We plan to leave the beginning of August, travelling along I80 across to the home of one of Paul’s cousins in Beatrice near Lincoln, Nebraska where we plan to spend a few days visiting with them and some of the others from Kansas. After that, we will continue across I80 until we get close to Wyoming when we’ll leave the interstate and plan to head northwest on secondary roads. We’ll spend time east of Yellowstone in a number of State Forest Campgrounds before heading through Yellowstone to camp on the west side while we tour through the magnificent park. After a week or so in Yellowstone, we’ll head south to tour around Grand Teton National Park. This is an area we haven’t travelled before and are looking forward to seeing the huge peaks. As we leave the Teton’s we will head northeast and by September hope to be in South Dakota and then North Dakota. The badlands and Theodore Roosevelt Parks hold some great wonders and it’s been many years since we were able to travel through that area. Current plans will see us follow US Hwy 2 across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan before returning home. We’ll see how the fall foliage is by the end of September!
Blog
And we’re home!
After 3 1/2 months on the road, we arrived home at 4:30 September 5th! We were fortunate to arrive home in nice weather which made it much nicer to unpack the trailer.
After leaving Glacier National Park, we headed across highway 2. Once again, we experienced high winds in both Montana and North Dakota. While it wasn’t a complete headwind, it did affect our fuel mileage. We were really glad to get into Minnesota and more trees to help shelter us. We also had some really high temperatures in the prairies – up mid-30’s, Celsius!
We spent a few nights on the road staying in some of the same local parks that we had on the way out – Havre, MT was a Good Sam Park but Culbertson, MT, Michigan, ND, Floodwood, MN and Crystal Falls, MI were all city-owned parks. They ranged from a parking lot with no services but free, to a wooded park with electric and water.
As we neared our last night in upper Michigan on Sunday, we saw large signs at the side of the road saying the Mackinaw Bridge would be closed on Monday morning from 6:30 to noon for the annual bridge walk. It was the first year they were closing the bridge but felt in the interest of public safety it was the best to do. We were really glad they had the signs out. This led us to some conversations about what to do though for camping on Sunday night. We had planned on a national forest campground just west of the bridge. Should we cross Sunday night so we weren’t delayed crossing the next morning? The problem might be finding a campsite south of the bridge. In the end we decided to stay as planned and get up at 5 am and cross the bridge before it closed. We did that and everything worked out fine.
The nice bonus for staying in the National Forest Campground was having a campfire (the first in weeks due to fire bans) as well as a nice sunset over Lake Michigan….
Our last night we stayed about an hour from the US/Canada border at a boondocker’s tree farm. Although we had significant road delays due to the heavy Labour Day traffic, it was a nice place to stay and we were welcomed by our hosts. We appreciated their flexibility in our arrival time.
Some stats from our trip:
Total km driven: 23330
Total km driven with the trailer attached: 17090
Total km driven without the trailer (day trips): 6240
Total spent on camping fees (in Canadian $$): $ 2720.05 (about 60% was in USD)
Total spent on fuel (in Canadian $$): $ 4139.30 (about 60% was in USD)
Following Joyce & Paul's Travels in Retirement 