July 26th, 2024
GAS: Utah: $3.25 Wyoming: $3.00 South Dakota: $2.99 Minnesota: $3.0
Wisconsin: $3.29 Illinois: $4.29 Indiana: $3.22 Ohio: $3.18
Pennsylvania: $3.45 New York: $3.11 (at Costco) $3.59
We left Las Vegas around 7:45 am on Friday the 26th and began our drive to South Dakota where we have doctor appointments on Monday in Rapid City. Today we went over 600 km / 400 mi to Salt Lake City. The I15 is now 80 mph (130 kmph) most of the way (when we lived here there were “test” strips it that were 80) so it was a pretty fast drive although Fran didn’t do the speed limit much of the time to keep the fuel consumption in check and not push our Trusty Civic too hard.
(Fran looked at her SS account online before we left and no Medicare approval yet so she’s going to call later today to cancel the specialist and change her “wellness” checkup to a “med” check.)
We arrived by 3:30 to the Sleep Inn in South Jordan where Doug had booked us a queen room with the usual amenities as well as a guest laundry. Fran took advantage of the latter before dinner time. It was an okay hotel; room was rather small, a few broken items and the parking lot was small for the number of cars; the through way in front of the office even had cars in it!
The time zone is now Mountain Time and we are ahead an hour once again.
When we used to live here in SLC, we used to visit an Italian restaurant called “Fratelli’s” that we absolutely loved and yesterday Google made us a reservation:
So at 6:15 we drove over and had a wonderful dinner; the bruschetta is still some of the best we’ve ever eaten and the pizza didn’t disappoint.
Later that night we watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris:
Saturday morning Doug went for a disappointing long run but did enjoy running along some of the routes he used to run when we lived here. We left around 7:45am again and today the drive was to Casper, Wyoming and not quite as long. Fran realized along here that she’d forgotten her “free pillow” in the hotel! Oh, well. It was nice to have while it lasted.
The I80 was hilly and busier than we expected at first; we got gas a couple of times to get us to Casper where we got the cheapest gas yet at $3 even! The temperature when we left SLC was 21C / 72F and it cooled up to 15C / 60F as we climbed up to 2347 m / 7700’ at one point. By the time we reached Casper, it was a lovely 28 C / 82F and much more bearable than the extreme heat of Nevada.
The MainStay Hotel gave us a queen suite with a full kitchen with decent supplies, a sitting area and the other usual amenities. It’s outside Casper so it’s away from the hustle and quiet.
We had a quiet rest of the day. Sunday, we had our monthly KEGS meeting before checking out and making our way to Rapid City.
The drive was pretty eventless, lots of interstate and high speed single lane highways. One interesting thing we passed was near Douglas, WY where we saw a huge jackalope on a hill:
The jackalope is a mythical animal of North American folklore described as a jackrabbit with the horns of an antelope. The word jackalope is a combination of jackrabbit and antelope. Many jackalope taxidermy mounts, including the original, are made with deer antler.
In the 1930s, Douglas Herrick and his brother, hunters with taxidermy skills, popularized the American jackalope by grafting deer antlers onto a jackrabbit carcass and selling the combination to a local hotel in Douglas, Wymoning. Thereafter, they made and sold many similar jackalopes to a retail outlet in South Dakota, and another taxidermist continues to manufacture the horned rabbits in the 21st century. Stuffed and mounted, jackalopes are found in many bars and other places in the United States; stores catering to tourists sell jackalope postcards and other paraphernalia, and commercial entities in America and elsewhere have used the word jackalope or a jackalope logo as part of their marketing strategies. The jackalope has appeared in published stories, poems, television shows, video games, and a low-budget films. film. The Wyoming Legislature has actually considered bills to make the jackalope the state’s official mythological creature.
The day was slightly overcast but the sun still shone through; as we approached South Dakota the temps reached up to 32 C / 90F. Then as we approached Rapid City we had a few on and off sprinkles with dropped the temps around 10%.
