Category: Places

26th July – 26th Aug 2023

We have travelled tens of thousands of miles in Big Dave and the vast majority of those have been outside of Washington, the state where he is registered. When you travel outside of your ‘home’ state licence plates announce to everyone where you are ‘from’ and thus people make conscious or subconscious judgements on the sort of peple you might be. When we have been far flung from Washington a common conversation opener has been “You Folks are a long way from home!” The reality that our home has either been in New Zealand or the UK has changed the course of these conversations somewhat. But now, as we cruised into Washington, we were back with our own and our plates no longer defined us as ‘not being from around here’. Big Dave and Tin Can had come home again.

Home, specifically, is the home of our good friend, Lori. The whole Tin Can Travelling adventure had relied on us having a US home address for our vehicle registrations, insurance and bank account and Lori has been kind enough to provide us with that. She is also incredibly generous with her time, administrative skills, hostessing and being a base for us. It had been 18 months since we had spent Christmas with her in Southern California, so we were excited to be catching up again. Initially we had arranged to be with her for about 5-7 days, but as things turned out we stayed for ten days.

As you know, we had decided that this would be our last trip travelling with Big Dave and Tin Can and had listed them for sale on a well known RV sales site at the end of June. We were in Wyoming and headed back to East Wenatchee, Lori’s home town. Our hope was that we could sell them privately towards the end of this trip – our flights back to the UK are booked for 6th Sept – but we knew that anyone looking to buy a rig was likely to want to get some use out of it this summer. So we were prepared mentally, if not logistically, for the possibility that they might sell quickly and hoping like crazy that we weren’t going to have to try and sell them on consignment with a dealer at the end of the season having left the country. We cast our advert into the wonder-web-world and waited. There wasn’t a mad rush of takers but after about 2 weeks we had an email query from a person in Washington asking when we were expecting to be back there as they would like to check out the set up. End of July, we said. Fine, call when you get here, they said. Where are you based, we asked. East Wenatchee, they replied. Oh. That would be quite handy, we thought, but as they had not asked any other questions or requested any more photos we had no idea how interested they were. So we continued our travels and waited to see if we had any more interest. There were only four other contacts: a lowball offer on the camper that we rejected, a tentative expression of interest from a US friend, a serious chat with the couple who took us out for the day in their jeep in Wyoming and then a scammer, who unsuccessfully tried their luck. So as we rolled back into Washington we contacted our East Wenatchee interested party and arranged for them to come and take a look.

It was great to catch up with Lori and her partner, Paul, but our relaxation was short lived as we only had one day to get Big Dave and Tin Can cleared out and cleaned before the viewing. We started early to try and avoid the worst of the heat, but it was a bit academic really as it took us all day anyway. First the emptying. I knew that we had aquired a lot of stuff in the 6 years of doing these trips, but wow, a monumental amount of clobber came out of that thing! Clothes, coats, shoes, books, bedding, towels, DVDs, pantry items, maps, toys, tools, lotions and potions, electronica and leads, cool bags, a printer, art, memorabilia, coolbags, travel bags, rucksacks, bikes, helmets….and more. It was endless and sweaty work. Finally it was empty (save for the kitchen stuff) and we could clean inside and out. By the end of the day we were tired and hot and had taken over Lori’s garage and basement area with our magnificent collection of detritus. This would all need sorting too. We spent the evening properly catching up with our gracious hosts, Lori and Paul, and Lori’s folks, Rocky and Casey who live just down the road.

Over the course of the past day or two we had made a decision. If our prospective Wenatchee buyers didn’t work out we were going to put the rig up for sale on consignment here and now, and not continue our trip in it. The logistics were just too complicated and uncertain to try and accomplish a private sale whilst on the road. We also didn’t want the stress of trying to sort everything out as our leaving date got closer. So whatever happened with our viewing, we really had already had our last night in the Tin Can. The melancholia could wait. We had a rig to sell! Big Dave and Tin Can were looking spick and span and they were ready for their viewing.

Our prospective buyers arrived later the next day and the guided tour was given. Facilities were demonstrated, storage compartments were opened, the bonnet was lifted, the engine started, nooks and crannies inspected. We liked them and they seemed to like BD & TC. They had been searching for the right rig for two years. This was just the sort of set up they had been looking for. There was just one issue. The rig had to be able to fit into their shed for winter storage. The door of the shed was 12ft tall. Exactly the height to which we had measured BD & TC in the past. Them not fitting was an unspoken deal-breaker. They left promising to call when they had discussed things. The next day they got in touch, said they were keen, and arranged to come back in two days time for a test drive up to their house for a ‘shed-fitting’. We went with them, riding in the back seats which felt very weird. Big Dave performed admirably, effortlessly sailing up the hill to their place. Then it was the moment of truth. As they approached the open doorway of the very splendid, massive shed that they had recently built for their business, it looked like they wouldn’t fit. My heart was sinking but I climbed up onto the roof of Tin Can to get a better view of the air conditioning unit, the highest thing, to watch closely as it inched towards the lintel. It cleared under it with 1 inch/2cm to spare and suddenly, with them safely inside, there was a deal to be done. After some minimal negotiations a price was agreed, hands were shaken and -pending a bank transfer – Big Dave and Tin Can had new owners. We pondered the kismet of connecting with these lovely,drama-free buyers who for two years had been looking for exactly what we had to sell and finding them 5 miles from Lori’s house. The sale had worked out pretty much according to our ‘best case scenario’ and we were very thankful for that.

We spent some time doing a full walk through of all the systems with them and then headed back to Lori’s place. It took a few days for the money to come through and in that time we both spent some quality time with Lori and Paul and also busied ourselves with the task of reducing ‘detritus mountain’ back to the amount of stuff that we could fly home with. This involved creating 7 catagories of things.

1. The rubbish – Easy. This included a lot of stuff that had just worn out or was on its last legs and this was just picked up from the gate by the bin lorry.
2. The stuff to thrift/give to charity – Moderately easy, but did involve quite a lot of laundering of all the bedding and some clothes. Lori gave us a lift to the Goodwill drop off centre that had a very efficient ‘drive thru’ system.
3. The stuff to sell – The bikes. Suprisingly easy. Having done us splendid service and having been hauled backwards and forwards across a continent five times, our bikes were no longer in tip-top condition but had plenty of life left in them. We sold them within 24 hrs of posting them on Facebook Marketplace, did a cash deal in a car park near Lori’s place then walked home.
4. The stuff that was included in the sale – Easy. We left tons of useful stuff in the rig, including our beloved breakfast sandwich maker. It had been a ‘rig warming present’ from Lori & Dean when we set off on our first trip and the ritual of creating and eating breakfast sandwiches on our travels became synonymous with Tin Can Travelling.
5. The stuff to send home – A suitcase of treasures. This was a bit involved. Rather than having to wrangle and pay for a third bag on our flight home we decided to send it ahead. Lori had an old suitcase that she gave us (Thank you Lori!) and we filled it with stuff that we had collected over the years and the extra things and clothes that we knew we wouldn’t need for the next month. I used a company called ‘Send My Bag’ that would collect it from the house here and deliver it to our UK address for $190, which I thought was very reasonable for large case that weighed 28kg/621b. There was just the thorny issue of the paperwork. To be fair, the website made it quite easy, but I had to itemise every item in the bag and assign it a value for the purposes of importation and customs. There were some very strict instructions on how to prepare the bag, what labels to attach to what and where, it was collected two days after I did the online booking and was in the UK within 3 days. It got tied up in customs for another week until they agreed that I didn’t owe any tax on the contents, but ‘Send My Bag’ were great with their customer support and sending snarky emails to get it released. It has now been safely delivered to my parents place and is cluttering up their conservatory.( Thank you Dad & Tina!)
6. The stuff to keep for the rest of our trip but that won’t be flying with us – Easy. We just packed this loosely in shopping bags. It will be jettisoned at the end.
7. The stuff to fly with – Easy. If it doesn’t fit in our usual travel bags it joins catagory 6.

After a few days the money was in our bank account and Big Dave and Tin Can were collected to continue their adventures with their new family. As they pulled away I was suddenly very emotional and won’t be afraid to admit that I shed a few tears. It was the end of an era. Buying them and embarking on these years of Tin Can Travelling had been both the catalyst for, and the fabric of, another whole different way of life for us. They had been our ticket to exploring this amazing country and having a million fantastic moments and experiences along the way. We had learned to live together in a confined space in a state of contented isolation and to appretiate life at a slower, less time-tabled tempo. In short, we had been pandemic ready several years earlier than the rest of the world.

What next?

Well. Tin Can Travels will live on. But on the other side of the pond. Our plans are to get back to the UK in Sept and we will (hopefully) take delivery of our new home on wheels and head to Europe.

Until then we have a USA trip to finish. I am not going to write in detail about these last few weeks as I want to take a bit of a break from writing, and from feeling guilty for not writing, the blog! In summary, we had another few days with Lori and Paul before continuing our travels. We cannot really fully express our immense gratitude to Lori for her seemingly limitless hospitality and generosity. Tin Can Travels would not have been as easy, or maybe not even possible without her help. I also want to acknowledge the equal contribution of Dean, who lives nearer Seattle, in facilitating our existence in the USA. When we started our adventures they were still together and although they are now travelling their seperate roads, our roads have always led us back to them both, their friendship, their wisdom and their homes. (Thank you Both!)

So we rented a car, a Subaru Outback – the chosen vehicle of the Pacific NorthWest and spent just under 2 weeks and another 1000 miles exploring the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. We stayed in Air BnBs and motels and enjoyed the freedom of having a car whilst adjusting to now not being ‘RV travellers’ -a real in shift our sense of identity. Unusually for this part of the world it was hot and we had some amazing beach walks, explored some ‘Twilight’ locations, hiked a hill or two, saw a whale in the shallows, watched a meteor shower, went to a blueberry festival, saw a civil war re-enactment, kayaked, listened to live dub funk, went to a aircraft museum, ate a burger or two and had a beer or three.

After that we flew to Alaska. Why not? We had some time in hand and a few extra dollars in the bank.

Here live our friends Ryan and Sarah who we last saw at their wedding 10 years ago. It was during this trip that we rented a motor home and fell in love with life on the road. So our life choices are partly their fault. Since our last visit they have created two humans and live in a rural hillside idyll overlooking Anchorage in a melange of cats and dogs. They calmly report frequent sightings of moose, lynx and bears in their garden and no walk in the nearby woods happens without a firearm. Summer is tolerated and winter is celebrated. Snow blowers and snowmobiles adorn the driveway, waiting to be pressed back into action. They have an amazing guest ‘wing’ and we made full use of it by staying considerably longer than is polite when you are not family. Ten years of separation dissolved instantly as we reconnected with these marvellous people.

We did take a little side trip to a fishing town called Homer. It is funny how human nature always wants to take you to ‘the end’. A transcontinental road trip ending in Washington state had us wanting to go ‘just a bit further’ to Alaska. When in Anchorage, our side trip took us to the end of the road of the nearby Kenai Peninsula, to Homer, and even then we had to go further and stay at the end of the ‘spit’. Then a boat daytrip took us beyond that to a town called Seldovia that is only accessible by sea or air. Next stop Russia??

We had a delightful 3 nights in an appartment with views of the marina and the mountains beyond. There can’t be too many places in the world where you can stay with a modern kitchen and bathroom, get a good wifi signal, be able to pop out for a beer and fish and chips and see five glaciers from your lounge window. I presume.

As I write this we are still houseguests in Alaska for another 4 days. As is often the case here, summer has ended abruptly and autumn has arrived with a vengence. The wind is blowing and torrential rain comes and goes. In a month there will be snow on the ground. Our hosts are ready for summer to be over. It instills a form of mania as the long days and brief spell of warmer temperatures enforce a compulsion to ‘make the most of it’. They are tired and we are too. It is time for our trip to wind up and for us to head back to the UK. From here we fly back to Seattle and will spend a week with Dean and his partner Jill before we fly on 6th Sept. Whatever jolly things happen with them will have to go unreported as this is where I sign off.

Thank you for reading my blurblings and I look forward to sharing our new adventures with you starting in a month or two.

22nd July – 26th July 2023

Our ‘road-of-the-moment’, the I-90, swept us out of Butte and through Montana and the foothills of the Rockies. This was one of our longest days on the road and we did 240 miles of mostly of gentle downhill until we hit one of our last major climbs of the trip, Lookout Pass. The summit of the pass is very close to the state line and we entered Idaho and our 4th time zone of the trip. Now we were in Pacific time. Like many states Idaho has a panhandle, its jutting up to the North, and the I-90 takes only 73 miles to cross it. We had two stops planned.

