Epic Seven State Road Trip: Part 1

Our family dared to do the impossible this summer: go on a 12-day road trip pulling the pop-up trailer and camp all along the way. It started with wanting to go to Mt. Rushmore. If you make it through all of these posts, you will find the presidents' carved noggins in NONE of them...it turns out that the week we planned to go was the same week when all of the motorcycling world planned to have a rally at Rushmore. BUT. Since we'd already opened up the door to the idea of a road trip, and talked with Rus' parents about doing part of the trip with them, we were committed. Instead of heading through Nebraska to South Dakota (as originally planned), we rendezvoused in Nebraska so the men could tour a bullet manufacturing plant in Grand Island. So, just to put it all succinctly: I'd rather explain the route of our trip by saying it was to not go to Rushmore, rather than admit that it was to tour a bullet manufacturing plant. Anyway...
Here's our trip in a nutshell:
Day 1: Albuquerque to John Martin Reservoir, CO
Day 2: John Martin Reservoir to Grand Island, NE
Day 3: Stay in Grand Island
Day 4: Grand Island, NE to Guernsey, WY
Day 5: Guernsey, WY to Martin's Cove, WY
Day 6: Martin's Cove, WY to Soda Springs, ID
Day 7: Stay in Soda Springs
Day 8: Soda Springs, ID to Rexburg, ID
Day 9: Rexburg, ID to West Yellowstone, MT
Day 10: Stay in West Yellowstone
Day 11: W. Yellowstone, MT to Yampa River State Park, CO
Day 12: Yampa River State Park, CO to Albuquerque, NM
I took notes each day to try to keep things straight, so I'm just going to type those up here and include as few possible of the hundreds of pictures that we took...I've added some comments to my notes, they are contained in [brackets]. So here we go:

Thursday 7/31
Woke up in John Martin Reservoir campground. I went for a run from our campsite (which is at the base of the dam) to the top of the dam...thought it'd just be a couple miles but in the end it was four. Funniest thing - all of us were chasing Marianne around the campsite and when we got close to her she just stood there and her pants dropped spontaneously and we were all laughing. [We laughed about her "super power" the whole trip, actually.]

Here we are at the top of the dam:


We stopped in Kansas at the Fick Fossil Museum and the lady (a Mennonite), was so nice to the kids - she opened up a beautifully restored fire truck and let the kids climb in and play. They loved all of the shark teeth in the museum. [Apparently there was a couple who ranched in that part of Kansas and they found thousands of shark teeth on their property...from long ago when it was part of the ocean. This same couple started the museum.] The kids also loved buying souvenirs. [Oh gosh. The kids were souvenir OBSESSED. They could not wait to spend the money they had saved all summer!] We played on the playground. They had a merry-go-round, all fun and games until Jacob fell off.
Oh! And in Colorado we passed through a stretch of road where we saw at least a dozen ornate box turtles trying to cross the road - some successfully, some not. We stopped once to get two out of the road. [Turtles pee buckets when they are scared, did you know that? And they weren't scared by huge semis zooming by, they were scared by me picking them up! I didn't get peed on, though.] We saw a little guy in the road and decided to keep him with us for entertainment. We put him - actually her, the kids named her Rose - in a laundry basket. [You can tell the sex of a turtle by it's eye color. Boys have red eyes. Girls have black eyes.]

It was fun to watch her try to escape. At one point, Marianne said, "The turtle's gone!" And when we looked, she wasn't in the basket! We looked for a minute and found her climbing up the seat behind Marianne's seat. We kept a closer eye on her after that. [We found Rose a great home at our campsite in NE. Some might say "sudden transferring" her was cruel. But they didn't see that stretch of shell-dappled highway in CO or the quaint stream we left her by in NE...]
We were happy to pull into Mormon Island RV park, Grand Island, Nebraska, and see Big Papa and Nana waiting for us. [Here's our campsite.]

And better yet, they had dinner ready for us! We enjoyed a slow morning before Rus, his dad, Jacob and Bekah headed to Hornady, a bullet manufacturing plant, and Nana, Beau, Marianne and I headed out to the Stuhr Pioneer Museum. We went to Railroad Town in the museum, a little town replicated circa 1894. There was a schoolhouse, bank, mercantile, barber shop, millinery, tin smith, blacksmith shop, and train depot, among others.



Nana and I enjoyed it, while Beau's favorite part was buying stuff at the gift shop - a little stuffed animal wolf key chain and "gold" candy.
We all met up for lunch back at the RV park and after a short siesta we headed to Island Oasis Waterpark. It had two sinisterly tall slides that Bekah loved but I swear took the skin off my back. [I screamed like a little girl. I thought I was going to die for about 2.7 seconds - how long it took to drop roughly 3000 feet.] It also had four other water slides that everyone loved, a wave pool that Nana especially loved, and a fun lazy river that we rode with inner tubes. It was fun for all of us!

Total time it took us to get from Albuquerque to John Martin Reservoir: 8 hours
Distance: 367 miles
Driving time: 5.5 hours (i.e. how long it might take if you didn't have kids, or a husband with a small bladder)