yosemite sam

hi fans

this weekend we are in yosemite national park and have been cycling around and looking at rocks and waterfalls and meadows, we also went to a film and talk by ron kauk who is a rock climber round here. we spoke to him afterwards and bert used to fly hang gliders round here so they talked about someone they both knew here - bert always knows people everywhere we go. we are currently sitting in ahwahnee lodge, a really swanky lodge hotel in the middle of the park, having a drink with our new friend david who is a photographer and takes photos with a field camera, those old cameras like ansel adams used. we went to an ansel adams gallery and saw some amazing photos of yosemite and california. we are going to go and build a campfire and cook our chicken on it. last night some bears came to the campsite, we awoke to someone shouting at the bear to go away. we also saw the rangers giving out fines to people who had left food lying around their campsite, because this attracts bears which isn't fair for the bears or the people who get scared.

that's my update for now, tomorrow we go back to work for the week selling our tree wraps. here is something john muir wrote - he was from scotland but lived here in america in the 19th century and basically was an amazing nature man who i think invented the national parks and was generally very cool:

climb the mountains and get their good tidings. nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. the winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

muffin the mule and the show pillow

exciting announcement - i just checked my blog account and apparently i have earned 1 pound and 9 pence so far this month from my adverts on my blog. mum, watch out for a cheque arriving at some point - it won’t quite clear my overdraft but every penny helps. i think that means i’m officially a professional writer now, that’s what bert said anyway.

exciting announcement part 2 - i have changed the blog a bit so that when someone leaves a comment it appears right there below the blog on the same page, not in a separate window. i hope this makes more people leave comments, i think it’s better that way.

exciting announcement part 3 - the film we watched the other night which i didn’t know the name of at the time, was the man from snowy river - it’s actually an australian western film about horses and things. i fell asleep during it which was a shame because i was enjoying it, but fell into a very deep sleep - this annoyed bert as it‘s one of his favourite films, but he is currently asleep so that evens it out. previous to this i had been trying to watch the film with my bad eye in an attempt to make it see properly, so that i don’t have to wear glasses anymore, as i find wearing glasses so very annoying. you non glasses wearers don’t know how good you’ve got it. i wear my contact lens sometimes but my eye doesn’t like that either and sometimes they break in half in your eye which is scary because then you think they have got lost into your brain (if you are me). anyway perhaps it was the effort of using my bad eye that put me in such a deep slumber.

exciting announcement part 4 - as pointed out by mamma mia, yes apparently i did spell weasel wrong on a previous blog and so i have 5 words for my spelling list now.

today (it was today when i wrote this, but isn't anymore - well it is today, but a different today) (tuesday 13th october) there is a dust storm blowing around so we decided to not do any driving as it can be dangerous in monty to drive in high winds. we have done lots of research of nurseries and farms around the area, and made some appointments to see other customers tomorrow and thursday and i have updated my lists of things. i have many lists of things, it’s a genetic disorder i inherited from mum. all i need now is a stationery store so i can get a folder for all our bits of paper and i will feel like a well organised worker again.

october 2nd to 5th, salida, colorado - jim and amy’s place
so whilst staying with im and amy in salida, colorado, i sewed 3 buttons back onto items of clothing - i am aware i have mentioned this fact more than twice already, but that is because it was such an achievement for me. however, my sense of achievement was short-lived when i realised later i had actually sewn one button right through the lining and into a pocket so the pocket is now half the size it was. i vowed to never do any sewing again. soon after vowing that i found the hem of one of our sheets was coming off so i took it to amy’s sewing room to mend it, and she saw me looking all pathetic and like i couldn’t use a sewing machine, which i can’t, and she did it for me which took about 1 second as she knows what she’s doing with sewing. here’s a picture of her dress. she was making this for a wedding but didn’t get it finished in time, but will wear it at her birthday party in november, 2 days before my birthday which is the 25th, hers is the 23rd.

we talked about books, amy recommended three cups of tea, which dad has read too and said was ace, also crazy for the storm, which is an adventure story about a crashed plane, and what is the what which is about child soldiers in liberia. she said we should get audio books to listen to in monty which is a very good idea. monty still only has one working speaker though, until we make some money on our sales out here we can’t upgrade any of monty’s parts.

we watched jim’s tree wrap machine in action, which was really fascinating - i can’t believe you can be so clever to design and build a machine that intricate that does that much stuff. in goes the plain cardboard, and out the other end comes a welded printed folded flat packed tree wrap, then a man bundles them up and they go on a pallet and get shrink wrapped when it’s full, then sent off to wherever they’re going. amazing. jim has patented a black stripe that goes inside the top of the tree wrap to stop tree scalding which is when the sun rays get inside and bounce around and fry the outer layers of the tree. he has to reverse the whole print process to get this printed as it’s on the other side, so this was causing a few teething problems and he had to work into the night most days we were there, to get it going properly.