During our drive today, Doug was getting really frustrated with his phone’s battery so once again we revisited the idea of getting new phones. After many miles, some searches, chats with our son, Josh, and a few phone calls to Best Buy, we decided we’d do it (it passed the time well too!) but we’ll ordered from Amazon.
We arrived in Rapid City around 3:30, got checked into the Sleep Inn and went for a soak in their hot tub with a cold one. The weather here is hot, but not extreme and it supposed to cool as we head further east.
Once back in the room, Fran got online and ordered two new phones with cases and screen protectors on Amazon to be delivered to our friend, Dave, in Indiana later this week.
Monday morning just after nine, we walked over to our “home” – actually just our SD residence at Americas Mail Box in Box Elder. It was a bit foggy and you could feel the humidity building.
It was convenient that we’d picked the hotel we did. Here we picked up our mail and paid for another year of service.
Doug has asked for a late check out of noon and spent the rest of the morning booking our flights to Australia. This is a long a$$ way to fly and we wanted to take the shortest we could so that we didn’t have to deal with all our bags. We looked at both flying out of Toronto and Buffalo and the convenience factor of Buffalo worked best. Not having to deal with landing in the US from Canada on a leg meant no dealing with re-checking bags and flying from Buffalo made it easier to drop off our Trusty Civic.
So we are flying on August 20th one way from Buffalo through Dallas and Sydney to get to Adelaide to get to our new rig. The sellers, John and Pam, have been very kind over the phone and they say they will pick us up from the airport and we can stay with them a couple of nights until we get “set up”.
Doug learned today that the money should be in their Wise account on Tuesday….. Fingers crossed!
We checked out at noon and drove over to the Medical Centre where our doctor practices. We had appointments for “med checks” in order to renew our prescriptions and discuss any new issues we may have. (Fran’s Medicare has still not been sorted out.)
Dr. Kelts took us both at 12:55 (instead of one at 1 and the other at 1:20). She renewed our scripts and we each discussed a couple of other things. We were out of there by 1:30 and began the next leg of our drive.
Shortly after leaving Rapid City, we began to see signs from the “world famous Wall Drug” before the Badlands National Park. In the 42 miles from Rapid City, we saw FIFTY TWO billboards/signs! We have been there a few times already so we didn’t stop this time.
Today we made it to Oacoma, South Dakota (about two thirds of the way across the state of SD. Doug got us a hotel at the Quality Inn. We arrived at about 5:40 and their computer was down. It took until 6: 35 to get us checked in! We had a queen room with all the usual amenities. We just made microwave popcorn for dinner as it had been a long day. A big thunder storm with dollar size hail was forecast but the bulk of it missed us and we only got rain which was lucky for the Civic.
After exercising the next morning (Doug finally had a good run), we left Oacoma around 8 and today we drove over 600 km / 400 mi leaving SD and crossing southern MN to Wisconsin over the Mississippi River and we are still in the central time zone.
Here we stayed in La Crosse at another Quality Inn – this one had the usual plus a hot tub which we took advantage of first thing. Rain was threatened all morning, but it never hit us although the freeway was wet for a good section.
Today we learned the deposit money had arrived in the seller’s account in Australia – finally!
This I90 is where we’ve encountered the most road work; sections up to 20 km / 13 miles long of single lanes and at one point we hit a stop where we think an accident may have happened within the road work as nothing was coming from the other direction either and there were several police cars. The speed limit on the I90 was 80 mph (130 kmph) until we hit the Minnesota state line and there it dropped to 70 mph (110 kmph).
While South Dakota was pretty hill and grassy, Minnesota was greener with corn fields, wind mills and actual groves of trees!
We checked into the Quality Inn near the river and got a queen room with the usual amenities as well as a hot tub which we partook of shortly after arriving. For dinner we had our usual salad, sandwiches and yoghurt and both slept pretty well.
