Foots and footwashes

Miles 1459 to 2498
Fort Robinson NE to Rawlins WY to Fernley NV

It has been said that Olaf never passes up a footwash. that is true.  I also would say that I do not particularly like Utah. They hate dogs...yes they hate dogs, banning them from the Wasatch Valley, and Utah's motto"Life Elevated" really bugs me as they seem smug about it.  As such, I prefer never to spend any money there, and this footwash at the Bonneville Salt Flats served to wash the stench of it off me.

Do people only wash ONE foot in these things?  I had a foot, another foot, some dog "foots" and as they had a wash, I washed.  I was thinking, why don't they call it a feetwash? If you have a lot of foots, isn't that a lot of feet?  I don't know.

Well we are a thousand miles farther down the road and we learned a lot in Wyoming, valuable RV teaching points.

1) Avoid the wind.  

It blew, and after being pushed around by 40mph winds we holed up in Rawlins and it passed.
to avoid this we learned to keep birder hours, on the road before dawn and tucked in by early afternoon before the wind gets bad

Rawlins was so windy, it was hard to bird,harder to photograph and even deer were hiding behind hedges.  It knew to hunker down in the wind too.  This one was on the front lawn of the hospital.It hissed at my dog.

I was too pooped to go and tour the old prison.

2) DEF is a strange deal.

We have a diesel.  We need to buy DEF (Diesel emission fluid).  My last diesel was a 2004, it didn't need this stuff.  DEF is urea plus water.  It crystalizes and makes a mess. It is hard to actually put in the rig.  It varies in price from about 2.79/ gallon to 10.00 a gallon.  It is all over the board.  No truck stop we've been to has a pump....that would be nice.  I'd pay more for gas just to have a pump

3) It seems there are a myriad of buttons and eventually you figure out everything...eventually

Our TV works!  
It took us 14 days to get the TV to work, thankfully tonight.  We have got the Sat TV to work, but not since Nebraska, more work needs to be done.
I just figured out the bright lights
We still are perplexed by two cable hook ups, which one?  There is a button and a fan in the bedroom near the TV which we have no clue what it is for.

Back to Utah......It is a pretty state as we followed the Donner's path into the state near the ill-fated decision to follow the Hastings Cutoff rather than the normal northward loop of the California trail.  It would be the first of many mistakes.

My dog and me enjoying the salt flats, sorry Utah, she will be gone straight away.  I was minding my own business when I saw something.

then a story I shared yesterday on Facebook...

I'm not even sure if this is the strangest thing I saw today as we see some very very strange crap. back 300 miles in Wyoming, three empty car carriers zip past us on I-80, then we see them acting strange at a rest area. Flash forward to the Bonneville Salt Flats.where I walking the dog.....the car carriers pull off the freeway onto the salt. They stop. A guy in the third rig pulls out and they line up and then, they race. Green takes the prize. have you ever seen car carriers race?

Unreal!
Then they pull onto the freeway and away they go....

So we ended up in West Wendover....a place that has been trying to unite Wendover Utah for years.  They used to have split time zones, Wendover Utah has tried to succeed from Utah but it hasn't happened yet.  They did put West Wendover into Mountain Tine, however.  I was hear during my big year and got a good picture of the east side of Will, this year, I'm on the west side

So I walk across the crosswalk and this RV just slams on the brakes in the middle of the road in the wrong lane. I watch as the woman in the front takes a picture of Will through the windshield, impervious to the traffic. Traffic stopped, they took pictures and then pulled out in front of that SUV and off they went..

4.  RVs are big, people will try to get out of your way. If you need to block traffic, just do it.  I'm a road hazard going up and down mountain passes and I go down as slow as I go up, I put on my flashers and I don't care.  I'm like the tractor blocking the road, if you want to go faster, just go around.  From Captain Ron.  "I learned driving the Saratoga that people will just get out of your way.

I passed 4 trucks today and one car.  That was a pretty good day. Yesterday, it was only two.

The other big goings on was a strange collection of car carriers parked in Wendover carrying Teslas, they looked to be just parked there indefinitely.  Hum...makes one wonder why?

