Homeward Bound

According to the odometers, we've put 9,602 miles on the motor home and 3,842 miles on the Jeep since July 10 for a total of 13,444 miles through 28 states and 2 Canadian Provinces. We're 108 miles from home and we'll have had 88 days away. A record for us. This will be the last blog for this trip. Thanks, everyone for tuning in and for your comments along the way.

We left South Dakota on Hwy 16 into Wyoming where we picked up Hwy 85 South to I-25 and on toward Fort Collins, Colorado. Nice highways with lots of color.

Stopped at a KOA in Wellington just short of Ft. Collins and got a load of wash done. Imagine settling into a nice camp area and finding out later that next door was a feed lot for cattle. You know the ones...you pass them on the highway and quickly roll up your windows before the stench can fill your car. WELL, there wasn't a feed lot, but just after opening the windows in the RV to let in some cool evening air, it hit us. A blast of the most putrid air filled the park and we couldn't close the windows fast enough! It smelled like a cross between a feedlot and a pig sty full of animal urine! According to the park manager, the farmer next to the park decided to chop up the silage at his farm that evening and the smell came in a dust cloud over the park. There was almost no place to get away from the smell. Luckily, for me, the bedroom had the least smell and I closed myself in for the evening. I don't know how Bruce could stand it...maybe the football game on TV distracted him from it. Fortunately the smell was gone by morning and we didn't need the AC over night as that would have just brought more of it inside.

We left that park and headed toward Denver and then west through Boulder, to Hwy 70, Vail, and Avon to Grand Junction. This is the most beautiful time of year to drive this part of Hwy 70 and it appears that we were driving this same route (in reverse) three years ago in October on our trip out to DC.  The canyons are quite steep with elevations up to 14,000 ft along the White River and eventually the Colorado River. Beautiful homes and ski slopes fill the hillsides among the fall colors of Aspen and Evergreens.

This house looked like a space ship.

This highway is very steep...low gear all the way down.

The highway through Glenwood Canyon.

Grand Junction RV park.

This is the eastern edge of the San Rafael Reef in Southern Utah.

Beautiful formations like in Monument Valley.

Our next stop was just before Nevada in the town of Delta, Utah. Not much to this town and the RV park wasn't anything to write home about. We decided to drive on through Nevada to Sparks and spend a couple of days winding down before the last short leg home.

A shoe tree along the highway. These are always interesting. This one was just west of the town of Hinckley, UT.

The long, long road across Southern Utah and...

...into Nevada and the Pacific Standard Time Zone

Surprisingly, we saw several cross-country bicyclists, some solo. Granted there's not much traffic out here, but it's a long way between any kind of services.

'The Loneliest Road in America'.

Today we plan on doing some shopping at Costco to restock the homefront and having a nice dinner out. Started out with the Jeep battery going south on us so had to take time to replace it. Guess, considering all the places we've been on this trip, it could have happened at a less convenient place and time.