Road Trip #20 – OH, IA, SD, MT, WA, OR, CA, NV, UT, CO

Posted 2 months ago by Kram

Road Trip #20 to Washington and Oregon is underway and the first stop from NC is Hocking Hills State Park in Ohio. This state park is easily one of our countries best. It is what geology is all about. The hiking is fantastic at all levels. Rained pretty much all weekend but that didn’t stop us. 

Well I have a news flash. The great state of Indiana has surpassed the great state of Louisiana for having the worst stretch of road in America for RV traveling. I can’t believe how bad I-70 is starting at the Ohio and Indiana border. Has any of the Indiana politicians driven on the highway? The patches and crappy repairs are worse than some of the sections that are craters and still in need of repair. Probably should have gone after some of that infrastructure money. 

Our next stop is the Amana Colonies in Iowa. It was a long, long drive. We are staying at the Amana RV Park and Event Center for two nights. It is a really nice, large, and spaced out campground. Surprisingly it is just about empty on this Monday and Tuesday in June. It will be interesting to see the campground occupancy rates on this road trip. Spent the day walking around Amana and putting all of my Antique Roadshow watching to good use. It is really pleasing on the eyes to see all of the gardens and flowers planted and blooming.

We left Amana, Iowa and headed for Mitchell, South Dakota. It is a 432 mile drive day. Our destination is the KOA in Mitchell. We made a pit stop for gas at Wall Drug. A first class tourist trap. Should be up there near the top. KOA’s are always hit or miss, but the Mitchell KOA is very nice. The sites are spacious and the campground is very clean. Speaking of first class tourist traps, while we were in Mitchell, we felt we had to visit the Corn Palace. So we loaded up the truck and headed over to see what a corn palace is all about.

It rained all night, which makes for great sleep in an RV, especially with the windows open. We had an early morning departure and headed for our next stop, which is 540 miles down the road, to 7th Ranch RV Camp in Garryowen, MT. This campground is right next to the Little Big Horn. Perfect spot if you are looking for some serious history from two different view points. We have visited the Little Big Horn previously, so we are just overnighting at 7th Ranch, which happens to be a beautiful campground. Spotless!

Our next stop was for one night at Jim & Mary’s RV Park in Missoula MT. That is the name of it and I picked it randomly based on their website. Turned out to be one of the nicer RV parks we have visited. They have their own greenhouse and flowers and gardens are everywhere. The sites are level and spacious. Very pretty RV campground. 

Headed to Wilbur WA for one night. Sort of in the middle of nowhere. We did have Billy Burgers.

Now that we are in the state of Washington, we stopped for a couple of days at Winthrop WA for a visit to North Cascades National Park. According to Notloc, it is  considered one of the least visited National Parks. I guess because it is sort of remote, but it is not that far from Seattle. We found it quite scenic and put it right up there with Glacier NP. I believe it actually has more glaciers remaining than Glacier NP. We took a day trip up Lake Chelan to Stehekin, which is a small little village only reachable by boat. The Cougar is nestled in at Silverline Lakeside RV Resort, which is only about two miles from Winthrop. 

Weaved around Washington and headed toward the Olympic peninsula. Not real easy getting around. Dipped down toward Olympia and drove up 101 to Port Townsend, the home of Fort Worden State Park. We had site 40 at the beach campground. Fort Worden is a very interesting state park.  Old gun emplacements and museums on site. The gas prices in Washington are criminal and I don’t know how the people stand it.

We are here on the west coast of Washington for several days and will be visiting the diverse Olympic National Park. It is a big national park. For day one, we headed to Lake Crescent and hiked to Marymere Falls and did some of the hikes around the lodge. For the second day at Olympic we got up very early and headed up to Hurricane Ridge, which is a brutal hike by our standard. 

Olympic National Park is extremely large with varied mountains and forests, along with several costal areas. We covered the park pretty well and it was a lot of driving from our base at Port Townsend. In hindsight, Port Angeles would make much more sense to use as a base camp for visiting Olympic NP, and reduce a lot of driving time. 

After five days staying in Port Townsend, we headed to the coastal side of the peninsula and stayed at Pacific Beach State Park for two nights. This is a really nice state park with electric hook ups only. They had a dump station and a potable water fill up station. After a brief stay camping on the Pacific, we headed inland to Ike Kinswa State Park for a brief visit to Mt. Rainier National Park.

