain for both sides of the perilous time of wagon trains, Native American and pioneer battles, displacement of tribes, and growth and expansion of American culture. These themes are still controversial today, and I do not want to get into debates, especially on this site.

We also visited the museum on-site in the park. It had a nice display of some fossils found there, a journal of a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, and some recreations of what covered wagon travel looked like.

When our stay was over, we packed it up and started west toward Nevada. While looking at our route, I noticed that we would be passing very close to Shoshone Falls. This waterfall is called the Niagara of the West. So, we decided a short side trip was in order. The falls are controlled by damns, so sometimes their water flow is high, and sometimes it is low. The flow was low the day we went, so we did not witness the full power of the falls. Even with low flow, the falls were beautiful. We also saw a mountain goat just hanging out, watching cars come in and out of the park.

After an hour of taking pictures, we continued heading west into Nevada. We had been to Reno the year before, just for an afternoon of laundry and lunch. So this was to be our first time camping in Nevada and we were looking forward to another new state and experience, but still in a desert environment. Next week will be all about our stay at one of Nevada’s beautiful reservoirs.