Home Sweet Home...

Leaving Utah on 50

We made it home today, a day earlier than we had planned, but being here sure does make the long hours of driving along Highway 50 worth it.  We picked Ruby up from her Lake Tahoe vacation with Diane and Stephan and headed home.  OhNo had been wonderfully looked after by Robin and when we got home, both Robin and OhNo were here to greet us.

This blog has been a fun way to share pictures and thoughts.  Thanks for checking in with us on our vacation to the Badlands and beyond.

Thank goodness for satellite radio, part 2.

Well, I didn't think we'd be able to post anything, but lo and behold, I do have a little signal on my iPhone! Unfortunately, we can't post any of the photos we took of some of the nicer landscapes in Utah before we hit Highway 50. But you aren't really missing much, if you've ever driven it in Utah or Nevada before.

We're currently in Eureka, Nevada, (not exactly on our have-to-see list, but it's home for the night) and will hopefully finish this blog from home tomorrow night. As much as we have loved every day of this vacation, there's really no place like home (and our family and friends!) Thanks for traveling with us and sharing your comments.

Scenes from a freeway





Hey, thanks to all of you who left comments at the last blog.  It sure is great to think that somebody is actually reading this!  Seriously though, it makes us feel like we're able to share some of our day's experiences with our friends and that's important to us.



OMG! I love pancakes!!





Today was our last day in Colorado and we ended it on a tasty note with Deb at breakfast.  We met at Snooze, which is a Denver breakfast and lunch joint that serves some outrageously good food.  Just check out Deb's reaction!

After we said our goodbyes, we hit the road for home, taking Highway 70 through some beautiful Colorado landscape.  We hope to make it to Placerville by Friday morning so Denna will have a couple of days before she has to get back to (ugh!) work.  Plus, we really are looking forward to reuniting Sonny with his sisters, Ruby & OhNo.....oh, and we'd really like to see them too!!!



Aspens in the Rockies



The Colorado River
in Glenwood Canyon



The drive took us up into the Rocky Mountains and we passed some famous towns and ski resorts (Vail, Breckenridge).  Of course, we also went through some unusually named towns like Rifle, Silt, Parachute, and Fruita (of the Looma...that was Denna's contribution).  We drove through a nearly 2 mile tunnel (the Eisenhower) and an area that seemed like we were at the bottom of a (not-as-grand) Grand Canyon.  Unfortunately, Colorado has also had the pine beetle devastate huge sections of their forests, but we were able to see autumn coming with the change of color in the aspens.  It was a beautiful drive.

The pilot and co-pilot

We spent the rest of the day in the motorhome and are now in Utah at a KOA in Green River (the last exit with services for 110 miles!).  Although we'd like to think we could drive the rest of the way through Utah and Nevada (across the loneliest highway) on Highway 50 into Lake Tahoe tomorrow, we know that covering over 700 miles in one day could be deadly.  So, we'll probably stop somewhere, anywhere, along the way to spend the night and hopefully cruise into Tahoe Friday morning (to pick up Miss Ruby) and home by noon.  If there's no new post on the blog until Friday, we're probably in the middle of nowhere with no internet.  Stay tuned.

Taco Tuesday!

This is just a short post today since we didn't travel anywhere but to our friend Deb's house in Aurora.  She came by our campsite around noon and we sat outside for a couple of hours enjoying the weather and catching up on each other's lives.  Although we thought Deb had been away from Placerville for maybe 3 or so years, she said it would be 6 years in December that she'd lived in Colorado.  Time really does fly......

Enjoying our tacos!



Deb and Bella



We followed her to her home in Aurora and met Kathy, her partner, and their 3 dogs and 2 cats.  They've really revitalized the home they purchased almost 2 years ago and they have good reason to be proud of the results.  Of course, no visit with Deb would be complete without some of her tacos and she did not disappoint.  We ate our fill (she admitted she had changed the recipe, but it didn't change the essence!) and then sat in their backyard and enjoyed the beautiful evening.



It was good to spend some time with Deb and to meet Kathy.  Although we heard a lot about them, we hope to meet Kathy's 2 high school aged kids, Caitlin and Blake, someday too.