Our first stop came at the bottom of the hill, in a town called Wallace. Founded in 1884, Wallace was a very rich town once upon a time and was known as the Silver Capital Of The World. It sat at the hub of Silver Valley which, at it’s peak of production, supplied 21% of the world’s silver. It is also notable as it is the only place in the USA where the whole historic district of the town is on the National Register of Historic Places. This was a brilliant and crafty move by local lawmakers in 1979 to protect the town from the proposed re-building of the highway through this narrow valley. The original plans had the highway carving through the land where the town sits and this would have destroyed many historic buildings and likely killed the town itself. By getting the whole area on the register it was protected from any interference from rebuilding the highway and the whole project had to be revised. Now the highway sails over the town on an overpass and the town survives and thrives.

Our small RV park was very close to town and co-located with a bar and grill. It was the only one, honnest! We arrived on a very hot afternoon, set up camp and decided to stroll into the historic district to see what was going on. A Gay Pride festival – that was what was what was going on. It was a small affair, which was in the ‘Family Fun Day’ stage of proceedings, with stalls and a tiny music stage set up on a closed street in the town centre. We had missed the earlier parade and apparently there was a pub crawl later on in the evening. Despite being the filling in the liberal Pacific NorthWest club sandwich of Washington, Montana and Oregan, Idaho is generally fairly conservative in its leanings. The older chap that checked us into the RV park was a bit bemused by the choice of Wallace for the event, and I suspect that he was not alone in his opinion. It looked like much fun was being had by the Priders and there were a few outlandish outfits to give the locals something to be challenged by.

Our short and sweaty stroll across to the other side of town brought us to a fantastic, unexpected and very welcome discovery: Wallace City Swimming Pool. This looked amazingly inviting, like an oasis in the desert and we quickly nipped back to Tin Can to get our swimmers. Not only was it a well maintained, clean and well staffed facility, but it was also free. FREE! It is funded by charitable donations and grants and has been a part of Wallace life for generations. We spent a very relaxing hour floating about and considering how hot it was, it was remarkably under utilised.

The next day it was forecast to be hot again so we set off reasonably early to do a hike. This was called The Pulaski Tunnel Trail, an uphill route through the forest. The endpoint was the tunnel entrance of an old silver mine that played an important part in saving many lives 123 years ago. In 1910 a combination of severe drought and hurricaine force winds fanned a terrible wildfire known as the Big Blow Up. Over a period of only 2 days and nights this burnt through 3 million acres of virgin forest in this area. Ed Pulaski was a forest ranger who was up in the hills supervising a gang of men when it became obvious that their lives were all in peril from the approaching fire. Using his knowledge of the forest he led his men to the tunnel, the only place they were going to be able to survive the blaze. They made it just in time and he only lost 5 of the 45 men he was leading. He himself suffered burns, smoke inhalation and temporary blindness and was hailed a hero for his actions. Pulaski is also widely credited for inventing the ‘Pulaski’ in 1911. This is a half mattock, half axe firefighting hand tool that most of us would recognise.

The trail itself was about a 4 mile there-and-back hike from the trailhead with the endpoint being the tunnel entrance which was so low key that we nearly missed it completely. We also walked from the campsite to the trailhead, which added another 2 miles each way to our efforts so by the time we got home we were pretty hot, sweaty and tired. Nothing that another FREE loafing session in the pool couldn’t fix though!

It may not surprise you that we did partake in a few beers and a meal at our local hostelry. We would not want to disappoint……

The next day we left Wallace early and did a short backtrack of our steps, climbing back up to the top of Lookout Pass again. Here was the main reason that we had opted to stay in Wallace, its proximity to The Hiawatha Trail. This is a very wonderful fifteen mile long cycle trail that follows an old railway line through the forest, over trestle bridges and through tunnels. Starting in Montana and finishing in Idaho (with their different time zones), it is a private venture so there is a modest fee to ride it, but it was fantastic and well worth the money. A few folk (mostly on e-bikes) cycle it both ways but most people opt to only do the downhill direction and there is an efficient shuttle bus service that returns you from the bottom back up to the top where the car park is. They recommend not to take RVs up there but we ignored the advice and arrived early enough to find a Big D & TinCan sized parking space. The ride starts with a 1.5 mile tunnel. This was cold, wet and of course, very, very dark. Our rented bike lights gave us plenty of visibility and it was a surreal fifteen minutes of a cruising along in the dark, splashing through the muddy puddles in a strange bicycle convoy of riders of mixed abilities and anxiety levels, at this stage of the day all going the same direction as us. The accoustics were amazing and there was a cacophony of screaming, singing, whooping and bike bells. By the time we emerged back into daylight again we were filthy, as was everyone that didn’t have mudguards.

From here it was a glorious, easy, barely-needing-to-peddle downhill with amazing views and lots of places to stop and appretiate it all. We encountered some little friends on the route that were so disconcertingly tame that they completely freaked me out. Chipmunks are usually very skittish but these had obviously learnt that humans have food and some might feed them. They were at every obvious stopping place so we had to be a bit inventive with the location of our mid-morning breakfast picnic.

I decided that the mid-point of a trestle bridge would be perfect and that we would not be bothered by the very insistant critters. Nick, however, has a morbid fear of heights (in certain circumstances, the vagaries of which are a mystery to me) so he wasn’t too happy. Maybe the pleasure of eating an egg and bacon roll whilst experiencing his fear will be of important psychological theraputic benefit. Anyway, we remained chipmunk-free and met one of the volunteer trail wardens who stopped to chat to us. During this interlude another group of 4 stopped and asked us if we were from Conneticut. We said no and asked why they wanted to know. They had found a Conneticut drivers licence on the trail and they were asking everyone thay met, trying to reunite it with its owner. The warden took on the task, and the licence, and the group cycled on. Five minutes later a chap cycled up from the downhill direction and declared that he was the owner of the licence and that he had met the group of 4 who advised him that the warden, who we were still chatting with, had his licence. Bingo! A happy ending to a minor drama, all played out on a trestle bridge. The amusing thing in all this is that Mr R Ford, the licence owner, was a big 6ft 2in Black guy and possibly the photo on his licence might have given a clue who it belonged to. That is sort of the point, after all.

We continued our cycle and after more miles of effortless downhill, great views, a few more short tunnels and scary bridges we sadly reached the bottom of the hill. We waited in line for the first shuttle of the day at 11.45am and squeaked ahead of lots of other people in bigger groups as we were shoe-ins for the last 2 seats. The bus was an old repurposed school bus and it lumbered back up the gravel road, making us sweat with its cornering on hairpins with steep drop-offs. The bus ride only took us to the downhill end of the long tunnel that we started with and the return 1.5 mile trip back through it to the car park was equally dark, wet, muddy, cold and noisy, but now it was busier with two-way traffic. The advantage of having your entire home in the carpark is the ability to change into dry, clean clothes in privacy and put your dirty ones straight into the laundry basket. We returned our rented lights and got back on the road, the ever present I-90. This took us down the hill from Lookout Pass, back past Wallace and along the 50 miles to our last stop on this stage of our adventure, the exotically named Coeur D’Alene.

Coeur D’Alene, pronounced Cor D’Alene (not the french way -this got us some odd looks), and often abbreviated to CDA, is named for the local native tribe that was probably given its french name by Canadian fur trapers. It is a very delightful lakeside city of about 50,000 people and is only about 30 miles from the much larger (450,000 pop), and a smidge less delightful, Washington city of Spokane. Judging by the lakeside real estate prices, the number of big boats in the marina and the selection of shops and eateries on the mainstreet, there is some money here.

Our lakeside camp was just slightly out town and had a reasonable sized ‘beach’. It was sunny and hot again and happily our site had a nice shade tree, which was good because the stiff breeze made deployong our awning unwise. By the time we had set up and hosed the layer of dried mud off off the bikes it was definitely time for a swim, so we donned our swimmers, grabbed our towels and headed to the lake…just in time for the sun to go in. The lake was not what you would describe as warm, but it was tolerably refreshing. Unfortunately once we were in the wind and lack of sun made it too cold to get out. We got chatting to a couple who were comfortably dry and warm as they floated about on their respective kayak and paddleboard and we slowly slipped into the mildly hypothermic body temp range. It had been a long time since I had felt so cold (tunnels excluded). We extracted ourselves from both the conversation and the water and headed home to warm up. Once dried and dressed we were instantly too hot again and we installed ourselves with snacks and drinks under our shady tree. As we watched the world go by,another strolling couple stopped to chat and we got on so well with them that after nearly half an hour of conversation we had provisional plans to go out for dinner with them the following evening.

The next day we spent the morning and early afternoon on admin and doing a few chores like laundry and having confirmed our dinner arrangements with our new friends, we headed into town on our bikes to explore. There was a great cycle lane along the lakeshore that took us from our camp to downtown. It went through the university campus and along an extensive lakefront park with its long city beach and then to the marina. It struck me as being a thoroughly pleasant place to live or to come to study although possibly it might not be so attractive in the middle of winter.We parked the bikes outside the restaurant that we were going to later and strolled around downtown. It was all very classy but not very extensive. This meant that we had overestimated the time our explorations would take and we were left with about 90 minutes to kill before our dinner date. We spent most of this sat in a lakeside bar with a drink, being entertained by watching kids jump off the dock into the water and judging the boaties tying up and coming into the boat ramp . The wind was so brisk that it blew the foam off our beers.

Finally it was dinner time and we met Blaine and Connie at the brew pub as arranged. They are Californian residents that are newly retired, have hit the road on their first long trip in their trailer and are loving it. They had spent the day doing the Hiawatha trail on our recommendation and had come home equally tired happy and filthy. We had a great evening with them and the food was almost incidental to the constant and uninterupted conversation. They were very good company. It was soon nine o’clock and dusk was suddenly upon us and we realised that we had to cycle home before it got too dark. But No! Our new friends had driven to town in their truck and it was a simple thing to throw the bikes in the bed and give us a lift home. Brilliant. We bade our farewells after they dropped us off at our site and although there is a very small chance we might catch up with them in Washington in August, there is a much bigger chance that we will never meet them again. These fleeting friendships are one of the joys of this sort of travel. There is a level of openness and honesty of exchange that one can have with people with which one has no past and an unlikely future.

So this was our second of two nights in Coeur D’Alene and with our next destination being our friend Lori’s place in East Wenatchee in Washington, we realised that there was a possibility that this would be our last night sleeping in the Tin Can. This was too abstract and too emotional to consider at this time, so we didn’t dwell on it too much and slept quite well. The next day took us into Washington state and across an unexpected plateau full of vast swathes of grain. Everywhere you looked there was a combine harvester plodding through the fields, kicking up massive dust clouds and the landscape didn’t change for nearly 150 miles. After a total of 850 continuous miles of cruising up the I-90 we finally parted company with this epic highway and the final 35 miles of our journey into East Wenatchee followed the equally epic Columbia river up its valley and grain gave way to fruit. This area grows masses and masses of cherries, pears and apples and is dubbed the Apple Capital Of The World. Coming back to Washington, and specifically back to Lori feels a bit like coming home. This was where Tin Can Travelling all started and as we know it now, this is where it would come to an end.

17th July – 22nd July 2023

Big Dave settled into his usual rythmn of an effortless 65 mph up the I-90 and soon we had left Wyoming and entered Montana. The Big Sky State. Allegedly. Unfortunately our spectacular views of the surrounding mountain ranges and the famed celestial hugeness was skuppered by wildfire smoke in the air, drifted down from Canada. We would have to use our imaginations. It was still quite impressive though. Our next two night stop was in Billings, a reasonably utilitarian city of about 120,000 people and Montana’s largest. To put that in context, there are 281 larger cities by population in the USA. Near here is the site of the ‘Battle Of Little Bighorn’ and ‘Custer’s Last Stand’, a place that we had visited and toured in 2017. We opted not to stop again as we could guarantee there had been no changes to the historical facts on offer. Our park in Billings was a bit of a celebrity campsite, the original (and flagship) KOA. This is a campsite company that the branding is an unmistakable yellow logo and all offer great quality of amenities and service. This was the first ever and had been going since 1962. Situated on the banks of the Yellowstone River it had a lovely pool and – this was a clincher for us – a complimentary mini golf course. There was going to be a (free) showdown….

Before we installed ourselves we treated Big Dave to an oil change. Due to our clearance being about 12 ft it is hard to find ‘Lube Shops’ that will fit him in with Tin Can on board, but in Billings we found a place. It could accommodate full sized trucks(lorries, my UK friends) and dealt with customers on a first-come-first-served basis. So we joined the very short queue and ate our car picnic whilst he was being dealt with. There was even a loo available in the reception area. Perfect. It doesn’t take much to keep us happy.

I have mentioned before that often we seem to just happen upon interesting events going on in places that we visit. The converse can also be true. Billings was going to be hosting “Montana’s biggest annual balloon festival’ about two days after we left here. Never mind. As a taster of the things that we were going to miss the campsite had arranged for their branded balloon to come to the camp and set up a non-launch display. We attended, we saw, we photographed.

