Today, two states
Trying to estimate travel times, despite the best gadgets and data from Google, saw us doing that proverbial last mile in the dark. It doesn’t help that a mile is now a foreign concept.
A friendly neighbour, retired from her professional life as a police officer in Alberta, had stopped by from next door. In campground terms, about as far as I can lob a wet slice of bread. She had hints, galore, and we found ourselves busily stocking up in a branch of Camper World before breakfast. There’s a sense of contentment in visiting such a marketplace and realizing that we already have most of the gadgets we need; a set of wheel chocks was the largest item in our cart. Oh, and a copy of “The Next Exit” because the interstate highway system requires details.
Our all day drive across much if Oregon and Idaho underlines hiw large and empty parts of the land really are. Other than a halt for a huge breakfast, we simply drove, refuelled, drove some more. Until about sunset, when we happened across a front of storm cells.
I have a healthy respect for clouds that can start to swirl, and in the brief moments of visibility provided by lightning flashes, I wondered where we would hide in the absence of any shelter. In the end, we outran the risks, and a pair of GPS voices brought us to within turning distance of tonight’s KOA in central Idaho.
The campground had provided us, as late arrivals, with a premarked map, the wifi code and a determination to improve our skills in estimating how far we really want to travel on any given day.
For the record, our new battery works just fine.