We did the "hat trick" today

Today was a major road trip for us and we managed to drive through 3 states on our way to Aurora (just south of Denver), Colorado.  After leaving the Black Hills we drove south until we got to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where our niece, Sarah, is a freshman at the local college.  We've watched her develop into an extremely good softball pitcher and player and it's hoped she'll be able to continue on to a major softball college.

We didn't make it to town until her classes were over and she had to be at softball practice, so we parked the moho at the local Walmart and drove the Element over to the field to watch her. Of course, most of the times we have visited her recently have been at the softball fields, so this was a familiar place for us. 

After watching practice for awhile, we said goodbye and headed to Aurora.  It's a little strange to see so many cars on the road - for the last week the traffic has been amazingly absent (a big difference from California!).  We arrived at the Cherry Creek State Campground this evening and are in one of the best RV sites yet. Tomorrow we'll get together with our friend, Deb, and her family.  We've been promised some of her famous tacos for tomorrow night's dinner and we can't wait :)

A day in Deadwood

Welcome to Deadwood.

Today we finally made it to Deadwood, the formerly lawless town run by infamous gamblers and gunslingers.  The town we arrived in, however, has become a quaint and a beautifully reconstructed collection of gaming halls, restaurants, saloons, and hotels.  It's pretty apparent that the casinos are making money and they contribute a lot to maintain and improve the town and its community.  But we did see several cars parked along the local stream and their occupants were busy panning.

Wild Bill Hickok's place
on Boot Hill (alias Mt. Moriah
Cemetery)

Calamity Denna at
Calamity Jane's grave

We did several geocaches that involved a series hidden near the signs for Deadwood at all conceivable entrances to the town.  Of course, no visit to Deadwood is complete without visiting the final resting place for Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.  Although the original saloon in which Wild Bill was shot by Jack McCall has since burned down, the town continues to maintain a marker at that spot.

We headed up to Lead, another mining town near Deadwood, to find a Subway for a sandwich and found the Homestake mine.  It's an open pit mine that was the second largest gold producer in the U.S.  We thought Placerville had been left looking scarred by the mining, but it's nothing compared to this nearly mile-long pit. 

Tonight is our last night in the beautiful Black Hills and we're off to Nebraska tomorrow to visit our niece who is a freshman in college.  Then we'll roll on to Colorado to see our good friend, Deb, who lives near Denver.  This trip continues to be a lot of fun and we've been able to see so much of this great part of the country.

The Badlands ain't so bad.

The original Wall Drug
dinosaur

T-Rex at feeding time.

We began the day with a trip to Wall, South Dakota, to visit the infamous Wall Drug.  This is no ordinary drugstore and it has remade itself into a showcase of food, gifts, jewelry, western clothing, historical photographs, panning and mining equipment, candy, rocks, pharmacy, and 5 cent coffee.  It also boasts an 80 foot Brontosaurus (along the freeway) and a T-Rex who feeds every 12 minutes. No trip to the Badlands is complete without the requisite stop at Wall Drug and so we stopped, shopped and took pictures.

Denna riding a giant
jackalope at the store

The drugstore began in 1931 and its new owners needed something to get people to stop in and shop.  Since the surrounding prairie was a hot and desolate area and the towns' people were dirt poor, they needed a hook.  They began offering free ice water and posting signs for it along the highway. Needless to say, during the depression anything that was free and helped to beat the heat was a welcome stop. The rest of the story is history; they still serve 5000 glasses of ice water on a summer day and the signs advertising it all dot the highways up to 30+ miles away.

Sonny & Kathy

We headed off to the Badlands National Park, which was once a part of a giant salt water sea, and watched the prairie literally drop away into gigantic valleys with sharp edges and strange formations.  It supported a large marshy area after the salt water sea receded and there are fossils of sabre tooth cats, crocodiles, camels, dinosaurs and rhinoceroses.  Today it has a landscape that has very little plant and animal life and is in a constant state of erosion.  Most of the area that is not exposed to erosion is covered in native grasses and today the forest service was burning the grass to stimulate new growth.

Kathy finds some
cypress trees and has to
touch them to see if they're real!

The Badlands earned its name from the Indians (who called it mako sica - bad land) and the French trappers (who called it "bad land to cross") who explored the west in the 1800's.  It's a beautiful area, but we were happy to return to the Black Hills and all its trees!