Day 9 ~ Driving to Grand Teton National Park

Day 9 ~ Driving to Grand Teton National Park

Note:  I forgot to mention that I found my SD card in the camper caught between the canvas and the hardside.  Thank you Saint Anthony, patron saint of finding things!

Breaking camp took until 11:00AM.  Bummer.  We used to be able to break camp in 15 minutes.  Now it seems on this trip that we can’t set up or take down in less than an hour.  Part of the reason is the tarp that we stake down over the tent each night.  This is a big pain in the you-know-what because it is so huge, but it has kept us dry through all this rain.  The other thing that makes it a little harder than it used to be is the wood inserts Mike added to extend the height of the camper sides.  We need these in order to have softer beds.  Mike and I used to use an air mattress that could be deflated, but we were over the air mattress so in order to have our Memory Foam bed, he had to make the camper taller in order to incorporate the mattress.  The kids are stull using the air mattresses now and love them.

 

Just trying to stay alive with food, clothing, and shelter is a challenge each and every day. We had granola, dried cranberries, almonds, chia seeds, and boxed milk for breakfast with a side of honey toast and an orange.  Despite a non-cook breakfast, we still took hours to organize, wash dishes, and break camp.

We had about a 3 hour drive to Grand Teton National Park.  Idaho is a lovely state.  I could live here….in the summer anyway. 

Idaho

 

The mountain we crossed to get to Jackson Hole was a little on the scary side…..Mike was using the Lower Gear Button and maybe the lower gear thing-y on the transmission and the car was still almost a runaway train.  We are probably just nervous about it because we aren’t used to this kind of driving.  I thought I smelled brakes burning.  Mike said it was everyone’s brakes burning……????  He might of just been saying that so didn’t worry. 

This KOA is really small with campers squashed together tightly.  I am sure our neighbors will hear us if we fart in the night.  Additionally, they won’t let us stake anything here (there goes the tarp) or tie lines to the trees.  I am not planning to dry all my clothes in the dryer, so we might have another problem.  It is sunny and warm now here in Jackson Hole, so I am hoping my nephew, Tommy’s advice that towels dry in 10 minutes here is true!!!!!  We plan to string up lines in the camper and lay jeans on our lawn chairs.  Then we will leave for a couple of hours and hope everything got dry.  I am really praying for now rain tonight, since we don’t have our tarp. 

Later:  Well, things didn’t turn out very well at this KOA.  They didn’t like my laundry drying!  I don’t want to use dryers because:  1.  Harrison and my pants will shrink in the dryer.  I made that expensive mistake  before.  2.  It cost 20.00 this week to wash laundry without drying…..It would cost more than 50.00 to dry it all in dryers.  3.  The hot, dry air will dry everything in a short hour or two.  4.  You would think in this “granola and hiking boot” country they would be a little more ecology minded. 5. Some of the whites are not bright anymore…..I am using scentless laundry soap (Thanks for the tip, Chastity!) that probably isn’t the best white brightener.  I don’t want to put the whites in the dryer like this because it will “set” in the dingy-ness.

Long story short:  When Mike and the kids left to get gas, this fat guy on a golf cart threw 20.00 at me and told me to go use the dryers.  When Mike got back, we decided we would leave even though we had no place to go and no Wi-Fi to figure out where to go.  The worst case scenario would be that we would have to skip the Grand Tetons and just start for our next place, which is a 9 hour drive to Glacier National Park.  It was already 6:00 PM.  No dinner yet.  Lots of wet/semi wet laundry.  A camper that that we just spent 1 hour putting up and will have to take 1 hour taking down and 1 hour putting it back up…….

So Mike walked up to the KOA office, where everyone in the office quit talking when he walked in.  He threw down the 20.00 on the counter and said, “Some Fat ass threw this at my wife.  We will be leaving now, and I need a refund for our stay.”  So the guy at the counter tried to just refund one night, until Mike corrected him with the most ominous presence he could muster.  So we left with our credit receipt and no place to stay.  I am sure they thought we were trash with our old camper and laundry, but in reality, we were planning on purchasing their white water raft trip for 500.00 the next day.  LOL. 

Another bad thing about that KOA was that it was so far from Grand Teton.  It would have taken us an hour just to drive to what we wanted to see at the park.  Then we would have an hour drive home.  Not to mention needing to go North again, the next day to head to Glacier, which is on the border of Montana and Canada.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, loaded up an hour later, I said to the kids, “This is your parents being stubborn.”  And smiled. 

So when we got to Jackson Hole, (no pictures of this because I wasn’t really in the mood for pictures) we bought Big Mac Meals for all of us at McDonalds.  That makes 30 McDonalds……Natalie is counting….. Mike really comes alive in a situation like this…..he loves flying by the seat of his pants.  Everyone in the car was a little down at this point.  So Mike, Captain Daddy, was himself at his best, cheering everyone up.  And let’s face it, when we are on a healthy trip of diet and exercise, a Big Mac puts everyone in a good mood! 

While we were eating, I asked Natalie if this painting was a Jackson Pollock.  (A famous artist that dribbles paint on canvases to make art.) Mike said it was a Jackson HOLE-ic.  Hardy har har. 

McDonalds Art

 

So I thought it best to just crank on to Grand Teton and see if we could get a site at one of their campgrounds even though it was late.  The big summer crowds don’t come until June because it is still pretty cold here. If we couldn’t get a campsite, we could always just drive through it going north at least.  We stopped to get a picture at the entrance sign. (another attempt by Mike to rally spirits.)  I grabbed my camera to get out.  Then I thought of the tripod we have been using for photo ops like this.  But we were rather in a hurry tonight.  I asked Mike, “Tripod?”  We said together, “In for a penny, in for a pound!”  I took a couple from Ohio’s picture for them too.  They wanted to chat……I did……but I felt like we needed to get going……

 

 We got a site easy as pie right after crossing into the park.  The crapbag was that there were no showers at this very rustic campground.  However, this was real camping to us.  We don’t really care for the “camping” at places like KOA’s, where people like to stay in their RV’s that are bigger than palaces in third world countries and the grounds look like a motor lodge.  However, reserving with KOA was the easiest way to find campgrounds from home and have reservations.  We loved the setting at the National Park for two nights and dreaded going back to KOA’s when we got to Glacier National Park. 

 

This is what our campsite looked like when we re-hung out our laundry at the National Park.

I am so glad that we didn’t have to skip Grand Teton National Park because my niece and her husband love this park, even got engaged here!  We really wanted to see the raw nature of this park.

Up next:  Grand Teton National Park!