On The Road At Last

After some delays, due to varying reasons we finally left Calgary and started heading south, the weather in Calgary had not been the best for the beginning of May. In September, we sold our house rid our selves of most of our possessions (it never ceases to amaze me how much junk you can accumulate over the years) and moved out of our home for the last 10 years.
We bundled what few things we had not put into storage took them to Edmonton where Stewart had been renting a furnished Condo for the last 6 years for work reasons, his home away from home. We moved out of the Condo at the end of April and moved into “Domo” our new home for the foreseeable future and headed to Calgary for a few days to sort out some things, place more items in storage and pickup some others. It didn’t take long to realize just how limited our space was and perhaps we still had too much “junk”.
We left Calgary on May 6, 2017, mileage on the truck was 71660km heading south towards Flagstaff to attend Overland Expo West, we had no sooner crossed the US boarder into Montana when Catherine received a text message from her cousin who was driving back to Calgary from Florida and coincidentally would be staying in Great Falls, MT that evening so we arranged to meet them for dinner.

We are ready to hit the road!

After dinner, we found a campsite and had our first nights stay on the road, celebrated by having some 20-year-old port and blue cheese.

We were up early and on the road for 8:30am continuing south having breakfast in Helena, MT. We drove some back road from here where we discovered Lewis & Clark Caverns – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_and_Clark_Caverns

From Lewis & Clark Caverns we continued south on HWY-287 towards West Yellowstone. Upon arriving in West Yellowstone we grabbed a bite to eat at a local brew pub (Buffalo Bar) before finding a campsite for the night just on the north side of town in a state park.
Up early in the morning headed to McDonalds for breakfast and some wifi.
After catching up on world affairs we entered Yellowstone National Park purchasing a year pass. Heading down to Old Faithful where we stopped and observed a herd of Buffallo. Arriving at Old Faithful we had about 45 minutes to wait before it was due to erupt.

Old Faithfull starting to erupt

Full eruption

We wanted to go south through Yellowstone but the road was still closed from winter so had to backtrack through West Yellowstone and head south to Jackson, WY. We arrived in time to pick up some groceries and a meal, after dinner we called in at Snake River Brewery to sample a local brew. We camped this night in the Albertsons carpark.

Jackson, WY.

We left Jackson the next morning, as our time was running out to get to Flagstaff on time we decided that today would be a long driving day and made it to Salina, UT. Again arriving around 6:30 pm at our chosen campground just find out there bathrooms were under renovation with no reduction in cost we decided to head up the street to the next campground who wanted to charge us $25US for a site with no facilities!
Half a block up the road towards HWY-70 was a truckstop with a Mexican restaurant in the carpark where we had dinner (food was good with large portions) and camped the night.
After a good nights sleep we continued travelling south, first destination was Bryce Canyon, UT. As we climbed up to Bryce, the clouds started to move in and by the time we arrived at the lookout it was almost zero visability. We opimistically donned our camera’s hoping the mist would disapate but to no avail. The clouds teased us with small glimpses of what was down in the canyon.

After the disapointment of Bryce Canyon we thought we would try our luck with Zion National Park. Zion was stunning, Catherine took over 400 pictures and admitted to being tired of taking pics. The pictures don’t do it justice. We drove through the tunnel, which goes right through the mountain.