We had plans to cycle the 3-4 miles into Billings downtown whilst we were here to have a look around and yes, you guessed it Eric of Morda, find somewhere for a burger & beer dinner but we didn’t. A combination of the heat, a fridge full of nice food and deciding that we just couldn’t be bothered kept us in camp for both nights. The closer we get to the end of this trip, the less we feel the need to venture out to experience ‘normal’ things on our travels. Our wallets and cholesterol levels thank us too. So we cooked in and spent our first evening chatting to our neighbour, a divorcé called Justin who was travelling by himself. He was a self confessed introvert but we bamboozeled him with conversation anyway.

The mini golf summary of play is: Nick 2- Sara 0. I was well and truly beaten, especially in the second round. I got the yips, bigtime, and I let myself down. There was no excuse for my poor play, despite an early showing with a hole-in-one on my first hole. I’ll get him next time.

Our next stop was a rare ‘one-nighter’ in Bozeman, another place beginning with ‘B’ along the I-90. This was purely a sleeping stop and we had planned to do absolutely nothing. This, retrospectively, was poor planning as we discovered that the city was hosting the Montana State Fair that week, exactly the sort of thing that we usually seek out and base whole itineraries around. We were right there but had left ourselves no time to go to it. We realised quite quickly that pretty much all the other occupants of the RV park were there because of the fair and we had had no idea. No wonder it had been busy when we had booked! Oh well.

Our last stop in Montana was a rare re-visit. Butte. Pronounced bewt, not butt. This was a place that we had previously stopped at in May 2017, a month into our first trip and we had developed a strange affection for this quirky town. It is an ex-mining town and has an enormous decomissioned open-cast mine pit right next to it. The ‘Berkeley Pit’, now an oddly beautiful lake, has filled with toxic water and is now a tourist attraction, along with being an environmental disaster-in-waiting.. When we visited in 2017 the rising toxic water levels had not yet reached the stage where they were running into, and contaminating, the ground water. This was forecast to happen in 2018 and happen it did. They were ready for this and now there is a water decontamination plant that treats the overflowing water so that it does not pose a risk. All is well whilst all is well. Water fowl that land on the lake water mostly die and the tranquillity of the site is only interupted by the bangs of regular bird-scarers.

We had two nights here at the same KOA campsite that we had stayed at last time. It looked a bit different as they had expanded it quite a bit and all the small trees had grown quite a lot in the intervening 6 years. Once we were pitched we looked back at some old photos and worked out that we were one site away from our previous stay. The photos were of me bravely BBQ’ing dressed in jeans and a long sleeved top. This visit it was almost too hot to be outside. On our travels we have only stayed in the same park twice on four occasions. They are a ragtag collection of destinations: North Las Vegas; Duluth, Minnesota; Las Cruces,New Mexico and now Butte, Montana.

On our first evening here we decided to cycle ‘uptown’ for dinner. NOT a burger this time. A chinese meal. Butte is built on a hill that we were staying at the bottom of. Uptown is really downtown, but up the hill. So we got ready to go out for an early dinner then thrashed 2 miles up hill in 30°c in the lowest gears on our bikes. Butte is trying to market itself as a very ‘cycleable’ city by painting cycle lanes on the roads and putting up ‘cycle route’ signs. This is all very admirable, but it doesn’t change the hill. Needless to stay we arrived uptown very hot and sweaty and needed a pre-dinner beer to restore the body temperatures to non-hyperthermic levels.

The chinese restaurant we were headed to is historic, not only in Butte, but the whole country. Opened in 1909 it is the oldest chinese restaurant in America and having changed hands in 1911 it has been run by the same family since then. Called ‘The Pekin Noodle Parlor’ it is possibly the weirdest eatery we have been to for ages. The whole place is painted in orange and most of the tables for 4 are located in curtained booths, leaving a long runway down the centre. The waiting staff thunder up and down this corridor that connects the kitchen with the restaurant, pushing trollies covered in plates of food which clatter about but never a morsel is spilled! Eating here felt more like being in a curtained bay of a busy Emergency Dept. We settled on a ‘banquet for two’ because we couldn’t be bothered to make any decisions about what to order and considering where we were, it wasn’t half bad. (This was our second chinese meal of our Tin Can Travelling, the first being in Lemon, South Dakota in 2017. That one was fully bad, our fault!) Our journey home was a thrilling freewheel down the hill, a much more enjoyable direction of travel.

The next day, falsely informed by a tourist map that there was a good system of trails around the outskirts of the town, we put on our hiking gear, filled up the camelback with water and set off, only to find that the trails were ‘still under construction’ (ie non existant). Basically we were lied to. So dressed for the ‘wilderness’ we converted our hike into an urban ramble and looked moderately out of place as we yomped around Butte. We visited the Berkeley pit again, wandered through the old mining areas and back through the centre of the town. By mid afternoon we had covered about 8 miles in the stinking heat and were very glad to get home for a shower and flake-out. Mad dogs and Englishmen….

Butte is a town of faded glory. The mines brought incredible wealth here in the late 19th C and many of the old buildings tell a tale of the money that was here once upon a time. I suspect that it’s time of gentrification will soon be here as the cheap real estate starts to bring people here again. Watch this space.

7th July – 17th July 2023

Our shortish drive from Lander to Thermopolis took us through the very picturesque Wind River Canyon. This was fairly low level and didn’t have any significant climbing. We had not paid much heed to altitude changes until recent weeks, but the closer we get to the Rockies, the more it is becoming a preoccupation on our journeys. I don’t know why because Big Dave is a strong beast and has hauled his buddy Tin Can up and down many a moutain pass in the past without incident (and yes, I am touching wood and got my fingers crossed as I write this), but grinding up hills is not our favourite thing. Anyway, the middle of Wind River Canyon seemed a suitable spot for our picnic lunch and after stopping at a pullout we jumped the crash barrier and sat on some handy rocks with a good view and a sheer drop into the river below. It was a nice change from a Walmart carpark, with a frisson of danger to boot. A train even chugged past, completing the scenic vista and, sandwiches consumed, we continued to Thermopolis.

As the name might suggest, Thermopolis is home to numerous natural hot springs. The biggest of these, appropriately named ‘The Big Spring’, is claimed to be the biggest mineral hot spring in the World. I am not entirely convinced by this claim as: A) it didn’t look that big. B) There wasn’t any real data as to whether this was based on area/ouput/depth etc. C) This country loves a biggest/tallest/widest/oldest/heaviest claim and is prone to stretching the truth D) A google search for ‘biggest mineral spring in the world’ comes up with several different answers. But despite all that, hot springs is what this town is all about, oh, and dinosaurs. Our small RV park was right in town and only a short bike ride from all the things we wanted to see. We had three nights here which gave us a couple of days of exploring. The adventure started in the only grocery in store in town. Here the dangerous things were sold in a seperate area. So glad that the cigarettes, AMMO and HANDGUNs are not on the main shelves…!

Several of the hot springs, including The Big Spring, are located on the edge of town in what is now a small state park. This has a small free hot pool (with a 30 minute soak per visit limit) and two commercially run hot pool complexes that charge about $15 for a day pass. The park also has a network of walking trails and a small herd of bison. On our first day we cycled to the hot pools in our hiking gear with our pool gear in a bag and left our bag in a locker and the bikes tied up outside.

We picked a trail that was about 3-4 miles around the park and set off in the blazing midday heat. All of our fellow park visitors opted to take the ‘drive-around-the-park-in-an-air-conditioned-vehicle option’ of sightseeing so we had the trails, and the gritty battle for survival, all to ourselves. Our route didn’t take us through the bison pasture enclosure but we did spy several small dark blobs on the horizon that we we assumed were bison not just big cows. We eventually arrived back at the hot pools, hot and sweaty and not really relishing the prospect of immersing our overheated bodies in hot water, but a plan had been made and we were sticking to it. We had chosen the older of the two outfits, a slightly shabby and outdated complex that was the less busy of the two. The other one, newer and shinier, boasted the Super Star 500 : ‘One of the longest water slides in the world’. I’m sure.

We found the coolest of the pools, bought an iced drink each and settled in for some relaxation. Our reverie was interupted by enforced conversation from a local lady. Deeply tanned and about 70 years old, she and her husband had season tickets to the pools and came every day. After about half an hour of her talking with her we were able to tease out the finer complexities of her character and beliefs. These I can sum up in two words: conspiracy theorist. She did not notice that normal two way converstation fell by the wayside when she started mentioning’ the poison injections’ and that ‘the government fabricated the pandemic to control us’ etc. We held our tongues, knowning no debate was possible. Her husband was strangly quiet too. I wonder what he thought about it all?

Eventually we extracted ourselves from the craziness and now that we had cooled down, physically if not intellectually, we managed to sample some of the warmer pools before we called it a day and headed home. That evening we headed to the small brewery in town for the usual cultural experience of beers and a burger. I actually had a ‘french dip’ which, for my non American friends, is a sliced beef and caramelised onion baguette-style sandwich served with a small pot of beefy stock juice that you dip the sandwich in. Bloomin’ delicious! As usual we sat up at the bar and had a very lovely chat with a younger couple who were celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary having gleefully left their kids with the grandparents. There was a tense moment towards the end of the evening as another couple that was sat further down the bar got up to leave and the guy challenged the couple sat next to us on the other side. “Do I know you?” he asked in an aggressive tone “and if I don’t then, why have you been staring at me all night?” . They were flustered and gracefully, although unecessarily, apologetic and he huffed off. No they had not been staring, just facing that way and being normal. He was just being a total a*se. It is exchanges like that that could deteriorate into a bit of pushing and shoving most places in the world, but in this country, and in this state in particular, where apparently everyone is armed (although we have yet to see any evidence), outcomes can potentially be very different.

The next day, we lurched back into the baking heat and cycled across town to the dinosaur museum. This is a fairly epic collection of fossil samples and dinosaur skeletons in what is essentially a big shed. A rancher here found some dinosaur fossils on his land and a rich German fossil enthusiast bought the land, leased the grazing back to the rancher and started excavating specimens. He is partly in it for the science, establishing the museum and a research facility, but it seems that his other significant motivator is money as he sells some of his specimens to the highest bidders at auctions. This annoys the scientists in his team and it sounds like they are resigning in their droves. We did the museum tour then paid a bit extra to have a guided tour of a dig site. A young college student doing a summer job confidently drove a minvan full of us up the hill at moderate speed along a winding gravel road with steep drop-offs. Once we arrived safely at the top he expertly toured us through the dig site, pointing out fossilised footprints of a few different types of dinosaurs, a few in-situ bones and some excavated bones and teeth, giving us lots of geological facts and figures and generally doing an excellent job. Once our brains were full of dinosaur facts and the sun had once again cooked our souls we headed back down the hill and found an icecream kiosk co-located with a mini-golf course. What’s not to love about that combo on a warm day?? Nick won.

Another short hop took us from Thermopolis to Ten Sleep. This tiny settlement at the base of the Big Horn Mountains has an unusual but logical name. It was originally named Sackett, after the Colonel who mapped the area but trappers later named it Ten Sleep after the Indian method of determining distance. The area was ‘ten sleeps’ travelling time from the settlement of Yellowstone and ten sleeps from Fort. Laramie. Simples! We had booked three nights here, which on the face of it was probably two nights too many, but in the end it worked out just perfectly. Our stop was an RV park co-located with a ‘horse hotel’, a camp for riders and their horses who come here to take advantage of all the great rides nearby. Our first day here dawned with a cattle drive. At about 5.30am a gradual increasing volume of mooing got loud enough to wake us and it sounded like there was a massive herd of cattle going right past the park and down the main road through town. We got up to investigate and that is exactly what was happening. The spectacle was entirely enhanced by the fact that actual cowboys on horses we doing the marshalling with their magnificently trained dogs and the sun was just rising over the mountain range. You couldn’t order up this stuff if you offered to pay for it.

Later, during normal Hampson waking hours, we cruised on foot along the short main street through Ten Sleep. This took mere moments. We padded out our adventure by chatting to the lady manning the visitors centre and then stopping for a milkshake at Dirty Sally’s, the general store. Here they served us up a pint of icecream each, barely liquefied enough to suck up a straw and thus be classified a drink. Our busy day continued with doing laundry and we got chatting to our ‘parked behind neighbours’ at the park. Mike and Sarah live full time in a big bus and she is a travelling nurse, currently working at the nearest town half an hour away. They had seen our ‘For Sale’ sign on Tin Can’s rear and expressed an interest, so we talked a bit about his and Big Dave’s attributes and the asking price. During our conversation we discovered that they love going up into the mountains in their Jeep Rubicon and they asked if we would like to go out with them the next day. We thought about it for about 0.4 of a millisecond and heartily accepted.

So the next day dawned, and 6 hours later we were up and about, breakfasted and loaded into a Jeep. We had an amazing trip of about 70 miles over 5 hours cruising up into the hills and navigating the narrow gravel roads that criss-crossed this side of the Big Horn Mountains. None of it was true off-roading, but it felt a like wilderness as we barely saw a single other vehicle or sign of human existance.