Only about a 3 hour drive from Pacific Beach State Park to Ike Kinswa State Park. We had a great full hook up site at Ike Kinswa. It was about an hour drive from Ike Kinswa to the Mt. Rainier National Park entrance. Like Mt Olympus in Olympic National Park, Mt Rainier was also socked in by low hanging clouds. You never know what you will be able to see at the higher elevations. Some of the roads inside Mt Rainier are still closed and not scheduled to open for a few more weeks. So we are limited and could not get up into the Sunrise area. We mostly stayed in the Paradise area.

We had a great visit to Mt. Rainier. We got up early to start heading to Oregon, and on the way we stopped by the Mt. St. Helens visitor center. We had to wait a little bit for it to open but it was worth the stop. Mt St Helens erupted in May of 1980. Fortunately, there was plenty of warning to get people out of the blast area, It lost 1314 feet off its top. It is still active today. I guess that is why a lot of these mountains in the Cascades look like volcano’s, because that is what they are.

To complete camping in the Cougar in the lower 48 states, we need Oregon. This will be number 48. So our next stop was Crater Lake National Park. This park is definitely out in the middle of nowhere. We stayed at a KOA and it was also in the middle of nowhere. Crater Lake is really a site for the eyes. A collapsed volcano. Quite the view. 

Onto Redwood, and lucky for us, we stopped to refuel in Grants Pass, OR, and what do you know, right across the street is a big beautiful In-N-Out Burger. Life’s simple pleasure, a really good fast food burger.

We dipped into California to see the big trees. A quick 4 day trip to Redwood National and State Parks.  We stayed at Nerak’s favorite campground, Crescent City/Redwood KOA. She just loves all the little running free and caged doggies pooping all over the place. The big trees are a sight to see. It’s another one of those things where pictures don’t do them the justice they deserve. Hundreds of feet tall and thousands of years old. The big trees are so cool. The Crescent City area could use some revitalization. But that holds true for much of America.

We had a spare day and set out north up the Oregon coast. We were in search of fish and chips and found a gem. For gas, nothing beats the gas prices on the various reservations. Almost makes the western gas prices tolerable.

After our visit to Redwood National Park, we headed east to our next stop in Winnemucca NV for one night. It was a brutal drive from Crescent City CA to Winnemucca NV. I never realized how desolate southern Oregon was. I expected desolation in Nevada, but not Oregon. After an overnight stay in Winnemucca, we headed to our next stop, Vernal UT. It was a short drive from Vernal to Dinosaur National Monument. Great place to learn about the dinosaurs. We stayed at Fossil Valley RV Park in Vernal and it was very nice and clean. It is located right in the middle of town and had a really good donut store across the street. 

Our next stop was Granby CO for a couple of days to visit Rocky Mountain National Park. 14,000 feet is above my threshold. The high altitude made me fill ill. The campground was at 8,000 feet. I really felt putrid. 

Headed back to North Carolina. Road Trip 20 was a lot of driving and its pretty hard to travel much farther than from North Carolina to the coast of Washington state and back. The trip was just about 7,000 miles and there were a lot of good roads and a lot of really, really crappy roads. I was very surprised by the geologic diversity in the state of Oregon. State road 140 from Grants Pass to Winnemucca NV is quite the trip. Road trip 20 was a pretty good adventure and completed our goal of physically camping in the Cougar in all 48 states.

I think my favorites out of the 48 were Maine and Utah. Notloc’s favorite was Yellowstone and Carlsbad Caverns. Nerak, not surprising, cannot decide, but she seems to be leaning toward some of the Florida state parks in the Destin area. She tends to favor beaches, then deserts, then mountains.

Notloc was a great travel companion again and has accompanied us on Road Trips 10, 17, and 20. Not sure what our next plan is going to be, but we need to hit some of the more local sites in the east, such as Shenandoah National Park. Going to have to hit the research and get planning. 

 

6 thoughts on “Road Trip #20 – OH, IA, SD, MT, WA, OR, CA, NV, UT, CO”

  1. Terri Cowell says:

    Looks like a great trip so far. Hocking Hills looks awesome. Dave and I will have to make sure we get there. Safe Travels ♥️

    • Kram says:

      Hello Terri and Dave,
      So far we have been having very nice “cool” weather. The farther North and West we are getting, the cooler the nights have been. We will be in Washington tomorrow.

      Kram, Nerak, and Notloc

    • Kram says:

      Hello Terri,
      It was a long trip. I kind of look forward to more East Coast travel. But there is nothing like the West.

      Kram

      P.S. the Italian tomato plant is looking good. I hope I can pull off fall tomatoes!

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