All over but the crying ....

Thursday May 1

We're back in Bellingham now. At the Bellingham RV park (which is surprisingly nice actually) and now have the car with us and will be packing it up with all the "stuff" so we can return the camper first thing in the morning. The trip ended up being about 3 weeks and the time went faster and faster the longer we were away.

On Monday we spent the morning in Salt Lake City cruising around the downtown core again and enjoying the city. It was a gorgeous warm beautiful day and the tulips were out and blooming and there were tons of people around - a stark contrast to the last time we were here. The beautification of the city and downtown core has been quite successful and we enjoyed walking around and having lunch outside even though it was almost "too hot". And then we drove to Mountain Home, Idaho. Yes it was just a stopping point with an RV park, but it became memorable when Bella met her first chicken. We have a lovely "key stone cop" memory of Bella chasing a chicken and Jan chasing Bella around the park. Still makes us chuckle thinking about it and we'll have to tie up Bella around any fowl in the future.

Tuesday was Mountain Home, Idaho to Boardman, Oregon on the Columbia River. We spent the afternoon "seeing" Boise which amounted to lunch inside cause it was raining and a trip through a Cabella's store to find out what it was like inside this "famous" US retailer. It's a huge "outdoor gear" shop that sells everything you could ever want and also does a large catalogue business. We'd heard about them but had never seen a shop before as they are more "midwest" than west. Turns out they do sell everything - including many guns, rifles, ammunition, huge gun safes, and video's of how to shoot wild animals. Oh, and some meat processing equipment too. I think I'll stick to MEC.

Wednesday we toured along the Columbia River - what a day. There were huge winds and the river had large whitecaps and 2 foot waves and appeared to be going in the other direction. The same thing was true of our camper on I84. This area is popular with wind surfers and we were hoping to stop and see some in action but I think they were all hiding. We stopped for lunch in Hood River and ate at a restaurant overlooking the river. It looked cold. We ended up driving all the way up to Edmonds that day since we didn't get that distracted by wind surfers and spent the night in Lorraine and Andrews driveway. And now we're back in Bellingham enjoying our last night in the camper.

We have very fond memories already of the camper and continue to marvel about how happy we were with it and how well it worked. It was so easy to stop and setup and then unsetup and go when we needed to. No dread, no fuss, no muss. Yeah OK, the gas mileage sucks but the furnace, the generator, the flush toilet ..... things of beauty that make you forget about the credit card full of gas bills waiting for you at home. Our future of touring the North American WalMart parking lots (probably CostCo actually) with a gaggle of dachshunds in an RV has been further cemented.

And, so here we go again, the end of one journey simply marks the beginning of the next. Onward and Forward-Ho to our next Great Adventure.