we watched becoming jane, a film about jane austen - she never married, despite being rather in love with someone who seemed to love her too, but the circumstances weren’t right (he seemed like a bit of a wally in the film). i guess that’s why her books have such neat little happy endings, imagine if she had married they might all be serial killer books instead.

on sunday we went on a flight in jim’s cessna320 which scared the sh*t out of me, but which jim and bert enjoyed immensely - i have to admit i actually nearly vomitted and passed out all at the same time. (am smiling on this photo below, this was before it got really bumpy).

somehow i kept it together but i had lost my appetite for lunch, which is quite unheard of for me. it was pretty bumpy conditions, cloudy, and remember we’re fairly high altitude there as it’s in the rocky mountains. we flew over the arkansas river, and bert pointed out the headwaters of the colorado river, which flows through the grand canyon, to lake havasu and then through california to the ocean - it also disappears underground for a while in southern california. we took some video of the flight, here’s a link to one i put on you tube - this is us flying low over jim’s ranch then zooming upwards again, you might hear me screaming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4cF8SJ_V9Q

it’s not that i didn’t trust jim as a pilot, but it was pretty windy and bumpy and we did some pretty sharp turns. bert drove it for a while and did a whole 360 turn (not upside down though).

we mended the wobbly headset on my falcon bike. the next stage of its upgrade will be new bar tape, and a good old clean. it could do with a new saddle too and a basket for going to the shops with, or putting a cat in.

we got a solar panel for monty from jim, and bert glued it to the roof. this is very cool as it means if you are parked for days with no hookup but with lots of sunshine - like on the beach in mexico for example - the solar panel will create all the power you need.

i read my spanish dictionary for a while, then boiled some eggs, and ate some green pepper, while bert was gluing the solar panel on the roof. peppers are very expensive out here - is it the same in England? - like one red pepper is around $1.50. the greens ones are about 78 cents usually but that’s because nobody wants them as they are a bit boring. everyone wants the yellow or red ones. when we went shopping last at walmart the lady at the checkout had prices of all the other big stores and was doing a price match for us, so all the vegetables we bought she gave us them at the price of the cheapest on offer anywhere else, which i thought was amazing - so our red pepper became 46 cents, and the courgettes and yellow squashes were about a third of the price too. this really made our day.

on monday 5th we left jim and amy’s, armed with our information about tree wraps and some sample tree wraps for our selling trip to california. we drove into a headwind which slowed us right down from our usual speed of 55mph to 45mph. good job we weren’t really in a hurry. the scenery was fairly unspectacular too so i ate my way through the contents of the fridge. we were headed to albuquerque in new mexico, to see timothy, bert’s son - he’s at college there. new mexico certainly is very mexican - suddenly there were little adobe houses, like in mexico, and lots of mexican restaurants and all the towns are mexican names. i don’t know much about american history, but i think this state was spanish and then mexican for a while then there was a mexico-america war and america won all that land from mexico. anyway i liked seeing all the spanish influence and cactuses and funny desert with little blobby trees. we drove through tres piedras - three stones, and ojo caliente - hot eye, and other such strangely named towns. i saw a café called el taquito, a colourful mexican style graveyard at the side of the road, a tumbleweed blew across the road in front of monty which startled him, i noticed petrol is much cheaper down here - i have become a connoisseur of petrol prices on our big road trip - they average $2.60ish for premium unleaded just so you know.

we saw lots of casinos too, and bert told me there is a law that allows the indians to own the casinos here tax free as a way of making it up to them that they stole all their land and pushed them into reservations. also you see lots of indian shops at the side of the road, with big signs up entreating you to come and buy their beautiful rugs and stone carvings and the like. i don’t know how the indians feel about this and maybe they love it, but it made me a bit sad that they should be consumed in the all encompassing mass consumerism machine, when what they actually represent is not that at all, but a natural and free way of life like in dances with wolves. perhaps that just doesn’t exist anywhere anymore, everything is too over modernised that there is no escape for anyone anymore.

anyway - we arrived in los lunas, which is where timothy lives. we met him at the walmart car park where we were going to park that night. he had just been told he had swine flu, which was really not very nice as bert couldn’t give him a hug or anything, and we stood a distance away from him with the wind blowing the opposite direction and him and bert wore masks. bert has bad asthma and we figured he really would be at risk if he caught pig flu, though i later read something that suggested you become more immune to it with age, so i’m not sure about that theory either. anyway, tim is fine now, and we are too and we didn’t catch it, but we were worried for him. there had been an outbreak at his college, though i don’t know how serious it became.

