Leaving Flagstaff: Today, we are officially homeless. After a reasonably pleasant stay at the Airbnb in Flagstaff, we woke up early and hustled to pack up all the stuff in the truck and get over to the trailer before the rain started. One of the big problems, and truly this is a first world problem, was that we had a lot of wine in our wine cellar and because the sale went through so quickly, we had no ability to drink it all. So a big chunk of the stuff we were hauling was wine.
We made it over to the trailer and unloaded and sorted everything. In general, all the work we had done ahead of time really paid off. I had built some shelves in the closet that turned it from useless to highly functional. About 9:30 am we hitched up Clark to Lewis and headed out on the road.
Our original plan had been to mosey our way up to Montana and spend a couple of weeks at my sister’s cabin in the Madison River valley. However, we had two big things working against that plan. (a) the gigantic forest fires in the West that were making thing terribly unhealthy with smoke.
(b) the incredible heat dome that was blanketing the Pacific Northwest with temperatures approaching a billion degrees.
In 2020, we were in Montana when they had a similar smoke problem and it was awful and we didn’t want to repeat that again. At first we thought we would do a short drive to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and stay up high where there was some cooler weather and then decided what to do. However, we decided to go a bit further into Utah and stay at another high altitude location that would, if we chose to, allow us to make it to Montana in one day.
Since, as has been pointed out already, we still had a lot of stuff, I had purchased an attachment for the trailer bumper that could hold a few things like the generator and toasty (our bbq). This seemed great.
We drove for about 6 hours high up into the Dixie National forest near Cedar Breaks National Monument where we found a pretty nice campsite. There were a bunch of trailers around, but most looked unoccupied. We saw a big gigantic flock of sheep and concluded that the trailers must be for the herding operation there. We were at 10,200′ ft and the weather was pleasantly cool. We were both super grateful for that.
When Susanne tried to put the slider out on the trailer, it seemed that the battery was dead! Doh! After checking it out a bit further, it turned out that we had blown the main 30 amp fuse. Quick change out and all was good and we settled in to the camp.
All in all not a bad start to the adventure.
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