We had  four days of major traveling.  It  was long and hard and stressful.  Our first camp was just outside of Grand Junction Colorado at James Robb Colorado River State Park.  I had planned on not planning travel days or should I say nights.  That has been a mixed bag of success. Most state parks, indeed all government camping, requires reservations even though there may be plenty of sites available.  Once on site, they require you go to recreation.gov to pay and make your reservation in real time.  Well most areas we want to stay at are out in the middle of nowhere.  Thus poor internet connectivity.  This leads to frustration on my part.  I  would recommend looking ahead on the map in a location that has good internet and  taking care of business ahead of time.  Even if that is just an hour or so before arrival.

The first campsite was nice.  It had full hook ups available.  For those of you that do not have a RV, this means water, electric, and sewage connections.  We did not use any of those even though they were available.  We often just dry camp (boondock).  This is because our camper has fresh water, gray water, and black water tanks as well as solar battery power.  The battery can power all our needs except AC and microwave oven.  Most of the time that is adequate.  We did pay too much in my opinion for this.  $41 camping and $10 entrance fee to pretty much just park!  This park is a destination unto itself and had we been looking for a place to stay for a few nights this would have been nice.

The second night on the road was worse.  We only found a KOA campground in Ogallala Nebraska.  It was even more expensive at $61.80 for the night even though we just parked.  Oh, I almost forgot.  We both had showers.  It was difficult driving with my little 14 foot travel trailer through the Rocky Mountains.  Major potholes and dips in the road caused  us to almost loose the dog crate that was attached to the top of the truck.  Also,  I noticed that the carrier  I had attached to the back of the trailer had bent.  It was noticeably saggy.  And,,,  a fellow traveller motioned that something was wrong with the trailer.  I pulled over and saw that the plug that holds the sewer pipe inside the bumper had come out and the sewage pipe was dragging behind us.  It was destroyed.  Finally, the last tank of gas gave me a record low MPG  6.3!

Day 3 could have been a disaster!  We could have killed a stranger!  Remember the sagging carrier I had purchased to carry additional items?  It actually was a wheelchair carrier with a ramp.  I had a receiver hitch welded to the bumper.  This modification was done the easy way not the right way.  Dummy Jerry.  I checked with a few welders in Las Vegas to get prices.  The one company told me that I needed  to do a complete reinforcement of the bumper to the tune of $700 and another said that I could just weld the receiver hitch to the existing bumper.  So I did it the easy/cheap way and had the $15 receiver welded ($250) to the bumper.  Well the bumper started to give away even more and was tearing the metal.  Had that snapped off at highway speeds.  Well.  You can imagine how it could have turned out in the worst case.

The third night after looking over the situation,  we decided to get rid of the wheelchair carrier.  This campground made up for the last two.  We made it an early day.  In Neola Iowa we found a camping spot for $20 cash on iOverlander.com and it was great!  Beautiful county park named Arrowhead Park.  The campsite was okay but the park itself was a thing of beauty.  We met a Volunteer Firefighter that was our neighbor and gave him the wheelchair carrier to find a new home for.  He gave me a beer and two T-bone steaks from his farm.  He was a local.

On the fourth night we arrived at our first destination where we would be for the next three nights visiting some life long friends and the Wisconsin Dells.  We stayed for three nights.  Total for three nights $70 plus 7.95 reservation fee.  I will make a separate post about the Dells.