Terri and Peter's RV Adventures

The day started full of ambition, with visions of a long but smooth drive from beautiful Utah Lake State Park to Laramie, Wyoming. We’d hitched the trailer last night, ready for an early start, which we got. Peter was up before dawn, doing the final preparations to leave and I followed suit. Just as the sun was rising we were off and decided to go to the public sewer spot before leaving just to have a clean start after the showers and dishes we’d done over the past two days, confident in our newly repaired system (at great expense, but I’ll leave that for another day).

It soon became clear that the repair guy had missed a part that connects the grey and black tanks together so one hose can attach to do the release, shall we say. Turns out, Peter had assumed the tech knew what he was doing, the tech assumed Peter and I knew what looked right and what didn’t. Calling up Andrew, the repair guy, we quickly realized what happened and despite the huge frustration of this thing not being fixed and continuing to be a presence on our trip, everyone took responsibility for their part. We all owned our role and apologized. We were already 45 minutes east of Salt Lake City so the next strategy which we pulled off rather nicely, was to find an RV repair in Council Bluffs, IA, our next “large” city down I80.

To move on from this never-ending saga, we found a great RV sales and service shop, they’re ordering the part and we will be there at 10 am somehow on Monday morning to get the thing fixed. The rest of the day was a very long drive through the entire state of Wyoming, accomplished by drinking copious amounts of coffee. Realizing we didn’t have a usable bathroom or shower and our dishwashing days were limited, we realized the good RV park options (nice bathrooms being essential) were nowhere to be found in Laramie and Cheyenne. The reviews were laughable, including “I stayed at the Walmart parking lot rather than at that rip off of a place.” And that was one of the nicer comments. So, we decided to drive an extra 45 miles to Cheyenne and book a room at a no-tell motel (Fairfield Inn).

Don’t tell anyone but we took a slight detour off I80 at one point and decided to empty our grey tank on gravel out in the middle of nowhere. To be sure, grey water is just shower and dish washing water but still it felt a bit like smoking weed behind the school.

We didn’t get caught and went on our way, past high country brown fields still dotted with snow, diamond sparkling snowy mountain ranges in the far distance and generally a lot of nothing. There were some unusual striated exposed rocky hillsides of shades of grey and some pink. Towns dotted the countryside every 200 miles or so. It’s a pretty desolate place and you get the feeling that a gold rush of oil or natural gas has created these overnight company towns filled with young men making their fortunes or at least hoping to.

Before settling into our hotel room we stopped for dinner at the Down Home Diner. Not exactly a Michelin restaurant but not bad for a diner. Just be sure to order diner food, not the Cobb salad I warned Peter not to order. (I knew he should have gone for the meatloaf and he agreed later.)

The dogs were champs over the 9 hour drive. Couldn’t have asked for more. Glad to be ensconced in this room, grateful to have the resources to be here and make the choices we make. Tomorrow, it’s on to our first Harvest Host stay at a dairy farm in Nebraska. Harvest Host is like Air BNB or a B and B only for RVs. People share their property (farms, wineries, distilleries, etc) and you’re expected to buy some of their product. I’m looking forward to this experience.