I have set Sunday, September 9th as my target departure date for OTR-9. I have had virtually no time to plan this trip, so many distractions have popped up. But I have given plenty of thought to it. In fact, as with all eight trips before this one, once I set a date for departure, the trip is my default thought, constantly on my mind. I have set Yellowstone National Park as my first destination goal since I have never been there and it seems almost un-American not to go there. Fortunately, the summer tourists will all be gone by the time I arrive. And 2000 of the campsites are given out daily so I do not need to do any planning or reserving.
I have not decided the route to take to Yellowstone, but my guess is that I will head diagonally from DC instead of going through Canada. At Yellowstone, I will decide where to go from there. The options are to head north to Canada and go through Banff again, and then swing west to Vancouver Island along the same winding back road route I took with Erde in 2014. There’s a wonderful small isolated remote primitive campground on Goat Creek along that route that I would like to visit again. On Vancouver Island, I will head to the west coast and camp on the ocean at Wya Point for a few days. Tent camping is right on the beach amidst a grove of trees that form the boundaries and walls of the individual campsites. Unfortunately, it will be monsoon season there, so I do not have high expectations. Perhaps a few days of reading in my tent might be nice. After that, I will head down to Victoria, hop the ferry to the States and then circumvent the Olympic Peninsula counter-clockwise and then head on down the west coast along the coastal highway to San Francisco, maybe diverting to the Sequoia parks inland. From there, I will leave open how to head home, but one choice is to head to Donner Memorial Park (Donner will like that) at the north end of Lake Tahoe and then head down to route 50 which crosses through the Nevada and Utah deserts. I can’t make specific plans because, as I now know, anything can happen. My hope is to arrive no later than November 6th so I can attend a function in NY for the Humane Society soon after that. Although I arrived home general on plan my first seven journeys, 2016’s trip taught me the lesson to be prepared to not make that target.
A map of this trip is shown below, although all of the above could change over the next two weeks, or as the trip is in progress, of course.
In addition to the three Ps, Planning, Preparing and Packing, the three big variables for all my trips are (DDM) the Defender, Dogs (Donner, this time) and Me.
In reverse order, my recovery from whatever it was that atrophied my abductor muscles is finally moving along, thanks to the PRP (platelet rich plasma) treatments I have been going through and lots of physical theraphy. All indications are that this all started with my first road trip and got slightly worse after each trip, but the final blow came with the hip surgery last year. I just bought one of those beaded seat covers for this trip to keep the blood circulating through those abductor and glut muscles.
Donner is in as good shape as he has ever been, although I will take him in for his allergy shot just before I leave. It lasts about eight weeks, which should get me home in time to ward off any problems.
I thought the Defender was all set for another road trip until this morning when it wouldn’t fire up after about 13 turns. But when I keyed it again, it started up right away. My guess is that I need to turn the key to the 2nd stage for a few seconds before trying to start it to get the gas pumping into the engine. I hate to set off with this problem undiagnosed so I will take it into my mechanic the week before I leave.
AAA through a monkey wrench into my planning yesterday when I went to pick up the half dozen camping books they have carried for years. Back in 2000, I relied on Woodall’s Camping books, but AAA bought them out four years ago, and yesterday I learned that AAA no longer carries them. Nor did they give me any advice on what to do instead. I have relied heavily of those books for all of my road trips and now they are gone. Fortunately, I think I still have the old books and bought a few others on the internet , so I will not have to change over completely to using the internet to find campsites. Google has this service where you type in "camping near [city]" and up pop several options. But the problem with the internet is that I often will not have Wi-Fi or even cell phone service, and using the iPad to surf these sites is not the most efficient way to go about finding campsites. Maybe it’s time to upgrade my 2011 model iPad.
That’s all for now.
ED
Map below…