Well tomorrow we drive near Donner Pass (I80 is not on the pass as the old highway was)  Hopefully we will fare better then they did all those years ago,  We stalked up with groceries just in case.

At least my feet are clean.

Olaf

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The Toadstools of Nebraska

Voyage of the Land yacht
Miles 729-1459
East Bethel MN to Brookings SD to Fort Robinson Nebraska

It is exactly 9 dead racoons from Brookings SD to Fort Robinson Nebraska, 461 miles.  Add in two dead cats, a dead coyote and something dead that my wife and I could not agree with, add in a very lackluster Vikings game on the radio and it made for a long day in the RV. a bit too moch as the cats started howling when we drove through Chadron, the Magic city (which has nothing to do with magic) and we still had 30 miles to go.

I did a book festival in Brookings, which was poorly laid out and as such, I won't waste my time there again.  It is a mystery of why they moved the biennial east river event from Sioux Falls to Brookings, maybe it was money or maybe just that the organizers don't want to have to drive to the largest city in the state.  It was a forlorned two days for everyone.

But enough of that, now we are in Nebraska, heading west.  Fort Robinson is a cool old Army base steeped in history.

Largely intact, the 140 year old fort served as an internment spot to subdue plains native Americans and then as headquarters of the 9th military and then as the largest quartermaster redoubt in the world from 1919-World War II breeding Army horses and mules.  In World War II it served as a housing for 2,000 German POWs from Rommel's North Afrika Corps.  The only trouble these prisoners of war caused was in another Nebraska camp when they ran our of beer, they rioted.  They accepted 3.2 beer ...reluctantly..

It has been largely restored since closing in 1947 and wirth the USDA pulling out in 1971.  It is a large and generally cool base, they have a nice campground and fairly healthy prairie steppe.

There is also an unsolved mystery of who killed a hobo on the Chicago Northwestern RR line to Lander WY right at this spot in 1940.

This was 63 years after Crazy Horse was killed a few hundred yards north.  It was pretty clear what happened there.

North of here is the Toadstool Geologic Park, it is basically badlands with a two foot layer of sandstone on top of the mud.  The mud erodes quicker.  Much of them have fallen down since being named.

I saw a common checkered skipper, a new butterfly

7 McCown's longspurs and a few odds and ends sparrows

Plus a last look at the sandridge prairie as tomorrow we climb the Pine Ridge before getting into Wyoming.  We will make the Rocky's tomorrow by noon.

I'm camped next to an military doctor buddy from Chuck Probst, an accomplished world lister and Hawaii birding guru who I birded with during my big year in Maui, small world.  Chuck's old Vietnam pal doesn't understand birders much like those at the Brookings Book Festival, we are a misunderstood lot, but oh well....it works for me.

Cheers!
Olaf

Of Ties and Tailgating

Chapter 4:  Of Ties and Tailgating

Excerpts from “Project X”

Miles 234-728, East Bethel. MN to Madison, WI

            It had been a very warm September week in East Bethel, MN for the first two weeks of our self-imposed exile from the world and slowly but surely we began to figure out what we needed and what we didn’t need in “Big Bird” our 34 foot land-yacht.  We didn’t need three cats.  We need individual storage buckets for underneath and we needed a longer sewage hose.  We need to lock a very friendly cat in the bathroom in the middle of night or that would be the end of sleep.  We need to move our rig the next time we come here to try to get satellite television due to a misplaced tree.  I also need an eastern screech owl but I didn’t need a barred owl, which, it seemed was almost as bad as Snowball the cat at night.

            Our last week in paradise we went to a baseball game in Minneapolis and I started to think, we needed a better team.  In 31 baseball games since 1977, I had never seen the Twins beat the hated (or loved) Yankees at home.  I was 0-31.  It was a painful, three stadiums of memories.  I had seen Reggie Jackson smack a monster homerun off the red scoreboard in right back in 1977 and then take a curtain call from the Twins faithful late in a game when I was 11 and then later, I saw Roger Clemons make one of his many “last starts” to beat up the Twinks and this year, my boys lost 7-2 in a very uninspired game.  The Twins fielded a team in September that consisted of 9 players that combined had hit 32 homeruns, one less than Giancarlo Stanton, the newest Yankee slugger that had hit 33 by himself.  Even the umps wanted to go home. In the seventh inning, he called a Twin batter out after a called second strike.  That is not something you see every day.  Even the Yankee catcher stood and patted the ump on the shoulder, after the batter looked confused at his early retirement.  The ump reversed his call and two pitches later, a soft line drive made the out “official.”

