“I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque!” — Bugs Bunny

If we had, we would be in California right now, instead of this:

It was a bit of a shock to wake up in Chatfield State Park to snow falling, since even the gloomy forecast didn’t predict it until the following night. What a change from the previous day’s sunny 72 degrees.

And the danged snow just kept coming down all morning, until we had about five inches on the grass. Emma was delighted, Eleanor was tickled to take photos from inside the Airstream, and I was horrified. That’s how we all generally react to snow.

Well, in such a situation there are clear protocols: First, crank up the heat.  Second, make a hearty breakfast.  Third, go outside and throw snowballs around.  We’re in an Airstream that we just loaded for five months on the road, so believe me when I say we had all the gear needed for this event: warm socks, a variety of teas, lots of propane, cold weather clothes, toast & marmalade, bad/classic movies on DVD, etc.

We were due at a rally in Fort Collins, but waited until about noon to leave the state park, hoping the weather would clear.  It didn’t. Weighing the options it seemed like the best move was to tow during midday when the temperatures were sufficiently above freezing to avoid icing on the roads. The trek to Fort Collins up I-25 was slow and occasionally “exciting” but overall safe enough and we got to the KOA in fine condition.

The GL had to fight a little to push the Airstream back into the snow-filled campsite. Even with all-wheel drive it was tough when the all-season tires slipped. This is definitely winter tire weather.

However, please notice the tire tracks on the snow: one pass to get parked—that’s our “performance guarantee”. I hate hacking the trailer into a site (going back and forth repeatedly). Eleanor took the brunt of this particular job since she had to go out in the wet slush and heavy falling snow to guide me in.

It’s probably a testament to the devotion and hardiness of the local Airstream club that more than half of the rally attendees eventually arrived despite the conditions.

Normally I’ll do everything possible to avoid snow. Towing in snow is craziness. We once bailed out of a great trip in Banff because it was October and a small snowstorm was looming. At that time of year one good snowfall might mean you’re stuck for weeks, because just as one begins to melt another snowfall arrives.

But this is May, so any snow that lands will melt quickly even up here at 5,000 feet.  The roads and bridges aren’t going to freeze (at least not for long) and there was no chance of the temperatures declining further as long as we didn’t go further up in altitude. So coming here was a calculated decision. No biggie to wait out a couple of days of snow.

We started our trip with full propane cylinders of course, but using the furnace all night and the catalytic heater all day means we will probably drain a cylinder before we leave on Sunday. Normally I don’t have to buy propane until the end of the summer. We’d be burning it even faster if we didn’t have the catalytic heater to use during the day (it’s much more efficient than the furnace).

Our strategy lately is to run the cat heater by day because it’s efficient. It’s fine for our 30 foot trailer down to about freezing. Below that, the ends of the trailer tends to get chilly. At night when temperatures are likely to drop below freezing we switch to the furnace. That way the trailer is heated more evenly and the holding tanks get a little warmth too (so they don’t freeze).

All of this will hopefully be of academic interest only in a few days. I’m looking forward to rolling down to the Great Plains and points east for a sudden switch to summertime greenery and warmth.  So for us, summer starts Sunday or Monday.

The saying is that “the journey of a 1,000 miles begins with a single step.”  The problem is that it takes a while to get ready for that first step. Lots to pack, arrange, and prepare when you don’t plan to be home for five months.

And that explains why our Airstream left the driveway two days later than planned.  Things weren’t quite ready and in the context of months, a couple of days isn’t really a big deal so it made sense to delay the trip just a little.

This delay cost us a couple of good stops. I was planning to go to Sunset Crater and Wupatki National Monument, then up to the Four Corners region and stop at Hovenweep National Monument. But we had also committed to a rally in Fort Collins and so instead of just moving the entire schedule back, we had to skip past the Four Corners.

That meant taking the Interstate highway system, a necessary but tedious expedient. Taking the Interstate is a great way to get from A to B without seeing anything. Almost as good as a jetliner. But we were slightly pressed for time and so we plowed west on I-10 and north on I-25, with the only good part being the detour through Hatch, New Mexico and a stop for lunch beside the town’s collection of advertising statues.

