Slower Life on the Road

May 23, 2021

Each of our stops for the rest of the season will be at least a week. Whew! We appreciate being able to slow things down a little bit. This post, for example, covers our adventures from May 19-23.

Geocaching

We spent one of our days in Tremonton, Utah geocaching in surrounding counties. Dave has several objectives including finding at least one cache in a series of contiguous counties from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. Also, he would like to have a variety of caches in each state we visit. So . . .

We stopped along busy Highway 89 between Wellsville and Brigham City for two caches. One was an earth cache (A Tropical Reef in Utah) where a roadcut exposed fossils of brachiopods and horn corals from over 300 million years ago when this part of Utah was at the bottom of the sea slightly south of the equator.

Travel bugs are registered with Geocaching.com and have goals of traveling to one locale or another. [We took one bug, a stuffed Olaf, from Banff in Alberta Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska.] Cache owners can designate their caches as “Travel Bug Hotels”. The largest one we’ve seen was under a beautiful spruce tree.

Our last cache adventure of the day was a WhereIGo (Where I Go) where we had to answer a question at each of 12 stations and then find the log to sign. The cache was set in a heavily wooded park with a stream, a reservoir, and information placards on local birds and mammals. The trail was about three miles. We treated ourselves to a nice supper before heading back to Tremonton.

Not Getting the Coach Steps Repaired

As soon as we set up at our site in Tremonton, we called a recommended mobile repair person to arrange to have the steps repaired. [They had gotten cranky two stops ago, but repair shops are hard to come by in towns of 500.] We were assured there would be no problem getting the work done in the week we were there, but daily calls revealed that the shop was busy and the part hadn’t been ordered or that the part hadn’t come in. By the time the part came in but we had left Tremonton for Hagerman, Idaho, dragging a 4-foot step ladder in and out of the coach so we didn’t have to stress our aging bodies by jumping and climbing. Our stress level was heightened by a discovery that a canvas cover over one of the slide-out-rooms was malfunctioning and was catching much more wind than it should have and by rain and high winds on the road. One of us has a vivid imagination and wondered if the wind was going to rip the slide cover (it’s about 15 feet long) off and send it into traffic.

We made some calls while on the road and stopped by a repair shop outside of Twin Falls, Idaho that also provides mobile service. We hoped to get parts identified that could then be installed after we got to Hagerman. The owner seemed competent and spent several hours with us. It looks as if the steps and several other repairs will be made before we leave Hagerman.

Hagerman, Idaho

We had visited the Hagerman area for about a day on our way to Yellowstone National Park in 2011 and loved the waterfalls and springs we saw. We decided to make Hagerman our base for a more leisurely exploration of the area.

We started with Malad [Autocorrect keeps trying to rename this to the Salad–we hope we overrode all of its attempts.] Gorge State Park. The Malad River is only about 12 miles long and was named, reputedly, the French word for sick because some trappers ate poisoned beaver there.

The Malad River empties into the Snake River. Here is a broad view of the Snake.