The Rambler

I'll begin with the end here. The last seven weeks have been a whirlwind, starting in Oregon and ending in Iowa, where we are now, and where we will be staying for good. Yes, we are exiting RV life! We went into this knowing that it wouldn't last, and with the idea that we'd find a permanent landing pad somewhere that we would find "out there". Interestingly, though we found a few really appealing places, we also didn't find anything that screamed "way-better-than-Iowa-City". The reality is that no place is perfect - not Iowa City either - but when we balanced the pros and cons, it became clear that we needed to come back. And so we have. As to the shorter-than-planned duration of this adventure, one important factor for us is proximity to family when they need us (and vice-versa), and Iowa City really is the best choice for us with that and all our other criteria in mind.

So, we have now been in Iowa City for a couple weeks. Since we got here, we've purchased a commuter car, looked at nearly twenty houses before placing an offer on a nice little house about 25-minutes walk from downtown, and placed the camper up for sale. We're moving fast! This then will be my last RV-living post, at least for the time being. We will continue our travel adventures in the future, but not with a big-rig RV, and when we do, I'll write about it. Until then, please enjoy the following...

Sisters, OR and Bend, OR

After leaving Lebanon, Oregon, we made our way to an RV park between Sisters and Bend, Oregon. We stayed in a quite expensive "premium" RV park, and were very disappointed to find it to be extremely noisy, being on the very busy US Highway 20, and with park staff constantly milling about in their go-carts and running lawnmowers, weed whackers and leaf blowers. Not for us! Outside of the park though, we spent some time in both Sisters and in Bend and found them both to be fun.

We wandered around Sisters and explored the downtown shops. Sisters is very touristy, but in a nice homey way, not garish and over-commercialized like what we found in Fredericksburg, Texas. Although we were in the area during the July 4 holiday, we didn't attend any of the festivities, preferring to stay at the RV park, away from traffic.

We spent a day in downtown Bend, checking out a small farmers' market, and walking along the Deschutes River Trail. Bend is fun, and we would like to go back sometime when we can spend more time there.

We went with the dog to Smith Rock State Park, which several people had recommended to us. It was a treat! The entire Pacific Northwest is a huge, geologically active young volcanic range; Smith Rock is an example of a series of lava flows that have since been eroded into a cool structure of jagged peaks with a lovely river flowing through it.

John Day, OR

We spent a week hanging out in the little town of John Day, camped at the county fairgrounds park, a very pleasant and quiet respite from the RV park at Sisters. John Day was settled after gold was found in the area. During its early gold-rush history a community of Chinese miners arrived, hoping to become rich. One industrious resident built and ran the Kam Wah Chung mercantile specializing in Chinese products to serve the immigrant community. Today, the original store remains, with many original artifacts, and is now a museum. Definitely worth seeing!

While at John Day we took a drive out to the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness Area to do a little hiking. This turned out to be a spectacular surprise, as we found a sparkling mountain lake fed by still-melting snow, nestled in a beautiful pine forest.

Kennewick, WA

From John Day we made our way to a state park northeast of Kennewick, on the Snake River just above its confluence with the Columbia River. The Columbia River is very impressive to see here, a broad river flanked with high bluffs of volcanically formed landscape. This was a short stay, so we only hit one "touristy" thing, the Sacajawea Historical State Park. This is a low-key park, but the historical display was quite good, and helped to further round out our year-long education on native American and early US history.

Spokane, WA

Spokane was our next stop, also a short one. We did make it to the Good Trouble Lives On protest in Spokane and had fun with that. I even made it into the local news!

Lolo, MT and Missoula, MT

We stayed at a lovely RV park outside of Lolo on US 12, near Lolo Creek and its confluence with the Bitteroot River, and near Traveler's Rest State Park, where the Lewis and Clark expedition camped and rested in 1805 and 1806. Lolo is just south of Missoula as well. This area of Montana is gorgeous, and we really enjoyed our stay there. Missoula is a vibrant college town, and we immediately felt super comfortable with the Missoula vibe. We wandered around downtown, taking in the cool shops, and made it to two different farmers' markets on two different days. The city library is absolutely stunning, one of the best we've seen anywhere. It is easy to imagine calling Missoula home some day.

Helena, MT

Helena sports plenty of natural beauty, though not quite as grandiose as Missoula. That said though, our stay on the shore of Canyon Ferry Lake was extremely picturesque and peaceful, and we spent most of our short stay just relaxing there. We did make it into Helena one day to tour the beautiful Montana State Capitol building and wander around Last Chance Gulch downtown. Montana is known as "Big Sky Country", and we definitely got a taste of that with towering afternoon thunderheads that evolved into an intense evening thunderstorm dropping half-inch hail, turning our usually quiet camper into a roaring tin can.

Sheridan, WY

By the time we left Helena, we had made the decision to wrap up our RV life for good in Iowa City. We compressed what we'd intially planned as four weeks to get from Montana to Iowa into a 5-day sprint, starting with a 3-night stop in Sheridan, Wyoming. This turned out to be a surprisingly delightful stop, as we found Sheridan to be a lively little town with quite a bit to do. The downtown area is full of cool little shops, there are numerous statues throughout, and it exhibits a strong celebration of cowboy culture. Super fun. We had good food and beer for our Friday beer & burger outing at The Pony Grill & Bar, and some spirited and friendly politics conversation with our waiter after learning that he is running for Governor of Wyoming! What a suprise for us!

Iowa City, IA

On arrival to Iowa City we immediately got busy looking for a place to live and becoming Iowa City residents again. I have no particularly interesting pictures of this time except this one. We went to the downtown pedestrian mall and did a solo Fight The Trump Takeover protest, since there was no organized event for Iowa City. It generated some attention and we had fun chatting with folks about it - Mission Accomplished!