13 May ‘08
Tuesday
Leaving Moab, Arches and Canyon National Parks behind, we headed north. The roadway north was on secondary roads but we found that they had less traffic and the scenery was wonderful. We left with the sun shining and ended the day with the sun setting. Our first stop north was actually east (of Moab that is). We stopped at Grand Junction, Colorado. We had been camping without hook-ups for over 8 days and we just wanted to “plug-in” for a night. In doing that, we were able to charge the batteries, do some laundry, and find some reasonably (I hate to use that term) priced diesel fuel at $4.12 p/g. Just after 10am the next morning we pulled out and headed north again. We took 10 east to Rifle and then turned due north up 13. About the time we passed Craig we encountered rain mixed with snow and carried that with us all the way into Wyoming. About Rock Springs, the weather changed to heavy clouds so we decided to hit Rawlins and stay the night. We knew the night temp was going to get into the 20’s so again we opted for plug-ins again. When we woke the next morning we were somewhat surprised to find 3 to 4 inches of fresh snow covering the cars and trucks around us. We were fortunate to have cable at this campground so we got the local weather stations. They told us that the weather pattern was going to be more of the same, but as we looked north on their map, it showed that we would most likely have it better traveling north than if we were to stay another day…so off we went. What we saw was it was even better than “advertized”. Again the roadway was a nice 2 lane road, but we also found that this was a passage way for the big trucks…oh well. Our route was to take us to Casper and from there to Rapid City, South Dakota. We normally don’t travel the long distances, but we decided if we were going to stop in our “normal” day of travel time, we would only be 60 miles from our next day and final day destination of Rapid City. Fortunately it wasn’t dark yet when we got to our campground, but they had already closed the office. We had a great drive, although a little longer than I like, but traveling the roads and scenery to get here were great.