Enjoying Our Dash

We have, at the Diamond P. Grassroots Bison Ranch! One of the cool things that’s available for those traveling with an RV these days, is a network of small businesses and individuals who are willing to share their land with RVers.  It is very much like AirBnB for RVers.  Harvest Host https://harvesthosts.com/ and Boondockers Welcome are the two apps that join these groups together.  Harvest Host participants allow you to spend one night for free with no hookups.  All that they ask is that you support their business in some small way.  Harvest Host has almost 4000 locations across the nation.  These locations include wineries, breweries & distilleries, farms, and museums. Below is a map of all the locations. We took advantage of our Harvest Host membership to book a night along our travels in McCammon, Idaho.  https://membership.harvesthosts.com/member/host/profile/diamond-p-grassroots-bison . Here we spent the night at a Bison Ranch.  It was...

Our journey continued across the state of Colorado to the town of Rifle. Once again, the scenery along our route was just beautiful. We were going through the mountains again, but the view was quite different. The roads seemed to have literally been carved out of the mountains. Check out the size of the vehicles, relative to the walls of the mountains. It was just amazing. We stayed at the Rifle Gap State park. https://cpw.state.co.us/placestogo/parks/RifleGap/Pages/Camping.aspx . The campground overlooked a reservoir. We could tell that the reservoir was low by several feet. None the less, the views were beautiful. We also had a chance to go the Rifle Falls State park just down the road. We had a nice hike where we saw waterfalls, caves and some very interesting rock formations,

Our trip to Breckenridge was filled with exciting moments. As we got closer to the Denver area, we began to see the snow-capped mountains which was a huge change from flatland Kansas. The scenery was just so beautiful to look at as we drove down the road. Once we got through Denver, we started to climb the mountains. Again another first for us. It was crazy how Dash, who was clipping along in Kansas at 70 miles, hour suddenly struggled to go up the hills at 50 mph and sometimes, even less than that. As if the journey up the mountain wasn’t exciting enough, as they say what goes up must come down! As we started down the mountain we learned how important the (engine) retarder was. It’s a cool little function, that Dash and most diesel engines have, that assists in downhill braking, so you don’t have to press the brake pedal. Don’t get me wrong, on the really steep hills like we were on, you still need to use the brakes, but the retarder makes it so that you a...

So, as expected, we are experiencing a lot of ‘firsts’ as we travel on our journey. Traveling to and through Kansas was one of them. We continue to learn new things on our journey as well. One thing we have learned is that you always have to be aware of the weather. Not only where you are, but also where you are going, and along the way to your next stop. Fortunately, we have some very good tools to help us. One of those tools is the Windy app. You can also go to their web site, https://www.windy.com/ . This is a great resource for not only the wind speeds, but the current weather and weather forecasts. When you are driving a 38′ x 13′ box down the road and towing a vehicle, it is important to know how much wind you are going to have and which direction it is coming from. Now that you have the set up information for this post, let me tell you the story. We knew from looking at Windy, that the winds traveling from Kansas City to Minooka Park in Kansa...

We had a chance to stop at Worlds of Village located at the Worlds of Fun Amusement Park just outside of Kansas City, Mo. https://reservations.worldsoffun.com/wof/ . It was a really neat place to stay. It is not often that you park your motorhome within ear shot of roller coaster riders screaming at the top of their lungs! As many of you know, Cole is a very sensitive dog and he gets very concerned when he thinks person or a dog is in distress. Every time he heard the rider screaming on our walks, I had to reassure him that everyone was fine and that they were really screams of joy. (Yes, I’m taking some liberties here.)

We stayed at a beautiful campground just outside of Nashville for a few nights. It was located on a peninsula that had the J Percy Priest reservoir on one side and a marina and smaller part of the reservoir on the other side. Check out the map below. We had some great views from our site and around the campground. Elm Hill Marina While we were out on a walk Cole & I saw this. I asked him what he thought…his response was an emphatic, no thank you, Momma! We went into the city and checked out some of the sights there as well. We had a good time and some good food too!