            The next night, we went to Hamilton.  In some sort of technical problem, the doors remained closed for almost an hour while we felt like cattle stuck in a slaughterhouse.  Then we were let in to a performance by understudies and fill in talent.  It wasn’t a bad performance, but for $200, I expected more.  Alexander Hamilton was a self-righteous man who traded moving the capital to the South for nothing.  He claimed the moral high ground except that he was more immoral than most, having affairs and leading to his son’s death by dual, before his own.  Aaron Burr was not any better and in some respects, both should have never left that New Jersey field alive back in the day.  The dual should have been a tie where both lost.  I guess, it was something to do and oddly, the night we were at the play a few blocks from Target Field, the Twins beat up on the Yankees and the night before our night at the Orpheum, Hamilton was played by their main cast….oh well, the story of my life.

            Our final weekend in camp featured a deck party hosted by us on our new "deck", that featured 50 guests and then on Sunday we sat on a neighbor’s deck to root for our side of the battle of the North, Packers versus Vikings.  

The rest of my family was in Lambeau rooting for Gang Green.  My wife brought purple and yellow chips to the deck party.  The game, never really ended as no one lost, or no one won.  Ties are like that.  In the end, the biggest loser was the Vikings rookie kicker named Daniel Carlson.  He kicked himself out of a job and two misses in overtime cost the Vikings a win.    He might have a “Viking” sounding name but the rookie was most recently at Auburn, Alabama and was from Colorado Springs, Colorado so in the end,  he wasn’t up to being a real Viking. 

            Much like the football game, the rest of what happened that weekend could not be properly described in writing, you just had to be there, so I will spare you the prose.

            On September 17^th, we drove down to Madison to see our son, Allwin.  Silja had never visited him in Madison, now in his second year of PhD studies at UW as it always seemed difficult for her to leave our daughter for a few days.  I stopped off at Necedah NWR to look for cranes and find a red headed woodpecker for “Project X” and we saw two cranes 10 miles west of the refuge out in a field, so not able to get them for my project, but found cooperative woodpeckers in the usual area.  Necedah is the easiest place to get this somewhat elusive woodpecker, I’ve ever found.  

There were trumpeter swans everywhere but there were also mosquitoes everywhere, even  mid-day in heat.  Brighid the dog was looking for any water she could find, and if it meant her falling off rip-rap, that was okay for her.

 Madison was still the same place I worked at back in the day as a Capitol page, but I never went to school here.  I was accepted to Medical School but I got such a recruitment to be an MD/PhD researcher here that it turned me off and I instead went to Minnesota.  This time, we walked around the campus and ate at the Terraces. 

I touched “Abe’s toe” on Bascam Hill for luck like I last did in 1984 before the Wisconsin State Forensics Championships.  That worked when I was a high school senior and my Demo speech on Ice fishing completed an undefeated year.  I guess it also worked this time, as we had a great visit with Allwin.  We miss him and he seemed to miss us, too.  We have thousands upon thousands of miles to go, so we need all the "luck" we can get.  We haven’t seen as much of him since he went to Europe to study in college and now, here.  Nine hours seems close but we never end up driving this way. 

We hiked around Lake Mendota, saw his lab, and then in between meals, while he went to an engineering class, we hung out at Barnes and Noble.  Maybe I’m writing about the wrong topics?

The weather is changing, and so after an all-too-brief visit we headed up the road to our next point of call.  We sort of left feeling like the football game, we hadn't won, nor lost.  It felt like a tie.  It was nice to be here, but sad to leave.  Allwin agreed to take the dog in February when we take this journey south to Uruguay on our way to points even farther south, so that was good.  It will be best to know that the family’s best friend is in good hands when we are off the grid in the South Atlantic. 

We love you Allwin!

Project X  9/17/2018

39.  Wild Turkey

40.  Red-headed woodpecker