Alaska 49 & 50. Road Warriors August 27 & 28

Ahhhhh. I keep getting busy and forgetting to write! You have to remember, these posts were always 5-7 days behind real time. So we’ve been back in Colorado for a few days now. And working like dogs unpacking, cleaning the car and camper, trying to get the house back in order after being gone almost the whole summer.

I keep forgetting that I’m a ROAD WARRIOR until the bitter end! The WORST thing I could do at this point is drop the dang ball. I’m still putting up with crap from my brother about the last-ever Road Warrior series that he claims I never finished. He’s probably right, but don’t tell him I said that. I challenge anyone to prove it though, my website being so abysmally bad. It’s easy to find my banana bread recipe though, right Charlie??

OK, where were we…

August 27

Lolo National Forest just south of Kalispell at Norton Campground, all by ourselves! We had a fun breakfast using up all kinds of crazy. We waited for the sun to peak over the mountains to warm us up a bit before heading to the river to fish.

It was beautiful. The weather was lovely…

Actually, it got a bit too hot. I feel like Gollum after having been in the rainy cold for the past month. I was all bundled up and we were wearing our waders when we started. And within an hour I was sweating and considering stripping down to my bra. Who would ever even see? (I didn’t.)

We caught some very small rainbows early on and then not much else. It was a TREACHEROUS river to walk in. Dave has a bad knee and walking in the river is hard on it. I am 100% injury free and even my knees were sore from all the slippery side to side near falls.

There was a new nearby fire that helicopters were flying water to. But generally, it was a disappointing fishing day. Again!

We closed the day out with a drive up farther to check the river out. It looked really nice. We fished some more. We caught nothing.

Then we drove back toward town to get some internet to check emails. It was a luxuriously slow paced day.

I swore I could not eat another BITE of Italian sausage but that’s all that was left in the fridge, so I made Cabbage soup with, yes, Italian fricken sausage. I think it was good, but I’m just plain OVER IT. Frankly, it kind of grossed me out.

Had another nice fire, having ascertained that there were, in fact, no fire restrictions — which seems LUNATIC given the new fires in the area…

We had the campground to ourselves again, or so we thought. At 9:45, well past dark — and let me say HOW WEIRD IS THAT having just come from Alaska where it’s light until midnight — a dumb pick-up drove in and stayed. Oh well. They were pretty quiet and unobtrusive.

August 28

We packed up and headed out for the final push to Coalville — another 7 hour drive. Completely uneventful, which I appreciate as I write this at 10 pm from my bed in Colorado.

As we left Montana, I got a Reddit notification about Banff (Reddit is creepy like that, I don’t even use it and it nows I was in Banff…) showing snow where we had just camped. So, we missed a late summer snow storm by just a day. The pass roads were closed and it sounded like a big mess!

Remember: we needed to accelerate our drive back from Alaska so that we could get the camper suspension looked at, along with a handful of more minor things (Like the flippin’ REFRIGERATOR connection for those that have been following since the beginning.) Escapod doesn’t have a full workforce on Fridays and it’s Labor Day weekend so if we didn’t make it, we’d need to wait until Tuesday.

They wanted us to drop it the night before, but we preferred to sleep in the camper. And rather than camp in their lot and get labeled as WEIRDOS by the good people at Escapod, we opted to spend the night behind the gas station in Coalville that happens to also sport a convenient RV park. Who knew? Not us. We just stopped to get gas and said “why not stay here?”

So we did.

Remember my third or fourth post when I was crying about having to stay in a private campground in Canada that had other campers and *gasp* electric hook-ups?

Just look at me now!

Pretty soon I’ll be in a Minnie Winnie towing a Jeep!

Likely not.

Given that our fridge is empty, we unhitched and headed in to Park City, where it all began almost two months ago. Had a nice dinner and walked around a bit. Truly, I’m also over Park City, having spent way too much time there waiting for the camper this past year. But it’s a nice town. We tried to make it until dark so we could pretend we weren’t staying in a drive-thru RV park.

We made it.

And you’ve almost made it too! One more post to go!! Text me if I forget!