There were some free ranging cattle, some beautiful lakes, wildflowers, colourful rock formations and endless epic views. Sarah capped it all by whipping out a box of snacks as we stopped at a particularly amazing view point. To thank them for such an unexpectedly fantastic day we offered to buy them dinner in the form of pizza at the local….yes you guessed it…..brewery!

The Ten Sleep Brewery was about a mile and a half out of town and that evening it was hosting an open mic music night and a pizza van. Sounded like a good combination. We had planned to cycle but happily accepted another Jeep ride. The brewery was located in a magical location up a slight rise and nestled into the base of some craggy red rocks. It was still sunny and hot when we arrived but there was plenty of shade and as the sun dipped behind the rocks it cooled to that perfect warmth where the air feels entirely neutral on your skin. The beer was great (They make an infamous 6% IPA with honey undertones called Speedgoat. Infamous because it apparently gets you drinker than you thunk you are), the pizzas were excellent and the musicians mostly talented. Considering the tiny size of the town (about 270 population) there was quite a crowd. There was a combination of cowboy-hatted locals, RV dwellers and horse hotel types like us and a significant sized gaggle of rock climbers, all sporting their tattoo dawbed, sinewy limbs, female midriffs and manly neon painted nails. I tell you, it’s a thing.

In the morning we bade our farewells to Mike and Sarah, who like the rig but probably aren’t quite in a position to commit to it just yet, and we set off. This morning we were doing our first significant mountain climb, The Powder River Pass over the Big Horn Mountains. This was 5000 ft of climbing and descent over about 45 miles. It had stunning views and we took our time, plodding up to the pass summit at 9666ft. Here we stopped for our breakfast, a picnic of bacon and egg mayonaise buns. A nostalgic nod to our similar boating picnics with friends Lloyd & Laura in NZ. We were thinking of you guys!

The cruise down the hill was punctuated by many signs warning us of STEEP HILLS! 8% SLOPE! CHECK YOUR BRAKES! USE LOW GEAR! EMERGENCY ESCAPE LANE 1000FT! One of the escape lanes that uses a wire system to slow runaway lorries was out of action because it had been used in anger recently and needed repairing. Scarey stuff. We were fine and soon made it down the other side to Buffalo and joined the I-90, the big daddy of all the interstate highways. This road was going to see us all the way back to Washington.

The I-90 runs coast to coast from Seattle to Boston and is the longest interstate at 3021 miles. This seems a long way until I remind all you loyal readers that over the course of our first trip, during the spring/summer/autumn of 2017, we drove from Seattle to Boston, covering 8500 miles. We deviated from the direct route quite a lot, barely using the I-90. Now it was taking us up to our next stop, Sheridan. Our last Wyoming small town.

Where as most towns concentrate on 4th of July celebrations, Sheridan (pop approx 19,000) hangs fire for 10 days, saving its festivities for WYO Rodeo. This is a 5 day fiesta of country fun. There is the annual state rodeo and funfair, a street parade, a fun run, numerous charity events, a pow wow and dancing display by the local native tribe, Crow Nation, and several music events. We had timed our visit to join the fun.

I had pre-entered the fun-run, another 5km jaunt, but for some reason we hadn’t pre-purchased our rodeo tickets. Arriving on Thursday afternoon, our plan was to buy tickets on the gate for the Friday or Saturday rodeos depending on which had the better weather. The hot weather was spawning evening thunderstorms which would reduce the fun of cycling up to the showgrounds and spending the evening outside. Luckily we checked online to look at ticket availability and discovered that Fri & Sat had both sold out and there were very limited tickets available for Thurs. Limited to going that evening we hurriedly tried to buy tickets online but the system got confused and wouldn’t sell them to us. After half an hour we worked out that this was because our billing zip code was not in Wyoming. Now we were looking at having to buy them on the gate before they sold out and the box office opened at 5pm. It was now 4.30pm. We qickly showered and changed into our suitable rodeo attire of jeans, boots and shirts and then embarked on the 20 minutes cycle to the showgrounds. All this would have been easier if it wasn’t still 30 °C and the showgrounds weren’t up a hill. We arrived (fairly sweaty) soon after 5pm and managed to get our tickets just in the nick of time before they all sold out. Now there was only two hours to kill before the rodeo started. There was a funfair, but it was still really hot and sunny and we were hiding in the shade like vampires. We settled for people watching from the shadows under the grandstand with a cold beer or two.

There were several food trucks and a few market stalls selling cowboy hats and Wyoming branded gear. We opted for ‘meat and chips smothered with cheesy sauce’ from a BBQ van for our dinner and finally it was Rodeo Time! Our seats were not the best in the house, as could be expected as they were the last ones sold but at least they were under cover and out of the sun.

The program consisted of team Indian relay races, (one bareback rider, three laps of a track, three horses, crazy changeovers), bareback bucking broncos, (angry horses, ragdoll impersonating, crazy riders), saddled bucking broncos, (equally angry horses, mildly less crazy riders) calf roping, (bewildered baby cows, cowboys with crazy lasso skills), barrel racing, (nimble horses piloted by crazy girls whizzing round obstacles), bull riding, (just plain mega crazy) and the obligatory rodeo clown (entertaining the crowd by making normal people do crazy dancing).

It was very entertaining but we left after about 2 hours, probably only seeing about half of the events. We bailed early for three reasons: 1) our seats were incredibly unconfortable narrow aluminium bleachers with no backs, 2) it was getting dark and we didn’t have any proper lights for the bikes and 3) the sky was starting looking ominously like rain. Our freewheel down the hill was quite the ride and we arrived home just in time to escape a significant downpour.

The next day started with the second of my 5km ‘fun-runs’. This started at the far more civilised time of 8am and there were about 400 people joining me. Despite the altitude being about 1500ft less than my last run in Lander 10 days ago it was much harder. I think this was something to do with the significantly higher temperature (it was already 27°C at 8am) and there was a very cheeky hill in the middle. I staggered round at my tortoise pace, running the second half with a lady called Martha. It turned out she was the person that the rodeo clown had singled out from the crowd the evening before and she had done some epic and manic dancing all whilst being beamed onto the big screen. Respect to her for having no self-consciousness at all!

I managed to finish without expiring, although it was close, and whilst I was still very hot and and sweaty we went for breakfast at an establishment called ‘The Cowboy Cafe’. I was so hot that I even had an iced coffee, an Americanism that I usually have no trouble avoiding. Suitably recharged with eggs and now much cooler we adjourned to our next activity – the town parade. This was far more enthusiastic than the one we had seen in Lander and hiding from the sun in the shade of a tree seemed more appropriate for the occasion than sheltering from rain and getting borderline hypothermia.

We took loads of photos, but these four sum up the parade, and the location, for us.

The local native tribe, Crow Nation, had brought a huge contingent to town and they looked fantastic in all their traditional regalia. After the parade they put on a display of Indian dancing, a slow, rhythmic marching type movement in formation.The women were dressed in colourful long tunics covered with elk teeth. Apparently the numer of elk teeth on a tunic was representative of their family’s prowess as hunters and therefore their status.

All the male dancers had strings of bells attached from their waists to their feet creating a really atmospheric sound, coupled with the singing and drums. It was the best part of the day and by mid afternoon we were ready for home. On our last evening in town we had a rare mediocre meal out. This was mainly due to the service being quite bad, which in this land of tipping, is very unusual. Afterwards we eschewed the live music on the main street in favour of a small locals bar on the way home and the evening was salvaged by meeting Riley, the philosphical bar tender who had a love of retro British comedy and Dillon, the smiliest young man in the universe, who despite a ginger moustashe and mullet, was very cool looking and just a delight to talk to.

We decided that Sheridan was to be elevated in status to One Of The Best Very Cool Small Towns That We Have Visited, although I do appretiate that we were experiencing it on its showcase weekend. It felt like it had a great sense of community, plenty to do and, as I will say yet again, it was a delight to be able to easily cycle about. We were quite sad to be leaving both Sheridan and Wyoming in general. This state, or at least the parts that we visited this time, really captivated us. It was beautiful, wild and we loved the lack of traffic and crowds. The people were incredibly friendly and welcoming but also know they have something special here and hoped that their slice of paradise doesn’t get ‘discovered’ by the masses. So Shhhhhh….don’t spread the word… Wyoming isn’t real….

30th June – 7th July 2023

Fuelled by mince and cabbage stuffed bread pockets from Runza we hit the road and this was a big moment. I was behind the wheel. It’s not that I am not perfectly capable of driving but usually Nick does it all. The difference is that I am also perfectly capable of being a patient, self amusing, relaxed passenger. ‘Nuff said. Today was going to be a slightly longer journey than usual and it seemed a good opportunity for me to get a few hours under my belt and keep the skills fresh. We were leaving Nebraska and heading into Wyoming – a state that we had visited before on our first trip in 2017 but one that we felt that we hadn’t got a good sense of yet. We had a ‘small town tour’ planned, one stop of which was going to coincide with that hallowed day, The Fourth of July.

Wyoming. The last state in the alphabetic list. The tenth largest by area, nearly half of which is federally owned. The second least densly populated, after Alaska, and the state with the fewest inhabitants. Only about 575,000 people live here. It is half ‘high elevation prairie’ on its eastern side, the lowest point being at 3100ft and its western side is made up of the Rocky Mountains and its rangelands. Its highest mountain, Gannett Peak is nearly 14,000ft and its average elevation is 0ver 6000ft. It is the driest and windiest state. Hot in the summer and cold in the winter. The people here are mostly tough, self reliant, conservative, country folk that are used to sorting out their own problems, are in touch with the rythmns of the land, make their own fun, carry guns, and live in tight knit communties. The rest seem to be rock climbers.

We had an amazing drive up onto the plateau, a wild, windswept prairie with nothing except the odd small settlement. The I-25 took us towards Casper, our first stop on the ‘WY Tour’. This road was magical. The views were epic and the traffic light. By the time we arrived in Casper it was pouring with rain and our spirits were moderately dampened, literally and metaphorically, by the apparent grimness of our RV park. It was only about 1.5 miles from town, and a featureless gravel pit full of longterm residents. The rain did stop, we set up, the sun came out, we found a picnic table to commandeer and we were happy again. We soon realised that the park bordered a small nature reserve on the river and there were deer, wild turkeys and rabbits milling around. This slightly made up for the lack of trees and grass.

Casper, population about 60,000, is Wyoming’s second largest city yet still feels like a pioneer town. It was established on the site of Fort Caspar, a military outpost and owes the slightly different spelling of its name to an error when the town’s name was officially registered. A river crossing and trading post for migrating land seekers on the Oregan, Californian and Mormon trails and a nearby oilfield cemented its position as an important town in the area. There are a few museums here, but we didn’t go to any of them. We had had our fill of ‘pioneer and settler history’ recently and they mostly seemed to be located up steep hills. We cycled to town on the very lovely dedicated cycle trail that meandered around the riverside golf course and up into the old part of town. It ended at a newly renovated town plaza that had a ‘splash pad’ and there were plenty of kids (and grown ups) in their swim wear, getting soaked and keeping cool in the heat. We were jealous.

Town was full of old buildings, many restored and re-purposed but also many empty and sad looking, awaiting their revival. Both the theatres were closed but the cinema had been revitalised as a microbrewery. The new entertainment for the masses. The jewel in the retail crown of Casper is ‘Lou Taubert Ranch Outfitters’ which had been selling Western wear in an original 55,000 sq ft historic downtown building for over 100 years. This we had to see. It was cowboy heaven. There were boots, jeans, shirts, belts and hats as far as the eye could see. It’s a great functional style here, in situ, in the rural west, but one has to resist the purchase of said garments if one is an out of country tourist who resides on the English/Welsh border. One sales chap pulled out this beautiful, brown, felt hat (as seen on Yellowstone, the series, he said), carefully set it on my head and showed me a dozen ways to style it. It was lovely and I was tempted until I saw the price tag of $250. He must have seen the look on my face as he then said “You’re not buying this hat are you?” Nope. We retreated.

Next stop: a small kiosk that sold ‘cream sodas’, a delicacy that we had yet to experience. For those that also have not sampled one before, this is a mixture of ice, flavoured syrup, ‘half-and-half’ (a cream/milk combo) and soda water. Terribly delicious, delightful and refreshing whilst sat on a shady street corner in a warm breeze on a hot sunny day, people watching and car judging. A bit more mooching heated us up again and we headed home for a few of hours of downtime before we came back out for beers and a burger. A tried and trusted evening’s entertainment that did not disappoint. The backwards and forwards saw us clock up 13-14 miles on the bikes without even thinking about it. Incidental exercise is king.