Wednesday had us up early in order to make it to Chicago for lunch. We drove through Wisconsin, stopping for gas before the state line and then were able to use the faster (ha!) toll roads.
Doug had read about “Superdawg” at Christine and Matt’s in May and we’d added to our itinerary for the return trip.
Superdawg is a drive-in hot dog stand with carhop service. It is located in Chicago and has two locations, both on Milwaukee Avenue about 11 miles apart. It has the distinction of being one of the few original drive-in restaurants left in the United States. Its methods have been the same since it opened in 1948 by Maurie and Flaurie Berman, and it is still owned and operated by their family. Although the restaurant has undergone some expansion and remodeling, the landmark figures of anthropomorphic hot dogs “Maurie and Flaurie” on the roof date from the beginning. Superdawg was featured on the Food Network’s and on the PBS programs Check, Please! and A Hot Dog Program. It has been visited by many critics and food aficionados. It is listed in the books 1,000 Places to see before you die and Hot Dog Chicago: A Native’s Dining Guide.
We pulled in to the car hop just before it opened and studied the menu:
A waitress brought a tray to the car window with our hot dogs and a chocolate shake that we shared. It was pretty good and it was nostalgic to get this type of service.
Doug booked us a hotel just inside Indiana for the night (we thought the time would change at the state line only to learn some of the western counties of Indiana stay on central time!) and after some bad traffic (yes, we paid tolls for the privilege!), we arrived around 1:30 and they let us check in. The temps here in this area are around 30C / 86F but it feels much hotter with the humidity!
After checking in we both went for walks in the heat; yuck! Dry heat is so much easier to take.
After another of our usual dinners we hit the hay and then hit the road after exercise on Thursday morning. Driving eastward after going south, the countryside becomes very rural with lots of farm fields.
We arrived at our friends, Dave & Michele, before lunch in Tipton, IN – north of Indianapolis (Michele is from this area while Dave is Canadian like us). They just bought this house about a year ago, sold their motorhome and bought a truck and trailer to take trips with. It’s a very nice modern house on a big lot outside the town limits but close to the actual town.
Our new phones had arrived and we’ll deal with them later. We are now finally on Eastern Time and will be until we leave for down under.
We spent the afternoon catching up and swapping stories. This was our first time meeting Michele as last time we saw Dave, they were not married yet but had met. They seem to suit each other well and have similar taste and interests. We are very happy for Dave.
Dave took out his drone and took some shots of the area for Doug to send to Uganda to show them American corn and soy bean fields right in residential areas.
This was the view of their house and lot:
That night they took us out for dinner to a local place which was very good. We were seated on the lower level and when we went to leave we saw that it was absolutely pouring buckets and we waited for it to calm somewhat before Dave and Doug went to get the truck. Michele recently had foot surgery so she didn’t want to get her brace wet. We returned to the house so they could feed their two dogs, Oakley & Gus and by the time we got there, it had stopped raining.
Then we took them to the movies at the local theatre – $5 a person and cheap popcorn combos ($6.50) to boot! We saw Twisters and it was pretty good. We spent the night at their place and after a small breakfast and our usual tea, we left just after 9am.
Friday, we made it across the rest of Indiana, then northern Ohio along Lake Erie into Pennsylvania where we had a hotel booked in the city of Erie. We hit some heavy rains in Ohio that slowed us down and sections of roadwork and when we stopped to fill up it was a wet experience – despite being under cover the wind was blowing quite strongly. It did this hard for about 90 minutes with brief stops.
We arrived at the hotel in Erie after picking up dinner at nearby Panera Bread and spent the evening setting up our new phones. We didn’t like the cases we ordered so we’ve ordered new ones and will return these when we get the new ones in a couple of weeks to fly out.
Doug went for a long run Saturday morning, Fran did her yoga and some chores and we left to drive to Buffalo to our car storage to pick up packages that need to be packed in a couple of weeks. The sky was partly overcast and not quite as warm as it’s been but we’ll take it.
