Travel Update 4

Our first week of hurrying across the country had several nice stops. Two of which already have their own post, Craters of the Moon and The Geographic Center. However we also stopped several other  lovely places so we wanted to do a quick travel update to include pictures we took of those places as well.

We stayed by a lake in Idaho near the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area. We didn't see any raptors but the lake was still lovely.

Further in Idaho we worked very carefully to have Andreas take a picture of the odometer as it hit 222,222.2 while Kathleen drove. We were probably more excited about that than we needed to be, but we like numbers.

Right before we left Idaho we stayed by one more beautiful lake. It was pretty but super cold. It actually started snowing softly before we left. Afterward we crossed through quite a snowstorm in Wyoming but just kept moving. 

In Wyoming we stayed in one of our rare paid campgrounds at Vedauwoo in the Medicine Bow campground. It was absolutely beautiful but a little chilly because it was up above 8,000 feet. 

 

We wrapped on the week in Kansas City, Kansas. Andreas's friend from his Masters program lives in Missouri and was coaching in a soccer tournament in Kansas City. We stopped off to watch one of his games and get lunch together. We love meeting up with people on the road. 

The Geographic Center

Given that we only had two weeks between weddings on opposite sides of country we mostly spent those two weeks driving quickly across. We partially chose our route to be direct and we partially chose our route for how funny it looked in the stickers on the back of the RV. 

We also wanted to see the geographic center of the lower 48. One of the books we read was American Gods by Neil Gaiman. One of the minor premises of the book is that roadside attractions are modern day holy places. His explanation: 

“It's perfectly simple," said Wednesday. "In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or...well, you get the idea." 

"There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow. 

"In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog, and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”

One of the places in the book is mentioned as the exact opposite of one of those holy places. There was a contrived plan to make a roadside attraction but the magic just wasn’t there. The gods avoid it unless they are forced to be there. 

After this description, and given the face that we are into things like mathematically calculating the center, we decided we had to visit. So we planned our mid-way point to be Lebanon, Kansas and the park at the geographic center of the lower 48. We were not disappointed. 

Overall the park was just as gods forsaken as we were expecting, but still interesting. And a fitting place to make the middle of our drive across the country. 

Expense Report: September

September was another fairly expensive month. We drove a ton in Alaska, all the way back to the lower 48, and started east across the country.

Maintenance: We blew another tire, so we replaced the ones that were older. We also did a little bit of work on the house.

New Tires : $608
More "home depot" type purchases: $21
RV running total: $18,323

Fuel - We've updated our Fuel log! We drove further in September than we did in August, so naturally we used more fuel.

This month, we drove 4369 miles on 330 gallons of gas, averaging 13.2 MPG (up from last month!)

Gas: $1140

Propane: $12 - We only needed to get propane once. We're amazed at how long the propane lasts, but we haven't been doing much with it besides cook and run a fridge.

Food: $706. We didn't do a good job avoiding restaurants this month, especially in Anchorage. Groceries only account for $250 of this and are the source of most of our meals. Duck football season isn't helping.

Pets : It's hard to separate pets from groceries, since we usually pick up what we need at the same time, so I've included them with food and will do so going forward. Usually it's roughly the same as last month: $60-$70 for dog food, cat food and litter.

Entertainment: $336 - This is almost entirely our Kenai Fjord tour cruise.

Lodging: $10 - We, again, only spent one night at a site we needed to pay for, in Seward.

Ferries: $716 - Turns out putting an RV on a boat is expensive. The ferries got us from Prince Rupert to Vancouver Island and then back to Washington.

Phone and Internet: $60

Haircut for Kathleen: $18

Other Expenses: $45 - We had to buy new hiking pants at Value Village. Kathleen tore holes in the bottom of both of her pair of jeans and they were past repairing. So this was another necessary expense.

Total Travel Expenses for September: ~$3675

Craters of the Moon

As we were driving through Idaho on a highway picked for no other reason than the fact that it was not a freeway, we came across The Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. We decided that this was exactly the type of place where we like to stop. 

There was a nice visitor center, complete with a movie, about the volcanic origins of the park. The park is over 600 square miles and is a remnant of volcanic activity between 15,000 and 2,000 years ago. The landscape reminded us a lot of the lava fields on highway 242 from Eugene to Sisters except that it was overall much flatter. 

They had several interesting examples of different lava formations. The first one that we looked at was the cinder cone. There are several big examples of these along the cascades. They are formed when lava sprays out in little droplets which cool and harden in the air to make small lava rocks. These little rocks often get carried in the wind a short distance from where they were expelled from the earth and then pile up to make a hill. It was still very very windy on the top of that hill. 

This image is not slanted

Near the cinder cone was the splatter cone. The splatter cone was the hole from which the lava making the cinder cone emerged. As the volcanic activity starts to slow down and there is less force pushing the lava out it starts to come out in big globs rather than the minute spray. Here the lava stays near the hole it came out of, congealing in globs on the sides. 

  

The park also has lava caves but we didn’t get a chance to explore those. Some of them are relatively accessible but you need to get a permit. Others are supposed to be very cool but require major spelunking skills that we don’t have. 

Overall, a pretty cool and unexpected stopover on our journey east.