wednesday 6th
we left los lunas after briefly seeing tim again. tim works a walmart as well as studying computer animation, he looks quite like bert and has blond hair. actually it’s hard to say how much he looks like him as he was wearing his mask, unfortunately, but he is a very nice boy. we will try to visit him properly after our time in california.

we were headed west now to california, so the next state we came to was arizona. we crossed a river called rio puerco which means pig river, which i thought was quite topical and amusing too. arizona is very deserty as you would imagine, with lots of indian reserves like new mexico. we drove on towards flagstaff, a big town in the middle of Arizona - not the capital though, that is phoenix. we came upon a small national park called petrified tree national park which looked quite inviting so in we went with our free park pass, hooray, and up to the booth. it said it closed at 6pm, and it was 5.45, so we asked if it was ok to drive through it still - they said yes you can but when it gets to be 6pm you can’t stop and take photos anymore, just keep driving please. so we said ok, and set off. we stopped at 5.50 and took some photos. then we saw a little museum place (below) overlooking a viewpoint and stopped for our last 3 minutes of being allowed out of the car.

we ran in the museum and looked at the view and wished we’d got there earlier. then the lady in the museum told us it was only 5pm. hooray! we had gone back in time an hour by crossing into arizona. this was practically the most exciting thing i can remember ever happening to me in recent history. we had a whole hour ahead of us to look at things and take photos.

so we looked at the beautiful views, and looked at some petrified trees. here is the explanation of what the petrified trees are, from the leaflet they gave us:

this high, dry grassland was once a vast floodplain crossed by many streams. tall, stately conifers grew along the banks. crocodile-like reptiles, giant amphibians, and small dinosaurs lived among a variety of ferns, cycads and other plans and animals known only as fossils today. the trees, araucarioxylon, woodworthia, schilderia, and others, fell, and swollen streams washed them into adjacent floodplains. a mix of silt, mud, and volcanic ash buried the logs. this sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs’ decay. silica-laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. eventually the silica crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood.

cool hey. it was beautiful - big plains, with weird rocky outcrops with stripy and red coloured rock, and then these little blobs which were petrified tree stumps, lying around. we also saw a herd of bikers, and heard them speaking a strange language, i guessed it was czech or russian and on investigating further, i can confirm it was czech, as i just looked up a picture of what their flags were that were flying behind their bikes. i studied czech for a year at university as an elective - most of the class were russian students wanting an easy elective option ha because czech is just like russian but not with the cyrillic alphabet. and then there were a few of us normal people for whom it was basically impossible. there are sounds in it that you just can’t produce, like -strj- and other silly combinations of consonants. anyway i did really enjoy it as it was a language and i like languages.

on leaving the park at the south exit, we found a gift shop with a big sign saying free rv camping. how exciting, we turned in there immediately, and i tried to manoeuvre monty into a spot by a hookup (it was free hookup too, i guess in return you are supposed to buy something from their gift shop but we left early in the morning before it had opened). i couldn’t make the corner in monty so we had a small (big) argument and bert took over, then got peeved as we missed the spot we wanted as someone else had got it in the meantime. we still got a spot though so i don’t know what the fuss was about. we had a really nice dinner as i remember, which was baked chicken with lemon pepper sauce, and roasted potato chunks (a la abi, as she had invented them when staying in monty with us), and broccoli and other veggies. i took some photos of the meal before it got eaten.

wednesday 7th october
we looked at the dinosaurs around the campground (i guess they are there because real ones used to be there - bert petted one of them because he’s brave - see photos in previous blog entry), ate some porridge and drank some coffee and were on our merry way to our next unknown destination en route. turns out we were following the old route 66 for a lot of this journey. i think we did it a bit less crazily than in that film easy rider though, which i haven’t actually fully watched but will try to while on the road. nor have i read on the road by kerouac but should do that too.

we saw a motorhome called a chinook - this is the name of those massive double rotored helicopters, but also the name of this amazing magical wind that appears in western states of america that can suddenly increase the temperature by up to 30 or 40 degrees, thus melting snow and bringing life back to crops and animals. another famous wind that does a similar thing is a sirocco wind. we saw a motorhome turned upside down on the highway, which was not a nice thing to see, but good to be aware of what can happen - bert is a very safe and good driver so this won’t happen to us. we left the highway to buy some sealant as it was starting to rain and we have a hole in the roof by the air conditioner. as it happened we stopped in winslow, arizona, which is very famous due to the song by the eagles called standing on a corner in winslow, arizona. we took photos of us on the corner and had a coffee and a brownie while the sealant dried on the roof. on checking with mammamia pepinillo, she is aware of this song and often plays it on her guitar. the other day she dressed up as a pirate and played her guitar to some people with cerebral palsy, they played sea type songs, thus the pirate outfit.