Amanda had them all ready, and after a chat we continued eastward in New York to the small city of Bath to spend the night in yet another hotel. It rained on and off for most of this drive. We stopped at a Walmart to get some dinner for tonight and tomorrow and then got to the hotel before 2pm but the Quality Inn let us get in early.
It was pretty humid when we got here and it rained on an off for a couple more hours. We opened all the packages we’d picked up and all that we expected was in the load Amanda gave us, including Doug’s new eyeglasses forwarded by the Costco in Reno. They were in good shape but need a bit of adjustment so we’ll stop at the next Costco we find to get that done.
Sunday had us up and out by 7:30am to get to our next destination before it got too warm. It was a foggy morning but apparently clear above that…..
Sidebar: we have driven long parts of this US leg of our road trip along the I90 – from Washington State to New York on and off (it continues on to Maine). The central part of the I90 had a great deal of construction on it and/or needed work. This New York section, Fran would have to say was in the best condition – we hit no road work and much few rough sections and the ones we did encounter were minor and short – kudos to New York State!
We arrived at Watkins Glen State Park in upstate New York to do a gorge hike. The fog had disappeared when we arrived around 8:15am and the sun was coming out.
Watkins Glen State Park is in the village of Watkins Glen south of Seneca Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region. The park’s lower part is near the village, while the upper part is open woodland. It was opened to the public in 1863 and was privately run as a tourist resort until 1906, when it was purchased by New York State.
The centerpiece of the 778-acre park is a 120 m / 400’ deep narrow gorge cut through rock by Glen Creek, a stream that was left hanging when glaciers of the Ice Age deepened the Seneca valley, increasing the tributary stream gradient to create rapids and waterfalls wherever there were layers of hard rock. The area’s rocks are sedimentary of Devonian age, part of a dissetion plateau that was uplifted with little faulting or distortion. They consist mostly of soft shales, with some layers of harder sandstone and limestone.
This was a spectacular hike/walk. The gorge is about 2.4 km / 1.5 mi long and we took the main gorge trail (there are 2 others) and stopped many times to take in the views. It obviously had rained overnight here as well as the trail/path was quite wet but manageable and the water flow was good. We walked about ¾ of it and after that it looked pretty flat and not as scenic so we turned around. Further, there was something called “Jacob’s Ladder” at the end that had an additional 180 steps to get to the west end parking lot which Fran did NOT want to do!
There were stairs and bridges, waterfalls, and more stairs, puddles, tunnels and more stairs, cool cliffs, frogs, and more stairs and it wasn’t too crowded until we turned around to go back – it was getting busier but still not totally unbearable. Go early in the day if you want to do this especially on a Sunday. Between the waterfalls and the humidity we were quite wet by the time we were done.
pic of us
The round trip walk took us about an hour and a quarter and we were very happy we did it and could not get over how we’d never heard of this park before! We highly recommend it! It has three entrances: east, west and south; the latter has a campground too.
map
We took TOO many photos to post in this blog, so click on this link.
After that we made our way to Syracuse NY to the Costco for gas and Doug wanted to get his new glasses adjusted a bit.
This area around Seneca Lake and the Fingers Lake region as a whole, is wine country and we saw at least two small wineries along the route.
Then it was Walmart to get a few beverages before we cross the border back into Canada. Today will be our last full drive in the US as tomorrow we cross the border at Cornwall, Ontario back to Canada.
Doug got us a hotel in Massena for the night and we got there right before it down poured as it had been threatening and sprinkling for the last hour. We had our final “hotel meal” of salad, PB sandwiches and yoghurt. This will be our LAST hotel stay on this road trip.
Mileage from the NV/UT state line to the CDN border: 5045 km / 3135 mi. We’re reaching the finish line!
For more photos of this part of our road trip, check out this link .
