Road Trip

In search of snow, we departed Grand Marais on November 1st. headed towards the rockies. Our goal was to drive about 400 miles a day, during daylight. For those of you who know us, that might sound pretty wimpy - we're used to driving all the way at once. The reason for our lazy pace, was that we were pulling our new home behind us, a 1948 tin can trailer.

The end of the first day brought us to Canby, Minnesota. We met up with our friend Matt, who just moved there this summer from the North Shore. He gave us a tour of town, including the campus where he is going to school to become a wind turbine technician. Sounds like a great program with tons of potential work opportunities in the future. After a super filling dinner at the local grub joint, we spent the first night in our camper on the street infront of Matt's house.

We knew Sunday was going to be long, we were shooting for Custer State Park, somewhere around 500 miles from Canby. We got an early start and the winds of the Great Plains were slightly out of the east, pushing us down the road. Things were going well until we hit a bit of road construction and the trailer decided to 'jump' off the ball. That slowed us down quickly. Because we were in this road construction site, the truck behind us had no choice but to stop and help us out. We put the trailer back on and made our way the next 1/2 mile to the closest gas station. I found some string in the rover and tied the tongue onto the ball. That made Mica fairly nervous, but it was Sunday and there were no hardware/auto parts stores open. We hit the capital city of Pierre and to our suprise, found a farm store that had tons of hardware. We fixed the trailer and made our way westward. We hit the Game Lodge campground in Custer State park right at Sunset, 10 good hours of travel.

Monday was going to be a shorter day, so we spent the morning touring the wildlife loop and hiking through the prairie. We saw bighorn sheep, pronghorn, bison, mule deer and Mica's favorite- the prairie dog. We proceded south and made great time, ending our day in Sterling, Colorado. We stopped at a travel center there and tried to get some advice on Camping in the area. Well, the best option the gentelmen in the travel center could give me was to camp at Walmart, "that's what most people do". So my distaste for the worlds largest distributor of cheap plastic crap has now pushed campgrounds out of small towns as well. We compromised and spent the night at the travel center.

Tuesday would have about 300 miles in front of us to reach our destination of Salida, Colorado. It was a really windy day and the rover got a workout on the long grades. After about 4 hours we were in Colorado Springs, stopping very quickly for gas and then on our way into the mountains. We passed through Canyon City and quickly found ourselves winding up the Arkansas River. After stopping for lunch we continued up to Salida, rolling into the Heart of the Rockies campground at 2:30 in the afternoon. We settled in and went to town for dinner. We should have a good night sleep, there is supposed to be snow for the next couple of days!