After a night in Albuquerque we pressed onward to Littleton CO and Chatfield State Park, just outside the Denver metro area.  This park surrounds a flood-control project that forms a nice little lake.  There’s a bike trail surrounding the lake, which enticed Emma and I out for a very pleasant morning of riding on our electric unicycles, for 14 miles.

But now that we’ve gotten here, the weather is about to make us regret doubly our decision to skip the sunny and dry Four Corners region…

Snow?  High temps of 37?  Isn’t this May?

This will definitely put a damper on the rally, but knowing the Airstreamers they’ll all find a way to have a good time anyway. Personally I’m going to stay in the trailer all day Friday with the catalytic heater and a movie marathon running.

To get ready Eleanor and I went digging in our under-bed storage and swapped out all our shorts and sandals for those items we keep on board for the occasional spate of bad weather. I keep a few items in the Airstream at all times: long underwear, hat, gloves, warm socks, and some grungy clothes for emergency roadside repairs. This stuff rarely comes out, and I sure didn’t expect it to be needed four days after leaving the near-100 degree weather in Tucson.

Well, on a journey of 1,000 miles (or in our case about 10,000 miles) change is to be expected. Before this trip is over we’ll visit at least 11 states and perhaps a couple of Canadian provinces. It won’t be sunny every day, nor will it always be warm. But, if we’re lucky, it will always be interesting.

After a few days of boondocking it’s nice to hit a full hookup campground for a night just to get everything back in ship-shape.  The Airstream is inevitably full of dirt and gravel tracked in from the campsite, we are perhaps a bit less fresh than we’d like to be (due to careful conservation of water), all the little electronic devices we carry need charging up, the laundry basket is full, it’s time to get some groceries, and maybe dump the tanks if there wasn’t a place to do it before.

The definition of many Airstreamers is “someone who spends $75,000 on a trailer and then looks for free campsites,” and there’s a bit of truth in that. But there’s a good reason.  I personally hate paying the rates commercial campgrounds charge when what we get in return is a lengthy set of rules, a tedious check-in process, an un-level campsite with dodgy electric, street noise, and neighbors so close we can hear them chewing. We look for the state park and federal sites not because they’re cheaper (or free)  but because they are so much less annoying.

But sometimes you need the full hookups.  In this part of eastern Montana there aren’t a lot of choices in campgrounds.  A few nice-sounding Federal and State campgrounds didn’t have the services we needed and were too far off in the boonies for our needs, so we just grabbed the first commercial campground we could along Route 2, “the Hi-Line” road—and resolved to accept whatever fate handed us.

As it turned out we got pretty lucky and found a residential park that had a few transient spaces available, for $25 a night. The site was a lumpy bit of dirt but it was quiet, the utilities worked and the friendly manager even tipped Eleanor off to the best washing machine in the laundry room. The town was too small to have a decent grocery store but we’d find groceries further west in Havre later.

Last spring when I was planning this trip I wanted to travel the Hi-Line across Montana to see what the small towns and native reservations looked like, and because it was an appealing alternative to I-94. There really isn’t much to grab the tourist’s attention along this route except for a dinosaur museum in Malta, the Fort Peck area around the reservoir, and a few other small curiosities such as a buffalo jump and some roadside art. The road is reputed to be the most dangerous in Montana, due to a 70 MPH speed limit and few passing lanes. Still, I’m glad we took this path at least once.

At Havre we faced a decision: continue along Rt 2 to the Glacier area, or dive south through Great Falls and back to the Interstate at Missoula?  Bert Gildart told us the crowds around Glacier and the Flathead Lake area were unbearable (by Montana standards) and a look at ReserveAmerica confirmed it: all Glacier-area campgrounds booked solid.  No, thanks.  We’ll come back another time when it’s not peak season and the NPS isn’t driving attendance up with their centennial celebration.

So we are going to press on westward, heading for the northwest corner of Washington around the North Cascades National Park, where hopefully things will be quieter.  This means a lot of driving over the weekend, but that’s fine if it yields a few days of really nice country at the end, and this way we’ll arrive in the park when a lot of working folk are heading back to home. Besides, we need to get to Seattle in less than a week, so we’ve dawdled as much as we can.