The next day the furthest we went was the showers. Some days are just like that. It does amaze me how we are able to pootle around in such a small space and not go mad. It is a dark art that we have been perfecting over the years. We weren’t entirely idle, however, and we did achieve something on this day. We listed Tin Can and Big Dave for sale. Quite a big deal. Tidying and decluttering was done, cleaning happened, photos were taken, blurb was written. They are now officially for sale and who knows if anyone will buy them before we leave in September. Fingers crossed that they sell, but not too soon. Here is the link if you are interested.

https://www.rvtrader.com/listing/2014-Lance-1172+LONG+BED-5026899780

After a few nights here we headed off further in to the high praries of central Wyoming. Destination Lander. Our drive took us across miles and miles of grasslands, mostly divided up into gigantic ranches, dotted with cattle and Pronghorn antelope.

In the middle of nowhere was a massive slab of granite called Independence Rock. We stopped briefly at the co-located rest stop/visitors centre to wring out a kidney each and found out the origin of the name. The settlers left the area of the Missouri River in the East and they trudged across the prairies in their droves, following the Californian, Mormon and Oregon Trails. The emigrants used this rock as an important landmark on their travels, hoping to reach it by Independence day on the 4th July. This meant that they were likely to arrive at their destination in the West before the cold weather of winter arrived. Now we have highways and cars and campers and hotels and rest stops and running water and electricity and we have no idea how hard these people worked for their new lives. Many of them carved their names into the rock itself as a tangible record of their existance in this place at that time. Many of them didn’t survive their journeys. We stopped at a pullout with an overlook called ‘Beaver Rim’ for our picnic lunch and then dropped down into Lander.

Lander. Population 7500, elevation 5300 ft. A much smaller place, basically a main street with surrounding houses. It was previously a place for ‘cowboys and miners’ according to an older, gnarly chap we met at a bar, but now tourism has come to town and I’m not sure he was too impressed with the changes that had brought with it. The ‘interlopers’ are outdoor sporting enthusiasts and mainly rock climbers. Situated at the base of the Wind River Mountains, Lander is very close to Sinks River Canyon, a world class rock climbing area. The climbers are easily distinguishable from the locals. Gathering in loose groups in the town’s biggest bar in the evenings, they are lean, muscled, tanned and tattooed. How can one tell? Because they wear small clothes designed to show off these attributes. Cut away singlets for the boys, crop tops and small shorts for the girls. The beauty asthetic is ‘towseled simplicity’ and for some strange reason many of the boys had neon painted fingernails. They are the surfers of the mountains, travelling and living in small vans, free camping wherever possible. You can see why the average Wyoming bloke is a bit bemused by it all.

We arrived on a hot 3rd of July as the town prepared for the next day’s festivities. The forecast for the next day was not good. Cold and wet weather was predicted. It didn’t seem possible. We found our site on a park only about half a mile from the main street. It wasn’t so much RV park as mobile home park. There is a distinct difference as you might imagine, but it had some nice trees. Just as we were finishing BBQing our dinner the hot sunny weather rapidly deteriorated into a short-lived, rainy gale, chasing us inside and bringing down many small branches from the trees. A few made an ominous clatter as they hit the roof and we had our fingers crossed than no bigger ones decided to make a leap for it, which luckily they didn’t.

The next day dawned and not long after we were up for the first of the day’s planned activities: a 5km fun run that I had entered. I was perfectly fit enough to run 5km back in March, but had done no running since we started the process of packing up the house before we came away. That coupled with the altitude, I didn’t have great expectations of this being much fun. And I’d paid to do it (for charity, of course). It started at 6.30am. This seemed like a very good idea when you know that the temperatures on the 4th of July routinely hit 35 °C (100 °F). Today, bizarrely and most unseasonally, is was going to top out at about 13°C (55°F). At 6.30am it was considerably cooler than that. We made tea and set off to the start on our bikes. After a bit of milling and a weird staggered start that managed to dampen the buzz which is the entire point of the exercise, I was off. Slowly. It was a plod, but I didn’t feel too bad. Except on the hills which were bad. I came in at 32 minutes which is quite good for me, until I realised that the course was only 4.5km long. So not that good! This was the last time that I was warm the whole day.

We nipped back so I could shower and change and after a breakfast at one of the cafes in town we found our spot just before 10am to watch the parade. Now the American public go a little bit loopy for a street parade. There had been lawn chairs saving preferred pavement/sidewalk locations for at least 24 hours and many people arrive with coolers of drinks and snacks and really settle in. The parade itself was ok but even we sensed it was a bit subdued and quiet.

It was cool but everyone got really cold because they had all underdressed, just not being able to quite believe the forecast. The ususally brilliant blue sky was grey and overcast, leaking a fine drizzle every now and then. Being British it didn’t feel unusual for a summer’s day but we got chatting to a rancher/archeologist chap called Todd, a cowboy type who was sporting a fine grey handlebar moustashe and he remarked that this was the worst weather of any 4th of July parade that he could remember. Ever. The locals were all stunned. Staying hydrated and avoiding sunstroke are the usual goals of the day. Not staving off hypothermia. Despite having a few layers on I got really chilly. My exertions probably catching up with me too. As soon as the parade was over we went home, put on our small heater and I crawled into bed fully clothed under 3 blankets. I just couldn’t get warm. It felt ridiculous as we’d run the aircon the day before. I was just about feeling human by about 5pm when we were going to decide whether or not to cycle up through town to go to the rodeo that evening and watch the firework display afterwards, or stay in. Our decision was made for us as the heavens opened and torrential rain began to fall.

Lander has a firework problem. On July 4th, for one day only, from 12pm through to midnight the town relaxes its restriction on private fireworks. This is like taking a group of recovering alcoholics to a bottomless brunch. They go mad en masse, setting off hundreds of thousands of dollars of fireworks consistantly throughout the day and considering that its not even remotely dark until 9.30pm, much of that is in daylight, and they were not deterred by the rain. They just like the bangs. It was mindless and relentless and happens every year apparently. Lots of locals (the non-firework addicted population) leave town to escape the cacophony and madness. We were just hoping a rogue rocket didn’t come our way. At midnight it stopped and we could finally get some sleep. It had been a long day.

The next day it was warm again and we walked the main street, our only purchase being a physical For Sale sign and a black marker pen. It couldn’t hurt to have one taped to the back of Tin Can for the rest of our travels. I spied a music shop too and called in to see if they bought second hand instruments. I have a nice soprano ukulele that I bought on our first trip, when I was a bit keener on playing, and I was starting to think about selling it. The owner of the shop said she’d look at it and I brought it back later. She liked it and a deal was struck that I was happy with. She then confessed that she was going to keep it herself rather than sell it as it completes a set that she owns. Win-win. The spoils of the deal paid for our dinner and drinks at the liveliest bar in town – the one with all the rock climbers. Our usual habit of sitting up at the bar got us chatting to a group of locals including a couple who were about our age and their 30 year old son, a really interesting guy called Zac. He was a native of Shoshone descent and as neither of his parents were native we assume that he had been adopted. He earned his living as a non-contracted softball player, getting picked up by different teams throughout the season and travelling all over the country to play. Nick had seen a sign advertising ‘Speedgoat Rugby’ and was curious. Our new friends informed us that ‘Speedgoat’ is the local name for the Pronghorn antelope and this was the local rugby team, which also had a really cool logo of an antelope’s head. Nick wanted a jersey badly. It transpired that although the shirts are not on general sale they had a nephew and friends who played on the team. A flurry of texts was sent to try and procure an old, unwanted jersey and we waited. Unfortunately is was not to be, but it was a fun exercise.

The trailer that was our neighbour during our stay here provided us with some unsolved intrigue. It was obviouly a long term resident, an older style, relatively small with its curtains permentantly drawn. There seemed to be a constant coming and going of a core six or seven people – ranging in ages from mid twenties to mid forties, – sharing two cars, with several bizzare behaving visitors that came and stayed anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. At any one time there seemed to be at least four of the core group inside with different people staying overnight and any time the door opened we could see a large pile of detritus filling the corridor, further reducing the space inside. At first we were convinced it was a drugs den, but then there just weren’t enough odd comings and goings. In the end we settled on the scenario that it was an overflow space for an extended family who had another place nearby. Whatever was going on in there it must have been snug and cozy, ‘coz a few of them weren’t small people and who knows what the sleeping arrangements were.

On our last day here we heeded the recommendation of several people and took the 10 mile trip up to see Sinks Canyon. Again we just unplugged and headed off without offloading and made the short trip up into the hills. The canyon gets its name from the fact that the river, the Popo Agie, flows down into a cavern and disappears underground, surfacing in a pool about quarter of a mile down the canyon. Dye tests have revealed that the water takes over 2 hours to make this short journey and that far more water surfaces at the ‘Rise’ than enters the ‘Sinks’. It is a mystery as to what happens down there.

Whilst up in the canyon we found an interesting walk up to an impressive set of cascade falls of the river further upstream and this was the first of our walks this trip where we have shared it with a significant number of other people. Even saying that, it wasn’t busy.

So that was Lander. Not seen in its best light, but charming and beautiful nonetheless. Our next journey was reasonably short. Destination Thermopolis.

25th -30 June 2023

If I were to describe the landscape of Nebraska in a few words they would be: gently undulating, mostly corn growing farmland. Great swathes of it. The lack of high ground means no distant views and the wind direction matters. We descended from our loess hill perch, crossed the Missouri River, entered Nebraska and set off westwards, into a stiff headwind. This day was a tiring battle against a Westerly that reduced our fuel economy from terrible (9 mpg) to very terrible (7-8 mpg). We had an ‘Interstate Day’ today, joining the I-80 at Lincon and staying on it until we got near to to our next stop, Grand Island. This approx 140 mile stretch of highway is in a dead straight line, exactly east to west, as if the engineers just drew a line with a ruler and said “Yup. That’s where we’ll put it”.

Grand Island, named for a French fur trappers settlement on the ‘La Grande Isle’ in the nearby Platte River, was orginally touted in the early 1800’s as an alternative capital city for the new country rather than Washington DC. This obviously didn’t happen. Instead, aided by the arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad, it positioned itself as a supply town for those heading west to seek their gold fortunes and to pioneer homesteaders, thus cementing its position as a centre for trade and settlement. Now it has a population of just over 50,000 and is Nebraska’s 4th largest city.

Its chief attraction is the stylish Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer. Named for Leo Stuhr, a local farmer and politician, whose family were early settlers to this area . He donated land, money and artefacts to build the museum which consists of a very stylish and somewhat out of place architect designed building at the centre of a circular island in a circular lake, and a mock-up living history pioneer village made up of many relocated original buildings ‘inhabited’ by period costumed players. It also had an exhibition of historic farm equipment including many steam engines and tractors in a seperate shed.

This had a very elderly chap manning it with the reception desk set up like it was his study desk at home, piled high with papers and magazines. A combination of him being hard of hearing and us being British meant that he couldn’t understand a word we were saying but we had a nice chat nonetheless. We managed to do a quick whip round the exhibits before he shut it for the day at 3pm. Having only opened at 11am, this 4 hours of ‘museum work’ was possibly a perfect distraction from retirement. There were other buildings with exhibits detailing the history and interactions (some may say skirmishes) with members of the local native tribes.

There were some very chatty docents who I think were obviously quite bored and the chap who was demonstrating in the noisy woodworking shop spoke so quietly that we have no idea what he was on about. There was also a small buffalo herd. Interesting factoid: In the 1500s, before the arrival of the white settlers there were approximately 30-60 million bison on the prairies of the continental USA. By 1884 this number had dropped to 325. In total. Now there are approximately 500,000. Here are six of them.

Our camp was located in a lovely town-owned park next door to the museum. It was well maintained and quiet with some much needed shade cast by lots of mature trees. Payment was by stuffing cash into the honesty box and spaces were on a first-come-first served basis. This always gives us a degree of anxiety as we arrive, hoping that the place isn’t choc-a-block, but there were plenty of pitches free. Two nights here gave us a full day at the museum on the middle day and the rest of the time we chilled out in the shade, the Nebraska breezeless summer heat being quite sapping.

The next section of road from here has been billed as one of America’s top ten scenic drives: The Sandhills Journey on Nebraska Highway 2 is 265 miles of single lane road through one of the great widernesses of this country: 19,300 sq miles of grass covered stabilised sand dunes. These were created by the sediment of the Rocky Mountains, ground down by glacial activity and then washout out onto these plains. They are the largest sand dune formations in the Western Hemisphere, and no, I’d never heard of them before either. The soft undulations of the dunes went on as far as the eye could see, but with no high points for a far reaching vista, the photos don’t really do them justice. Back in the day, when the pioneers were granted ownership of 160 acres of homestead land in order to encourage the settlement of the Mid-West they had to rethink the land allowance in this area. The soil quality of this area was so poor that the allowance was increased to 640 acres. One settler remarked that she was glad that the allowance had been increased to 640 acres as now one could starve to death in style. These were hardy people living very tough lives.

