Mad Max is now in Ogden

Another very quick......too quick......trip this last week.

Sandy and drove to Sacramento Ca. Friday to pick up a homemade dune buggy that will fit in our new toy hauler.

It is smaller than it looks...but at 10.5 feet it will fit in the new toy box rv we bought when we sold the farm.

The toybox has a garage that can serve as a second bedroom/man cave for me when Sandy joins me on the adventures. We found a used 39 foot 5th wheel that is like new even though it is as old as my other 5th wheel and the price was fair. I will now have to remove all my solar system from the old 5th wheel and install it in the new toybox. This will be a lot of effort for me, but should be worth every bit of the trouble and I hope this will be my last trailer.  I'll do a post once I get it home.

For now here is the trip to pick up the Mad Max.

Our trip started very early Friday morning 2am. We drove west and stopped just a few miles from Wendover

.

The salt looked great this early

The rest of the trip was a mad rush as the seller was waiting for us and he needed to get on a plane to travel for work.

Here it is all loaded up

We got in and out of California pretty quickly, but what a mess........I hate traffic and crowds!!!!

I was not able to find out much about the buggy yet, but it was done much better than if I had built it myself......I'm pretty pleased with it!

We did not see many bugs.....not like when I was a kid, guess these things are getting rare. I saw 3 bugs being driven on the whole trip and only 4 or 5 sitting in back yards. Things have changed.

Reno was busy this week as it is the Hot August Nights this week and it would have been fun to check it out, but we needed to hurry along.

We did stop and eat all you can eat Lobster Buffet.......I tried my best to get my $75.00 out of them.....I had 5 lobsters and at least 10 legs not to mention a bunch of other stuff.......Sandy hates lobster so I had to work hard to cover the cost for both of us.....lol

Sandy did have plenty to choose from and she said the food was very good........I loved it!!!

The parking lot was interesting too....

 

We spent the night in Winnemucca  Nevada after I realized I could not sleep in the Dodge

The Mad Max is a bit hard to get into but I do think it will be a part of the family for a long time, both Sandy and I like it alot!!!

 

Here we are home safe and sound....If you look closely you can see my next big project.....finish the landscapping!!!!

 

West Yellowstone

Seems like I have been crazy busy this summer.

For weeks I have been feeling over whelmed with all the things I need to do this summer.

Sold the farm and got the house emptied out so one of the biggest things is out of the way.

I do have a lot to do at the farm, but I leased back the big barn and included storage of personal items for a year so I have some time off on that one.


My good friends Jim and Sue have an old farm in Idaho near Bear Lake, they have been asking Sandy and I to come visit for years, but whenever I got free to go someplace I always needed to go to my old farm so I have never been there.

It worked out that the weekend we planned to go to trade the hood was the same weekend Jim and Sue were going to an annual salmon fry near their place. We were able to go to the salmon fry and spend the night at Jim and Sue's place. Jim's mother, son and grandson were also there so we had a great time.

 

 As you can see it is a very nice place and now that I do not have my farm I hope to spend many days up there with my good friends Jim and Sue. I have known them about 40 years and the friendship has made my life much better, I hope you all are as blessed with good friends as I have been.

Sue's family has owned the house longer than she has been alive, she grew up in this house and was lucky enough to be able to have purchased it and has put a ton of work and love into the place.



Another big thing on my list this summer was trading the carbon fiber hood off the Crossfire with my friend Gary. Gary has been wanting the hood for years so I packed it up along with Sandy and her Buro trailer. We met Gary at West Yellowstone to make the trade......I got a great like new TIG welder, now I need to sell it or learn to weld TIG!!!!

Sandy and I drove up to West Yellowstone last weekend to trade the fibber carbon hood I had for the Crossfire. Since Sandy and I were there we decided to make a mini vacation out of the trip so we headed up through the northern part of Yellowstone.

The trip was nowhere close to a vacation like Sandy wanted, but we did see northern Yellowstone, a bear, a buffalo or two and Cody Wyo.

The park was so busy, even up north where it is usually less crowded.

We got to see a few buffalo and even had a close encounter with a bear.  We got caught in a traffic jam.....tons of cars stopped in the middle of the road and running around all over the place....FOOLS!!!!! Sandy was sitting with her window down wondering why all the excitement when I spotted the bear just 30 feet from us......we had food in the truck and the bear had his nose up in the air.....I saw him start heading our way so I rolled the window up just as Sandy saw the bear......Sandy was grabbing her camera/rolling the window back down as I was pushing the button to roll the window up......rather exciting....the bear ran directly in front of our truck and across the road to disappear into the woods. Sandy did not get a good photo, but I got a poor one....I can not believe how stupid these people act.....I saw them out of their cars chasing buffalo and standing less than 50 feet from the bear.

Sad to say this is the only photo we got of the bear.

You can not see the parking lot or the crowds in this photo.....kind of makes it look like nobody was around.

I gave up pulling into the pull offs to go site seeing as all the traffic was too much.....cars were parked everywhere and if you had an rv you could be stuck in one spot of hours......I will never go back!!!!!

We did find a great spot to spend the night, we pulled off into a wild flower meadow

Here is the bear as he ran off

After we got out of the park Sandy drove over to Cody Wy where we got a good meal and then headed towards home. We found a spot to pull off and spend the night.

 

 

For those of you who may not be familiar with the western states, there are millions of places where you can just pull off out of the way to spend some quality time.....free boon docking spots are everywhere and are usually left alone.


One mistake most travelers make when traveling through the western states is to stay on the freeway where they miss most of the beautiful sights. I have often heard from others that they drove through Salt Lake, Ogden, Boise and many other cities and that they thought they were so ugly.......from the freeway they are, but if you get off the freeway and drive through the towns they are often beautiful.

I have often been amazed by Wy......I have driven the I-80 hundreds of times over the years and it is such a long ugly drive, yet if you get just a few miles off the interstate there are so many wonderful low valleys with rivers, streams, trees and wonderful people. Paradises can be found just a few miles away and so few ever see it.

Here are two photos I took just to show you what you often miss.  Some how these places are not seen from the freeway.

Another hidden treature is the worlds first J.C. Penny store....still going strong.

Kemmer Wy.

There is a great museum just a block east of the store where Mr. Penny lived it is worth the time, and very interesting.


http://www.kemmerer.org/

Our trip ended with a bang......just two miles from home the buro broke..

I was able to limp home slowly on residential streets and have since been able to get the frame tacked together .......now if I just knew how to use that new TIG welder!!!!!

God Bless you all and thanks for joining along.

Papa