Two related observations:

1. When I tell non-Airstreamers that we are taking “only” a month to cross the country, they always give me a peculiar look. They’re used to the idea that you can only take off a little vacation time and so such a trip must be a rush-rush thing. So I explain to them that having the Airstream means I can work as I travel—relatively little of my time is spent “vacationing”— and slow down to enjoy things more. Usually this gets me a blanker stare.

   This trip has been a relatively quick one.  We will have traveled well over 3,000 miles from Vermont to Washington in 25 days, which is an average of 120 miles per day. There have been so many times we wished we could detour further, stay longer, relax more on this itinerary.  I think the ideal amount of time to cross the USA is about two to three months. Maybe when we’re closer to retirement we can slow down and travel like we did in the 2005-2008 full-timing days.

2. When thinking about North Cascades National Park, I realized that we have been to 38 of the 58 designated National Parks in the NPS system so far.  We’ll bag two more—Mt Rainier and North Cascades—before this trip is over.  We may never see some of the National Parks (like American Samoa and Virgin Islands) but I do think we’ll continue visiting the 400+ units of the National Park Service for the rest of our lives.  They are an amazing treasure and the best value for an Airstream owner anywhere.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Wisconsin always remind me of Vermont.  There are no mountains here, but the abundant scenic byways, small towns, and long stands of forest are comforting. Except for a few minutes of highway construction in Green Bay, the drive from De Tour Village MI to Sturgeon Bay WI was easy and quiet.

Along the way we stopped in Escanaba to snag a few pasties for lunch, and before we could get out of the car we were visited by two enthusiastic Airstreamers-to-be, who exclaimed “We’ve been following you for an hour!”  At first I thought this might set a record for aluminum stalking but really they were just heading the same direction along Rt 41.  By the time we all pulled into the parking lot at Dobber’s Pasties they had figured out who we were, and we had a nice chat before going inside to get lunch.

Pasty, by the way, does not rhyme with “tasty” although it should.  They’re like calzones on the outside, but without tomato sauce on the inside. Instead they’re filled with diced potatoes, meats, cheese—all kinds of things depending on which type of pasty you choose.  Unfairly, the name rhymes with “nasty,” but let’s overlook that.

They’ve been beloved by Yoopers for generations. We get them whenever we are up here, and clearly from the sign (above) Dobber’s knows it.

The trip plan I posted in yesterday’s blog shows that this dip down to the Door County peninsula is a pretty big detour. We’re doing it for our kid. These days there’s a lot of fear about the perverts and weirdos who kids might meet online, but our experience has been different. Emma has been videochatting online with some pretty cool kids for a couple of years now, and we vowed that we’d make the necessary side trips so she could meet them in person. We met Hannah in Indianapolis on our way to Alumapalooza, and now we’re here to meet Emily from Sturgeon Bay. Both visits have been spectacular successes.

The parents are always a little skeptical at first, which is natural considering what they’re faced with.  A strange family that lives in a trailer and wanders the country like gypsies is going to drop in for a visit?  Imagine what would go through your head.  Lock the doors, keep an eye on their hands, and make sure the ammo is dry, I expect. But all the parents have been great, quickly seeing that we’re only a little weird, and the girls always have a great time.

This time we met them at the Door County Fair and spent a couple of hours on the classic fair rides, and checking out the 4-H exhibits of poultry, rabbits, horses, and an amazing array of baked goods (which inspired me to get back to bread baking when we get home).

While the girls were hanging out, Eleanor and I had a chance to roam up the peninsula to Egg Harbor and walk the town and marina.  We were surprised to see the population listed at merely 201 people.

It’s a small town, kind of like an outpost on Martha’s Vineyard. Tourists outnumber the locals by a fair amount. I was expecting something bigger and more touristy. It’s actually nice to see that much of Door County is quieter and smaller than I expected.

OK, having seen more of the countryside I can see that it’s definitely different from Vermont in a lot of ways (we don’t have cherry orchards, for example), but there’s still a nice country vibe.  My one suggestion to Door County:  get rid of the billboards before they take over, like Vermont did in 1968.

We like Door County enough that we have decided to spend another day here, roaming around and picnicking at one of the sandy beaches, before resuming our northern trek through the national parks.  Tomorrow we’ll head back up and spend the next five or six days around Lake Superior.