We stopped halfway along the route at a National Forest Park called Bessey Recreation Area. This was named for a chap called Charles Bessey, a Nebraskan botany professor who hypothesised that this area had been covered by natural forest in the past and in 1902 he convinced President Roosevelt to set aside 222 sq miles of sandhills to recreate it in a small way. The creation of a tree nursery and many years of hand planting native Ponderosa pines led to this being the largest hand planted forest in the world for a while until the title was lost to a forest in China. In October last year a wildfire called the Bovee fire destroyed over 19,000 acres of forest in this area, destroying one camp and coming perilously close to the camp we were staying in. This camp was very picturesque with the sites slotted between the trees giving some much needed shade. It was mid-week and mostly deserted, the majority of the sites only filling up at week-ends with Nebraskans that come with their ATVs to use the trail network here.

Our two day stay gave us a middle day to do a good hike. This ended up being about 7 miles of reasonably poorly signposted trail through the forest up to a fire lookout tower. Ironically this took us through a big swathe of the fire ravaged land, including the fire tower surrounds. It was beautiful but ugly all at the same time and it was slightly unsettling to imagine what it must have been like to have been staying here when the fire hit and having to evacuate. It was also boiling hot and we were a bit cooked by the time we got home.

Here the scenic highway followed the Middle Loup River, as did the railway line and getting to the recreation area involved a railway crossing. In most areas the trains sound their horns as they approach crossings, even if there are safety barriers deployed, so despite us being IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, the frequent freight trains made their presence known day and night. This is the soundtrack of much of our travels.

After two nights here we hit the road again and the view was all sandhills for the whole journey. They seemed neverending until they ended, which was quite abruptly just before our our next stop in town call Alliance, a classic utilitarian prairie town. Here there was the spectacle of Carhenge.

Like Stonehenge, but made out of cars. The brainchild of a chap who decided to build it and the sort batsh*t crazy thing that puts an otherwise fairly nondescript place on the map. Well on some maps, anyway. We detoured 3 miles to see the marvel. Saw the marvel. Took a few medicore photos of the marvel and left. Most people did exactly the same thing. There was an RV park right next door, but we were booked into a place back on the other side of town. Our place was run by a 80-something year old Woody Harrelson lookalike who had two man-mountain sized sons who ran a lawn mowing business from the same location. We were breaking the rules here and were only staying one night. Our plans for a stroll out to get dinner were skuppered by the weather. The sky started to look very dark and angry and the internet yet again warned us of meterological perils. High winds, flash flooding and possible tornados. I had another calm and relaxed freak-out and sought out our host who was oblivious to the forecast. I enquired as to our ‘options in case of an imminent tornado’. He said we could shelter in the basement of his (on-site) home, which had an external entrance. I got him to show me where the door was, we put away everything that that we had just got out, made sure our go-bag was packed again and kept our eyes on the radar and the updates. In the end, again, it was a reasonably big storm in a teacup. Just a lot of rain and lightning and thunder. As I said my goodbyes and thank yous to Ol’ Woody in the morning he looked at me wryly and asked if we were going to stay any longer to perhaps ‘catch a real storm’ instead of just ‘the bit of rain’ that we’d experienced. This worldly old soul has lived in tornado alley his whole life and can’t quite fathom how terrifying the concept of a twister is to this Euro/NZ gal. The next morning, in lieu of our missed dinner out we stopped at ‘Runza’ for our breakfast. This Nebraskan-centric, Mid-Western darling of a fast food chain is named for its most famous offering, The Runza. This is a German-inspired, seasoned mince and cabbage bread pocket. It has variations and comes with fries. It is not a classic breakfast food but this was our last chance to sample one before we left ‘Runza territory’. We were there as the doors opened at 10am and yes, they are very tasty.

17th June – 25th June 2023

Reminder to subscribers: I’ve still not sorted the issue of the photos not coming through on the automatic email. You can either go directly to the website at tincantravels.net, or follow the link at the bottom of the page.

Many RV people that we meet during the course of our travels drive insane distances in a day in order to get from A to B in the shortest time possible. 12-15 hours on the road can be entirely normal and then they get up early to do it all again the next day. But, as you know, that is not our style. We do have the luxury of time and we also can’t bear to fill up with petrol twice in a day. Tin Can Travels Trip Planner (aka Nick) has done some forward planning so that we are booked into places in Wyoming for the silly season of 4th of July celebrations and another town for their rodeo weekend. Now we had an itinerary in place we knew our timeframe to get across the mid-west and so we commenced our slow and steady plod. The under 2oo mile drive, arrive by 2pm, stay 2 night plan was implemented.

First stop: Mount Vernon, Illinois, is a small town that services I-64 traffic and we stopped at a camp that mainly hosted the aforementioned longhaul driving overnighters. It was just across the road from a great hardware store called Tractor Supply Co. and a short walk from a Walmart Supercenter. Big D and Tin Can needed a proper clean, a few minor things fixing and sorting and some general maintenance so we decided the next day was going to be a work day. We set off to get some supplies. In the heat. On foot. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that. Neither establishment see many customers arrive without the aid of a combustion engine, but the Hampsons like to confuse the locals. The next day, with a storm forcast for mid afternoon, we set to work early. I borrowed a set of tall stepladders from the RV park so we could reach the high bits and we washed, polished, filled paint chips, fixed a chair, lubed the slideouts, trimmed some old putty sealant, removed some tape residue and generally spruced. At about 3pm the sky blackened so we finished up and put everything away about 2 minutes before the rain started. A good day’s work.

The next day we headed off after a tank washout during which I discovered our septic pipe had acquired a hole. Not a big one, but no hole is a good hole in this department. It was not a fixable hole either, so we factored in a visit to an RV store on our onward journey. Its amazing that we have been doing this long enough now that things are starting to wear out. We also needed to replace a broken gutter spout (again) on the front right corner of Tin Can. This is always the one that gets broken or lost as it get caught on low hanging branches en route (I think the Blue Ridge Parkway ate this last one). Of course while we were there we did some window shopping and had a nosy at some new RVs in the sales area. We often wonder how different our travels would have been with a different rig.

We pootled on and arrived in Missouri. Our second stop of the day was in a very elegant town called Fulton. This is noteable for its small but influential private liberal arts college and The National Churchill Museum. Sir Winston Churchill came to this college in March 1946, as the post war, ex-prime minister of the UK, to deliver its annual guest lecture. His invitation was a bold, optomistic move by the college but because a college alum, a military man, was high up in the administration of Harry S Trumans’s government, Truman agreed to endorse the invitation and offered to introduce Churchill. Churchill accepted and thus Fulton, Missouri became the site of one of his greatest speeches and one where he coined the term ‘The Cold War’. This would be bizarre enough, but the museum is housed in a church that was built by Sir Christopher Wren. He designed and rebuilt St Mary The Virgin of Aldermanbury church after it was destroyed in the Great Fire Of London in 1666. Unfortunately the church took a direct hit during the Blitz in 1940 and was ruined. In 1965 the church was purchased by Fulton College in order to create a memorial to Churchill and to commemorate the lecture. The (mostly) pile of rubble was dismantled, transported to Fulton, rebuilt, restored and opened as the museum on the college campus. Interestingly, not long after it was completed, the college’s own chapel collapsed and St Mary’s became the college’s chapel too. (Here’s one I prepared earlier…) The museum was actually really interesting and mapped out Churchill’s life and work, obviously with a focus on the War, in a very informative way. We were impressed.

Our next two night stop was a wooded camp accessed by a 5 mile gravel road. This really undid our days work of cleaning and polishing and the bikes were just a mess. This camp was almost deserted and had a small pool which was great as it was pretty hot on our days here. Apart from the excitement of using our new sewer hose and fitting the gutter spout by standing on a step ladder atop a picnic table, there was not much to report about this place.

Onward! Westwards! In a very straight line through Missouri. The road brought us to the metropolitan area of Kansas City, but our destination was not the city itself – or it’s neighbour across the river, Kansas City , Kansas- instead it was the historic city of Independence on its eastern outskirts. Before we arrived at camp we took a short detour to find a self service car wash place to knock off the dust. This was a quick affair as there were a couple of questionable looking locals hanging out nearby, looking shifty and definitely not entirely devoid of mind altering substances. I guess if they had approached in a threatening manner Nick could have ‘jetwashed’ them to protect me. They probably could have also done with the power shower but it didn’t come to that. Finding ourselves in uncomfortable situations like this during our meanderings is very unusual so we don’t let it bother us too much. Trusting a gut feeling goes a long way. Happily the carwash was in an entirely different part of town from the handsome and historic downtown of Independence which was where we were going.

Our two nights here were in a church-owned town camp only a stone’s throw from the centre of Independence. It was spacious and well maintained and managed by a nice lady with two friendly siamese cats who hung out with her in her office. The land that the park was on had a colourful past. Initially it was the site of an impressive home owned by a business man. After he died, leaving a widow and seven children, his wealthy batchelor brother moved in with the family. A while later, in 1909, he and another couple of family members died in mysterious circumstances and the family physician was the prime suspect. Dr Hyde (yes, really), who had suspiciously recently married one of the daughters of the family, was accused of poisoning them. His motive was deemed to be to reduce the number of heirs of the fortune, thus increasing his own potential share. He was convicted at trial but this verdict was overturned on appeal. His reputation never recovered, he divorced his wife and he maintained his innocence for the rest of his life. Years later the house fell into disrepair, was demolished and the land was finally sold to The Church of The Latter Day Saints. Independence now serves as the World Headquarters of The Community Of Christ, a branch of the LDS church and they have built the most beautiful and crazy looking temple. We cycled up to it, but unfortunately couldn’t get inside for a look around. It is quite magnificent just from the outside though.

The other thing that Independence is noted for is that it was the home town of President Harry S Truman and is now the location of his presidential library and museum. We also paid a visit to this on our bikes, first passing his old home on the way. The museum and library was the first of its kind and its inception and creation was Truman’s retirement project. He had an office here and he, his wife and his daughter, are all buried here. This museum also did a really good job of mapping out his life, both personal and professional, detailing how his presidency encompassed a significant slice of world history and how his character influenced his achievements and legacy. He seemed like a thoroughly decent bloke who did a good job of being president, even if this was thrust upon him unexpectedly. Interestingly the ‘S’ doesn’t stand for anything. His parents gave him the middle initial S to honor and please both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.

It was definitely time for haircuts whilst we were here and on our first evening’s foray into town we happened upon a salon that was still open and called in on the off chance that we could get appointments for the next day. Amazingly, due to a recent cancellation, the answer was yes, and we had back to back bookings for 7pm the next day. We also had a recommendation from the hairdresser for somewhere to go for food and drinks and thus ended up at the local brewery on the main square. Here we sampled a few pints of the local brews, ate a very delicious couple of flatbread pizzas from the co-located food kiosk and listened to the offerings of the ‘open mic music night’. These were pretty much all ‘man-with-a-guitar’ acts and most did a pretty good job. One was questionable. Our haircuts the next day were both very satisfactory and finding ourselves back in town at 8pm we went back to the brewery for another drink. Be silly not to, we reckoned.

We headed north from here and managed to sneak a stay in the very south-west corner of Iowa, a state that we didn’t think that we would get to visit. Iowa has the Missouri River as its entire western border and the Mississippi River as its entire eastern border. A unique situation in the USA. The landscape to get here had been very flat and mostly given over to the growing of corn. We had found a small campsite in Waubonsie State Park. This was situated up on some bluffs, a geological curiosity of this area. The bluffs are called loess hills and are formed by the heaping up of wind blown fine soils over past millenia. There are loess hills all over the world, but only in China are they found higher than in Iowa.

At this camp we met a group of men who were four brothers in their late 50s and early 60s. They were here for their annual family reunion that was happening at one of the park’s big picnic shelters in 2 days time. Their surname was Churchill, which was topical for us. They all lived about an hour up the road in a town called Council Bluffs, all were with their respective wives and were all camping in either an RV or a cabin. They looked nothing alike and spent very little time talking to each other as far as we could see. They did, however, all engage us in many conversations seperately. They were all very pleasant, although the youngest of them, who was also the tallest of them by some considerable margin, was a bit weird. He knocked on our (very much closed and locked) door at 10.30pm at night to give us a present of a crocheted dish washing pad that his wife (who we never clapped eyes on during the entirety of our stay) had made for us. Admittedly our lights were still on, but this is a significant departure from ‘normal and acceptable behaviour’ in any situation, and especially in the RV world. What I thought was “What time do you call this ????? The only valid reasons to knock at night are medical emergency, imminant tornado or a rapidly rising river situation, but otherwise go away and it can wait until morning, you freak. But of course what I said was “Oh, thank you very much, that is very thoughtful“. So very British.

