As I skitter from container station to container station today, my mind also skitters from road to road and favorite campsite to favorite campsite. In going through my stuff from last year’s still-unpacked containers, I came across a patch from Craters of the Moon in Idaho, clearly a camp I want to try to make it to, two days beyond Yellowstone. Last year, just as we passed Blizzard Mountain late at night trying to make it there, we ran into, yes, a blizzard, and by the time we reached the gate of the park just five miles up the road, the park was locked closed. Darn. We did visit the park the next day after a pleasant bivouac in a KOA cabin about 30 miles away, and I vowed to return to that camp there on my next trip in that direction, so that is being added to my list. And if I am adding that, I will probably want to add the nearby (250 or so miles away) Sawtooth Mountains before moving on. And if I do that, perhaps I will swing into Canada and try to spend a night at one of my favorite campsites of all times, the uber-rustic Goat Creek Recreation Area (see red star on map below) on the long, winding, empty road through British Columbia to Vancouver Island. I will describe more later so you understand why it is one of my favorites. Of course, if I make that, I will probably swing onto Vancouver Island by ferry to Nanaimo and head for the Pacific, where there is a wonderful private camp (see blue star) where you can pitch your tent right at the edge of the beach in cozy little, treed plots and sleep to the waves crashing on the shore at night, feel the cool (probably cold by then) breeze coming off the Pacific and just think, read, or clear your head without a worry in the world (assuming that I, Donner and the Defender are all problem-free at that point). It just so happens that one of the best bakeries in North America is just five miles away in Ucluelet, but that’s not why I want to go there. But to get there we have to pass through Port Alberni, the former home of those two kids (former kids, really) who went on a killing spree in July in Canada five miles away from another one of my favorite camps on the road to Alaska in British Columbia. And if I make it that far, I might as well head up to Port Hardy to visit Henry the barber (out of my way by 300 miles) for what will then surely be a welcomed haircut and a stop at another one of the best bakeries in North America, the Market Street café.
(Incidentally, I will be posting on my blog from time to time the distance to the moon. Who can predict why I will be posting that?)
And then I will plan the trip “home,” from there, although on the road, “home” is where you happen to be at the time.
Since I never know which trip will be my last, I decided to make my aim on this one to visit some of those favorites camps I spent time in before, and perhaps toss in a few more new ones. My only other goal is to make it back home safely (with Donner and the Defender, of course) by early November. (But if this trip turns out to be a repeat of 2016’s, well, I just do not know when I will return.)
Needless to say, things are rather hectic here right now, jumping from container to container, looking for this or that, and so on. But what drives me on is not only Pete Seger’s “This Land is Your Land,” on Loop Mode on my Echo, but the thought that keeps coming to me, that once I get into the Defender whenever, fire up the engine, punch in TLIYL on my iPad, shout to Donner, “Let’s go for a ride,” I enter an entirely different world, mentally and physically.
Ed and Donner
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