Beef Country and The Mashed Potato Tower

Wyoming steak and mashed potato towerWorked most of the day yesterday, finally developing our long-awaited road trip soundtrack page – complete with lyrics to classic travel tunes we’ve deemed appropriate for our trip, local radio stations that have stuck on our dial, and interesting internet radio streams.

But I couldn’t leave Devil’s Tower without a report of this awesome place I’ve always wanted to visit. OK, technically, I did leave since I’m writing this from our new home for the week at Whistler Gulch Campground in Deadwood South Dakota. But I digress…

Traveling across Wyoming, we saw numerous signs stressing that we were in cattle country. As if all the herds weren’t enough to indicate such. As a vegetarian, René was especially amused by the billboards boldy telling us to “Eat Beef!” Personally, I took it as a sign to seek out and grill a great big Wyoming steak. And of course, I would just have to do my best Richard Dreyfus impression by sculpting a replica of the Bear’s Lodge from my mashed potatoes.

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Our First Roadkill

Longest drive yet yesterday, from Laramie to Keyhole State Park just outside Devil’s Tower Wyoming. No wonder we made our first kill. Good thing René wasn’t looking when the little bird hit the grille, she would’ve cried for sure. And thank goodness it wasn’t anything bigger, like the open range cattle, free roaming horses, Pronghorn sheep or numerous Jackalopes we’ve seen littering the Wyoming byways. …

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Hammock Tryouts: Strike One

Stayed up late last night updating our full-time RV road trip gallery with the latest photos and videos. But no pictures can do justice to the outdoor adventures we enjoyed while dry-camping for the previous four days at Seedhouse in the Routt National Forest. While heavy thunderstorm clouds kept us incognito in the woods, the weather was not so bad that it kept us from …

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Field Report: MotoSat Trouble

Our first day boondocking at Seedhouse Campground in the Routt National Forest, we had excellent connectivity with Satellite 91 West using our DataStorm F2 dish. The next few days however, we spent too much time trying to troubleshoot connectivity issues. In a previous life, this would have been frustrating. But it’s hard to get upset when your home office is deep in the woods with so much to do…

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Troubleshooting the Norcold N821 RV Refrigerator

We’ve been giving the fridge a serious workout the past few weeks as we have traveled through some record-breaking heat in Arizona and Utah. I’ve been meaning to post about how the fridge issues that began at Lake Francis RV Resort seem to be resolved. Then I noticed the ignition fault error this morning after our first night in the Rockies outside Steamboat Springs, CO.

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Why Does Being Green Have to Hurt?

Biodiesel cost in Carbondale, COOuch! See that price per gallon? That was for B20 biodiesel in Carbondale, Colorado. Now, do the math to figure out what it cost to fill our 34 gallon tank.

I was thrilled to finally be able to fill our tank up with biodiesel for the first time since leaving California, but what a painful experience it was. This was B20 for cristssake, not even the primo stuff. Once, we wanted the kind biodiesel, so we paid $3.74 a gallon for B100 at Real Goods in Hopland. Pure as gold, and worth every penny to find out how our Dodge would perform on it. But B20? In Arcata, CA, we paid $3.05 a gallon for B20, and we were OK with that. But $3.53?

Why does doing the right thing have to hurt? Can average people truly afford to be “green”? Not completely, not in this universe. Would you pay that?

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Mountain Biking in Moab, Finally

Rat’s Radical Ride in Moab, UTSince the first time my knobby tires hit dirt back in the early 90s when I regularly biked Mt. Tam in Marin, I’ve always wanted to hit the trails in Moab, Utah. Those red mountain single tracks, biking to the edge of a thousand foot drop on some mesa . . . all those things I heard about, there they were, at our disposal when we arrived in Moab on July 8. But there was just one problem: it was a record-breaking day weather-wise, a whopping 100-something, in a town that never gets that hot. Only a fool would ride under those conditions.

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Too Darned Hot. Too bad.

Arizona’s canyon lands, painted dessert and red rock buttes are beautiful sights to be seen and appreciated. That being said, I am happy to say I can check that area off my list of potential places to plant permanent roots. I’ll never say never, but the heat and local societal attitude that I encountered – yes, first impressions do count in my book – throughout …

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Campground Review: KOA Flagstaff, AZ

Get to Know Your Neighbors in FlagstaffDo yourself a favor, and skip this area of AZ any other time of year except winter.

We don’t like KOA parks, but we decided to stop here because it was easy to meet my parents there, and we could use it as a base camp to explore the area south, Sedona. The tightwad in me also wanted to avoid the few overpriced RV parks closer to Sedona. So upon check in, we weren’t expecting much other than the standard swimming pool and hookups that would allow us to run our AC. But what we found out after check in was, this KOA is, simply put, a dump.

The place is run down, trash is everywhere, the sites are crammed together, and management is so cheap they won’t even buy toilet seat covers for the restrooms. Unlike other KOAs we’ve overnighted at, this one had no DVDs for rent, the office doesn’t open till 8am and you can’t even buy a newspaper until then because they’re in the office. And they don’t even have a pool! In Arizona!

As we sat in the cool comfort of our Fox’s air conditioner while the outside world baked in 100 degree heat (ok, it was 95, but is there really a difference?), someone knocked at our door. It was a KOA Flagstaff clerk, who arrived to tell us that we weren’t allowed to run our AC on their 30amp hookups, “because the park is so old it can’t handle it.” If we had been told this ahead of making the reservation, we never would’ve stayed there.

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Independent America TV Documentary

My sister sent me this link to the Yahoo News Interview with Hanson Hosein and Heather Hughes about Independent America – the documentary they created during a two-lane trek across the U.S. to identify communities where mom & pop stores are taking on Big Box America. Just as we are in search of the ideal community to live and work, where mom and pop stores …

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Lowered Expectations Can Equal Happiness

I’ve always been a crunchy granola type who recycles everything, eats organic, and tries not to consume mass amounts of paper products. But I’m slowly finding out that applying these values on this trip is going to be tricky. Ever try going inland to someplace like Arizona, and looking for organic produce that doesn’t look like it was held over from last winter? Forget it. …

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Fifth Wheel vs. Travel Trailer (vol. 1)

Steady fifth wheel trailerHere’s another reason to get a fifth wheel instead of a bumper-mounted travel trailer. The last few legs of our roadtrip have confirmed that we made the right choice…

When we researched purchasing a travel trailer or a fifth wheel, we discovered that fifth wheels are much less likely to sway in high winds as the weight is centered over the axle instead of hanging off the bumper.

Over the past few days we have experienced some pretty high winds. Traveling south on CA highway 395 and then up out of Death Valley, we experienced strong winds from all directions. Not once did I feel instability in the trailer. I never noticed the fifth wheel sway or fishtail from side to side. It felt steady even in the strongest winds and was always rock steady in the rear view mirror.

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Staying hitched to the trailer

For the past couple nights we’ve been staying hitched to our fifth wheel trailer when spending just one night in RV resorts. We’ve researched this online and only found this one forum discussion about staying hitched that addressed the issue specifically. It confirmed my assumption that it will do no harm to the truck. I do, however, raise the trailer a bit more than the …

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Engine Dings in the Valley of Death

From our direction we’re traveling in, there’s only one road in, and one road out, to the hottest, most inhabitable place in North America, Death Valley. The music of Pink Floyd is the ultra mellow soundtrack for our crossing at 5:30 am today. Way back in 1996, the first time we crossed this inferno, the only soundtrack was the wind screaming in my ears as …

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