There was a great sunset lookout a short stroll from the campground. The plains to the west of here are so flat that it was like watching a sunset over the ocean, without the blinding reflection off the water. We walked up both nights, beer in hand, and shared it with a photographer chap the first evening and two younger couples the second evening. Both of the couples had driven from the campsite. I swear this was only about 350m away. (About 1000ft for our US friends). One couple even brought their big, bouncy dog in the car, made it sit to watch the sunset, then drove it back again. I despair!

The next day was hot and windless again, as it has been for days now. We waited until late morning so that the temperature had easily reached about 28 °C (82 °C for our US friends) and then set off for a nice long walk. Mad dogs again and all that. It was a beautiful route, mostly shaded through woodland with a short segment in the blazing sun along an open ridge that had that great westerly view. We marveled, as we sweated, about how we had the whole walk to ourselves, not meeting a single other person along our route of about 6 miles, the reality being that everyone else had more sense, of course as the temperature was now about 35°C. (The Americans can work it out).

We survived our exploits and made it home with only mild heat exhaustion and dehydration. Nothing that a cold shower and drinking 3.87 litres (a gallon) of refreshing water couldn’t sort out. The next morning we bade our farewells -seperately – to the band of Churchillian brothers and headed across the Missouri River to Nebraska.

12th June – 17th Jun 2023

A few hours cruising west through Kentucky brought us to the oddly named town of Bowling Green. This city of 80,000 people is the third largest in Kentucky after Louisville and Lexington and is best known as ‘Home of the Corvette’. Production of America’s best loved sports car has happened here since the assembly plant opened in 1981 and it has produced over 1 million of the 1.5 million Corvettes ever made. You can pay to do a factory tour of the plant and there is a museum. So of course we were stopping here. We stayed locally the night prior and headed off to the factory the next morning.

The rules for the tour were simple: wear closed toed, flat shoes and bring nothing with you: no bags, no cameras, no phones. After arriving, walking a considerable distance from the carpark to the entrance and checking in, we were given eye protection and an audio tour receiver and sat in a waiting area. Here a wall of large screens gave us our safety briefing and then our group of about 10 were taken into the factory. This was not a tour from behind glass windows or up on balconies above the action, this was a walking tour of the actual factory floor and it was fantastic. Partly it was interesting because the Corvette is now actually a half decent sports car (after the lows of the 80s/90s & 00s) and it was great to see it take shape from all its various components, but mostly the tour was so good because of the experience of being so up close and personal with a modern factory production line.

The factory has a current target of 94 cars per day and each shift in each zone has its live stats visible on a board. Each car takes about 65 hours to manufacture and this includes the painting and curing of the body panels. The place is an absolute ballet of slowly moving production lines – both floor level and overhead – humans fitting parts, robots fitting parts, robots delivering parts around the floor, humans driving forklifts to deliver parts around the floor. Body panels for each car are sprayed together in the new $450 million paint shop, then after curing are split up and transported to all different corners of the factory to be reunited on the same car at various stages of the build. The computers know which car has which different options and these are all perfectly assigned to each vehicle along the line. The technology was incredible. It was also strangley quiet and no-one needed any hearing protection. There was one amusing analogue safety feature. The corners of the windscreen frames of the cars have a small sharp nubbin on them and the workers were hitting their heads on them as they bent over to fit items into the car’s dashboard area. At great expense, the Chevrolet engineers designed a special cap to clip onto the nubbin, but it kept falling off. The solution? A tennis ball with a cut fits perfectly. The factory gets these as seconds from a tennis ball factory and all are happy. As you might expect, a lot of Corvette owners come to see the factory and the carpark was heaving with shiny, sporty machines and if you have ordered a Corvette you can come and do a VIP tour to see your actual car being made. If you want to come and collect your new car yourself, rather than have it delivered, then you can collect it from the museum site where they do a full handover. All very exciting. We went over to the museum after our tour, saw the things and read the blurb. It was good, but not a patch on the tour. We saw a few of the cars being handed over and then watched this guy drive off in his new pride a joy.

Next stop: Mammoth Caves National Park. Two nights in a quiet camp run by a religious couple where the rules specified: discrete alcohol drinking only and no bare chests or beach wear. This set us up for a visit to the caves on our middle day. We couldn’t be bothered to off load Tin Can for our 8 mile drive to the park’s visitors centre so we just unplugged and all went together. The cave system here is enormous and formed by underground rivers dissolving the soluble limestone. It is the biggest cave system in the world, with over 400 miles of mapped caves. We booked onto a cave tour which took us underground for a 2 hour, 2 mile guided walk with lots of historical facts and figures from our two rangers (who were both called Kelly). I kept my mild claustrophobia at bay and knew that I certainly wouldn’t have been exploring these caves 150 years ago with just an oil lamp and a laissez faire attitude towards safety. No sir.

And onward we rolled to Louisville, Kentucky’s biggest city with a population of approx 630,000. In fact our roost was to be across the Ohio River, in Clarksville, which was actually Indiana. From here it was an easy 3 mile cycle along a riverside path and then over the river on an old railway bridge which has been repurposed as a pedestrian and cycle crossing, then into the riverside park on the Louisville side. This was only a short distance from the heart of the historic downtown of Louisville and several key areas of interest for us: Bourbon, Baseball and Bats.

All bourbon is American. 95% of bourbon is made in Kentucky and 40% of Kentucky bourbon is made in Louisville. This is the heart of the operation! The water here sourced from underground aquifers and is particularly tasty. We had booked onto a tour of a distillery called Angel’s Envy and headed there on the bikes once we had set up camp. (I have said it before and I will say it again…it is such a joy to be able to cycle safely into and around a city!) The tour was very good. All brewing, distilling and bottling happens there on site, with only the barrel maturation happening elsewhere. We had a taster of the rough corn mash beer brew-complete with chewy bits and a proper tasting at the end. I learnt a lot and actually have acquired a taste for bourbon. Well the good stuff, at least.

We obviously had to have a bourbon cocktail at their bar before we left and had to buy a bottle of the brew to take home. Of course! On the way home we stopped on the Indianna side of the river for dinner at a brewery. This had a great view of Louisville and its bridges and served a good burger. It also served us a jug of full strength IPA when we had ordered a lighter, lower alcohol one. That explained why it had tasted so good and why my head was a little fuzzier than expected in the morning. I should sue!!

The next day we hoofed it back across the river again and having parked up the bikes we strolled the historic main street. This is dubbed ‘Bourbon Row’ as many of the distilleries have a presence here. Our strolling took us down to the museum and factory of another famed export of Louisville: The Slugger baseball bat. Another tour was attended and again, we learned stuff. The Slugger bat makes up 15% market share for the MLB. They make about 1.8 million bats annually, 3000 of which are made in the factory here. That was suprising to us as the factory seemed to be awfully quiet and unproductive whilst we were looking round. After the tour we both got a free ‘mini bat’ which are too small to be useable and too big to be practical souvenirs. I carried them around for the rest of the day, like every other tourist in town.

The latter part of our afternoon was spent in the shade outside a nice bar slowly eating a meal and drinking weak ‘happy hour’ beer whilst we waited for the evening’s entertainment: a baseball game. Our thouroughly pleasant sojourn was was slightly marred by a father and son who were standing on the street just near our table, drinking beer out of cans and smoking big fat cigars, by virtue of the venue being smoke-free. This we could tolerate. But the spitting. So much spitting. One drag of cigar…One spit. We couldn’t see the ground where they were aiming it, but there must have been a pool of it developing. If there had been ducks they would be paddling on it. Surely a cigar shouldn’t trigger such waterbrash, and if it does, just swallow the flaming stuff. Or ditch the habit, it’s obviously not agreeing with you. Rant over.

To the baseball. The local team are called the ‘Louisville Bats’. Bats for the Sluggers homage and the mascot is….yes…a bat. The small furry winged type. The team play in the minor leagues but have a great little stadium in the heart of the historic district. They were in the middle of a week of games against the St Paul Saints. We bought tickets (The slightly fancier ones with padded seats, upper tier, access to air conditioned bar.) and took our seats at 7pm in time for the anthem. This was belted out by an 11 year old girl who did a much better job than many a well known artist. Now baseball itself is fairly boring, which is why they serve beer and snacks, but our view was great and a ball did fly very close to our heads at one point. which was a bit exciting. After sitting through 2 hours and 7 innings by which time the score was still 1-1, we bailed. Partly due to boredom, partly due to the fact that dusk had arrived and we had no bike lights. Our route home initially took us past ‘Funk Fest’, a music event in full swing on the riverside park. Hundreds of people had paid the $65 for a ticket to get in, but thousands of others had just pitched up with lawn chairs to sit outside the venue and listen from the nearby park, bringing their own private parties with them. It was quite a spectacle. We had noted that the baseball crowd had lacked Black faces. Here they were, having a much better time, for free! Sensible people. We stopped for a few moments to listen to ‘Slick Rick’ but as darkness waits for no man, we pushed on. The rail bridge was lit up with colourful lights and the city looked great behind us. We cruised home, marveling at the displays from the fireflies along the riverside, trying not to swallow the myriad of other bugs that were out in force, arriving back safely before it was pitch black.

7th June to 11th June 2023

We cruised out of our hilly campsite back onto the hilly Blue Ridge Parkway. After about 7 miles we left the Parkway and headed down the ‘hill’. Jeepers. What a hill. It came with numerous hairpins, a 15 mph speed limit for big vehicles, a plethora of warning signs about using low gears, several pull off areas to allow trucks and larger vehicles to stop and let their brakes cool down and at least two escape lanes. We are not a large rig, but we are heavy. Seven tonnes. That’s alot of momentum. Luckily one of the numerous things that we had done on our very expensive trip to the Chevy Service Centre in Nov 21 included new rear brakes, so we were hoping they did their job. We reached the valley floor without incident and carried on. Before long we started climbing again, the I-40 highway winding its way into the Great Smokey Mountains, a subrange of the Appalacians. The hilly theme continued. We crossed the state line into Tenessee and before long arrived at our next stop, a small riverside camp wedged between the I-40 highway and the Big Pigeon River. This area lives and breathes white water rafting and aside from several outfitters, a petrol station and a couple of cafes, there was not much else on offer. Except a moonshine distillery. We were only here for a night, had not planned a rafting trip here and thought we would walk out to find a food before sampling the local distillates. When we arrived it was unfortunately pouring with rain but this did ease enough later to tackle the half mile walk along the grass verge of a suprisingly busy side road back to the ‘village’ centre. We soon discovered that nowhere served food after about 5pm which was when all the rafters were done and gone. So early evening moonshine sampling on an empty stomach it was to be then!

We had a great tasting (drinking) session with the very personable lady manning the fort -whose name neither of us can recall for obvious reasons- and ended up buying a jar of Jalepeno moonshine which makes a very cheeky Bloody Mary variation. We rolled home and cooked pasta…I think!

This section of Tennessee is very narrow and the next day’s drive took us quickly into Kentucky, another new state on our travels. Today we had a lunch destination, the original KFC retstaurant and museum. We don’t often buy lunch when we are out on the road, usually making a picnic if needed, but this was an opportunity to worship at the temple of ‘fingerlickin’ fried chicken’y goodness’. We were powerless pilgrims and made a 20 mile detour to this fairly unprepossessing establishment. The museum exhibits line the walls of the restaurant with a few mock-ups of the original kitchen and several statues of the big man himself. Much of the history of the place was a summary of Colonel Sanders’ life and entrepreneurship. The man was a hardworking genius and latterly a philanthropist. And made very good chicken. The fries are also spectacular. We resisted the urge to get a family sized bucket, ate our modest lunch and headed to camp.

“Me Too”, said the Colonel.

We were staying in a small park co-located with a watersports outfitters in the Daniel Boon National Forest (I love how many of these places are named after people), and was called the Sheltowee Trace Adventure Resort. The main reason people come here is to see the nearby (6 miles away) Cumberland River and its falls, the self proclained Niagra Falls of the South. After setting camp we headed to the office to see what river trip we could do during our stay here. The only trip that had transport directly from the camp was an all day rafting trip, the most expensive option. This was more than we had planned to spend, but we couldn’t be bothered to off-load TinCan from Big Dave, so booked onto it for the next day. Once back at Tin Can our solitude and peace and quiet was ended by the arrival of a group of local Kentuckians away for the weekend from their home town 90 minutes away. Three large camping trailers containing three couples, Levi & Mary, Curtis & Tiffany and ‘Homer’ (not his real name) and Kelly. All lifelong friends, a bit younger than us, with an assortment of offspring (Aged between 19 and 10) and some of their friends. They occupied the spaces either side of us and set up a bit communal party area with a shade gazebo nearby. It was a situation that might have turned out badly but we got chatting and thus commenced our assimilation into their weekend of fun.

They were one of the most genuine and friendly group of people we have met on our travels. Their easy, relaxed and deep-rooted relationships with each other enveloped us too and for 3 days and we were part of the family. There were many hours spent sitting and chatting, mostly with a drink in hand, and a significant number of those around a raging camp fire. There was food. Almost none of it ours. Freely shared. There were marshmallows toasted. There was singing, mostly by Mary using a piece of ‘2 by 1’ as a fake microphone. There were some hangovers. There was a hiking trip to a waterfall that involved chucking some of the kids into the back of a pick up so that there was room for us too. There was a restock shopping trip to the liquor store as the beer supplies had taken a beating. There was some zipline spectating as all the kids, and Mary and Curtis, dared to hurl themselves off a tall platform at the on-site zipwire. There was reciprocal male grooming when, after many drinks, Levi and Homer gave each other buzz cuts. It’s tradition apparently. There was also attempted ‘gigging’ by Kelly. This is the act of catching frogs in the dark by stunning them with a bright torch and them stabbing them with a long sharpen stick, or ‘gig’. One then cooks and eats the legs. She was unsuccessful for several reasons: It was late and much booze had been consumed, rendering her less ‘stealthy’ than necessary. Her ‘gig’ was a short marshmellow toasting fork. Her ‘bright torch’ was an iphone. Frogs 1, Kelly 0.

In amongst all this fun we did our rafting trip, co-incidentally with Levi and Mary and their 2 kids, Blain and Hallie. Despite the heat of the days it was a cold morning and we met at the office reception at the ungodly hour of 8.30am. There was the usual safety briefings and kitting out and we were bundled onto an old yellow school bus which took us to the start of the trip. Our group had five rafts and we had a 40 year old guide called Amy on our boat.

(Side bar: Amy showed us the scar of a gunshot wound on her left thigh. This was a through-and-through injury that had been self inflicted. She said that she had started sleeping with her loaded 9mm handgun in the bed with her for security as her ex had been threatening her. She accidentally discharged it somehow -in a dream???-and woke when she heard the shot. The bullet missed all major blood vessels and nerves, thus she lives and can still walk. Only in America…..)

The trip started with a paddle up to the Cumberland Falls and then headed down river from there. The river was quite low and this was not the high octane, gnarly rapids navigating experience that it might have been, but it was amazing. The river was beautiful and mostly clear and calm, the rapids were fun rather than scary and there were frequent stops to jump off rocks and swim. As the river flow was low it was safe enough to navigate some of the rapids out of the boat and at the end of the trip, once we had descended to lake-level, were met we by a larger pleasure cruise boat to take us the rest of way to the finish point. Once on the boat we were served a ‘build it yourself’ sandwich lunch which was very much needed by then and at the finish the same bus took us home again. Well worth the wonga!

On Sunday morning our new friends all packed up and headed off. We were sad to see them go but not sure we could have managed a fourth consecutive evening of merriment. We said our goodbyes and then were were pretty much by ourselves in the park again. The weather was turning and a storm was forecast. Late afternoon we had a message from Levi: Keep our eyes on the weather forcast. There had been alerts. The storm that was headed our way had ‘potential tornadic activity’ within it. It was about 30 minutes away. We were immediately online and checking ourselves. He was right. I hustled over to the office to check where the storm shelter was. They hadn’t seen the alerts but agreed that it could develop. They pointed out the shelter, the stone built lower floor of one of the larger cabins, and unlocked it. We then packed a small ‘go bag’ with passports and electronica and I quickly door-knocked the three other RVs in the park to make sure they had seen the alerts and had clocked the storm shelter. None had. It was a slightly tense half hour but happily the tornado alert was removed before the storm got to us. No twisters, just a crazy amount of rain and thunder and a great lightning show. I’ll take a storm in a teacup any day over the alternative, Dorothy.

29th May -6th June 2023

We bade farewell to the marshes, wetlands and sandy islands of the coast and headed inland. The landscape filled with trees again and there were occasional swathes of cereal crops and pastures with a cow or two in them. The roads in the USA are really designed to get you from A to B to C to D with minimal fuss. Long, straight, four lane roads carving through the distances, the need for many corners removed due to the unfathomable amount of space in this massive country. It is easy to do many, many miles in a day on the road here. We generally choose not to and this day was about 170 miles, a moderate journey for us. It brought us to a town called Wilson. Pretty non-descript but a place to be.

Some wise man somewhere along our travels once said to us that we should, as far a possible, stick to the ‘Rules of 2’ when touring: Don’t drive more than 200 miles in a day. Don’t arrive at your destination after 2pm. Stay 2 nights. Following these rules takes a lot of the fatigue out of travelling when rushing about is unecessary due to being time-rich. They were wise words and we try to stick to the ethos.

So we were here for two nights. The RV park was an older, spacious camp with lots of mature trees, set back from one of those aforementioned four lane main roads. It had a small lake, some resident donkeys and a selection of long termers in the back section living in crumbling rigs covered in leaf debris. The newly renovated pool looked lovely but it wasn’t warm enough for us to consider using. The town centre was about three miles away and on our middle day we broke out the bikes and set off to see Wilson’s premiere (and arguably only) attraction. The Whirligigs. ‘The what?’ I hear you ask. Well a chap by the name of Vollis Simpson lived near here and was farm machinery engineer by trade. His hobby was building ornamental windmills out of scrap materials. This became his major activity in retirement and he created an impromtu tourist attraction on his farm, filling it with wind powered contraptions of all shapes and sizes. He also did commissions for galleries, cities and museums. As he got too old to mainatain the pieces himself the town of Wilson bought his windmills, now called whirligigs, lovingly restored them and re-sited them on a sweet, multi-purpose community park in the centre of town. This has helped return some of the vibrancy to this deprived town that was once fabulous wealthy due to it being a major centre for tobacco trading in the past.

We arrived at the Whirligigs in one piece having had to navigate a one mile stretch of the main road on our bicycles before we could turn off towards town. Luckily there is little antipathy or disregard for cyclists in this country, as far as we have experienced. Motorists alway seem to give us masses of space or slow down when passing us. Perhaps that is due to the terror of litigation. Perhaps they are just so bemused by seeing people using bikes as a form of transport. Whatever the reasons, we generally feel quite safe.

It was a perfect Whirligig day: bright with a moderate breeze. They were bonkers. The photos obviously don’t capture the noises of their clattering and rattling or their complex moving parts, but trust me, they were delightful. There was a small free ‘museum’ next to the park that we went to afterwards. There were three members of staff in the one-roomed venue that was mostly gift shop, and we were the only visitors. There was a video presentation about Vollis, the story of his creations and their relocation to the park and we watched this, slightly self-consciously, sat on two tiny stools in the middle of the room. We then left without buying anything. Terrible tourists.

Back in camp we met our new neighbours, a delightful older couple called Phyllis and Ron. They had travelled a massive 20 miles from home to do a shake-down trip in their new aquisition, a very cool 2013 RoadTrek 190. Unfortunately it did not come with an owners manual and they were not entirely sure how to work everything. This was majorly complicated by neither of them being particulary techically minded and by their eschewing of the digital age. ‘Checking the internet’ was not in their repertoire of problem solving strategies. So we helped them set up, worked out how the water system functioned by finding an online manual and I even printed out the fifteen or so relevant pages for them. (Yes, we travel with a printer. Yes, this really impressed them.) We spent an hour or so chit-chatting our way through getting them sorted, mutual camper appretiation and general conversation and then, after our respective dinners, sat with them by their camp fire, toasting a marshmallow or two. In the morning we bade our farewells, shared contact details (blog site and email for us, landline and physical address for them), took a momento photo each (iphone for us, 35mm film camera for them), and headed off. They have bought a very cool little van and I’m sure they will be very happy in their travels. Perhaps just need to find someone to print off the rest of the manual for them.

Next stop on our westerly trajectory was a place called Clemmens, just south of Winston-Salem. Here they have an amazing park, owned by the town, that is a magificent temple to recreation. It is over a thousand acres in area and contains three standard golf courses, a ‘soft-golf’ course, a stables and equestrian centre, an aquatic centre, a tennis club, a dog park, a hotel and restaurant, an aboretum, a botanical garden, cabins, BBQ pavilions, function halls, forested areas with hiking trails, a paved multi-use path around the circumference and…an RV campsite. It was charming and made even better by the fact that there was a really good supermarket a ten minute walk away. Our 2 days here were like a mini health retreat as we took advantage of all the facilities on our doorstep. We cycled, walked, swam (Ok, played on the slides and the lazy river at the pool complex) and even had a round of ‘soft golf’. This is played on a roughly mown field with 9 large diameter holes using a grapefruit sized soft ball, a reasonably conventional driver and wedge and a fat putter. It can be played at twilight as the hole markers and balls all glow in the dark although we played in the blazing sunshine of 4pm. It was a lot of fun, and even a non-golfer like myself could thwack a respectable round. Nick won, which was reasonably inevitable. We were sorry to be only stopping here for two nights here but onward we rolled, in a northwest direction…

…into Virginia. But only just. When I say ‘rolled’, I mean ‘climbed’, because now we had arrived in the Appalacian Mountains. The first mountain range of this trip. Our second trip in 2017/2018 had brought us down the inland side of the Appalacians but we hadn’t spent any time in the hills themselves really. There is a scenic route along the central and southern Appalacians called the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its about 470 miles long in total and is one of America’s great scenic drives and longest linear park. (Factoid). We had headed a trifle more north than was necessary for our overall journey in order to take in a good section of the drive and we had a rare single night stay near a town called Galax. This would give us a 109 mile drive along the parkway the next day. Our campsite for the night had promised us nothing of note except a spot to stop and plug in, but what it delivered was a little feast for the eyes. We had accidentally coincided our stay with a group of about 15-20 Airstream trailers who were camping in a bloc for 3 days whilst on a caravan rally along the length of the parkway. They are such handsome things, almost pieces of art, and to see them en-masse was a sight to behold. Big Dave and Tin Can lurked on the outskirts of the gathering, trying to look as cool, but not quite managing it. We still love them though.

The Parkway is a single lane, windy road that has a very sedate speed limit of 35-45 mph. It climbs and descends as it meanders its way through the thickly forested hills with frequent lookout stops suddenly revealing jawdropping distant views of more hills and mountains, all uniformly covered with equally dense forests. There is little evidence of human existance here, save for the road itself and the other sightseeing vehicles. We thought that this would be the entirety of our Parkway experience, but no. Every road needs fixing now and then and we unfortunately encountered a long detour which meant that half of our journey was actually along the more frantic, far less scenic normal roads through the hills. Once finally back on the Parkway, and back into North Carolina, we stopped to do a short hike (as the longer one that I had planned was in the middle of the bypassed section) and then stopped at a lookout to eat our packed lunch. Another hour or so on the windy road brought us to our next destination.

This next place was a massive sprawling hilly camp set into the forest. It had seemingly hundreds of pitches and cabins but was almost deserted. This is unusual for a weekend but I think we were in the thin sliver of the calendar between a long weekend and the schools breaking up for summer so most people were staying home. Whatever the reason, it was very peaceful. It didn’t have a pool but did have a small duel purpose swimming and catch-and-release fishing lake, the sections demarkated by a rope with floats. The water was too murky to tell, but I had visions of all the fish hanging out in the swimming half, having long since learnt that frequenting the other end led to a faceful of fishing hook and all that followed. We did brave a swim on the first day (the only day hot enough to justify it). It was brisk and refreshing and suprisingly quite pleasant considering!

Camp also had this inflateable trampoline type thing, designed for children, but fun for grown ups too. We couldn’t resist a few minutes of unbridled glee, whilst trying not to pull a hip, rupture a knee or slip a rib. Luckily there were no other witnesses to our shenanigans and we got away without injury.

We had three full days here and were keen to do some walking. There were three different hikes that headed out directly from the camp, all well signposted, and all advertised at about 3.5-4.5 miles each. We decided to do one per day; no point overstretching ourselves! This was hilly terrain so we were prepared for some climbing but the 2nd of the walks had a near vertical scramble (or so it felt) for one stretch. At this point there was some very ripe language coming from my hiking partner. He was suffering from calf cramps and finds the utterances of a continual stream of expletives a useful self motivational technique to help him push forwards and enhance his enjoyment of the challenge. Or he might have been having a massive whinge. One or the other.

The trails were otherwise well trodden although we barely saw another living soul whilst out and about. There was a lookout, a waterfall and many, many trees. This area is rich in pyrite, a crystalline iron sulphide. It is everywhere, sparkling in flakey rocks of various sizes and sometimes just as a dusting amongst the leaf litter. It’s other name is ‘Fool’s Gold’ and I can see how easy it would to be seduced into thinking it was it’s far more valuable doppelganger. The lengths of all three walks were all fairly significantly overestimated and having packed a daypack with plenty of water, snacks, waterproofs, first aid kit, bug spray and suncream we felt a bit silly arriving back at camp an hour and a half later. I’ve been on longer walks around shopping malls.

We had another lovely evening around the camp fire in our private deserted campsite and the next morning we were off again.