after this we headed up north a bit to see the grand canyon. firstly we stopped at the IMAX cinema there, to watch their half hour film about the grand canyon - it’s about the history of it, and there is a man in an ultra light in it, who obviously bert knows because bert always knows someone wherever we go, even if it’s not technically a person that’s there, but on a screen. this man was called larry newman. the film is made 25 years ago so his ultralight is kind of dated, so we got in touch with a friend of bert’s who makes 3D films for big screens - they did one together in hawaii that showed in las vegas at the film and video show, and we told him that they should make a new 3D film for the grand canyon, so he is going to approach grand canyon imax about this and see if they can make a new film for them. there are bits in this film where you fly through the canyon and over the river and it makes you feel a bit sick and dizzy, unless you are bert and aren’t scared of anything.

we carried on in to the main bit of the park there, and went to the nearest campsite. they had a 30 foot limit for rvs, so we lied and said we were 30 feet, actually we’re 33 feet. the campsite man said well sir you’re in luck there is one 30 foot site left. oo goody we said. and it’s actually a very long site, so you’ll lots of room. oo goody we said, how fortunate, we like having lots of room. he looked at bert’s senior pass, and said gosh you look too young to have this pass. thank you sir, said bert. and you have a very young wife too i see. yes i said, i don’t have my senior pass quite yet. this was all quite funny to me, the lying and the strange compliments, so i walked off and giggled to myself while bert filled in the forms.

we parked monty and ate some hot dogs for lunch then cycled to the south edge of the canyon, which was only about a mile away. i have to say that this canyon is one of the most stunning things i have ever seen, it’s absolutely massive, and it is so strange and eery that it is so huge. the north edge is higher than the south edge which you can’t tell when you stand there looking over the huge distance, this is because the original land which is now a canyon, is on a hill inclined to the north. it really is awe inspiring. it’s interesting too because they’re not really sure how it got there - apparently the river colorado eroded all the land and made it all stripy and funny shaped rocks, over the ages, and the wind eroded the land too - this makes sense, but isn‘t particularly normal behaviour for a river to just kind of sink into the land like that.

the bottom to the top at the highest place is a mile high. the rocks in the bottom are 2 billion years old which is crazy if you ask me. this was probably the most touristy place we’ve visited on our whole trip - you can hear all types of languages being spoken - i think it is the number one visited tourist spot on the whole planet actually. we saw some cool little blue birds sitting on a rock drinking a bit of water which was sweet. we bought some postcards and wandered along and down into the canyon a little bit - not very far, it’s 7.8miles down and back out again, and people have died as they miscalculated the distance and time and provisions needed. so we just walked about a mile so as not to risk death. by the time we got back to the place we’d left our bikes it was pitch black and we could only just see the numbers on the bike lock. this was a bit foolish. we rode/walked the bikes back to our site, which was no fun - don’t know why we didn’t bring our torch but we hadn’t thought about that in the excitement of getting to the canyon.

that night the temperature got down to freezing again and our funny heater made those funny banging noises, which basically means it’s not working properly which is no good as then the pipes and things can freeze up, so we set the generator off at 5am, which you’re not allowed to do, but at least our heaters worked then. then we figured we should leave as we had contravened 2 laws of the site, by being too big and having our generator on in the middle of the night. so off we sneaked before daylight and stopped in a nearby carpark and walked to watch the sun rising over the canyon, then ate our breakfast and set off.

thursday 8th october
so after our grand canyon sunrise we headed to lake havasu, which is on the border of arizona and california. the river colorado separates the 2 states and lake havasu is made by parker dam. it is much much hotter down here than all the other places we’ve been - i much prefer the non heat, so i didn’t like that aspect of it. it was weird to see palm trees again and not have to have the heater on at night and stuff. bert used to live here with his sons. bert once flew his hang glider under the bridge they have here, which is london bridge - they bought it from london in 1964 or something round that time. i guess the guy that bought it thought he was getting tower bridge as that is the prettier one, but he got it wrong and they got london bridge. they dismantled it all and shipped it over and put it all back together, with all the bricks individually numbered, you can still see the numbers. the man that did all this was mr mculloch, of mculloch chainsaws. mr mculloch dug a channel that goes from one shore of the lake to the other, like a river, and built up a whole little area around the bridge, and that is the london bridge area of lake havasu city. anyway bert once hang glided underneath the bridge for a july 4th special, and he had smoke coming out of the back of his glider, and a radio presenter with him so they were broadcasting live on radio, and tons of people watching from the shores. it is of course totally weird to be standing on london bridge in the really hot heat, with boats whizzing around and clear blue lake water instead of dirty river thames water rushing by. and busy commuters commuting over it to their offices. it’s strange because i used to cycle/walk over london bridge each day on my way to work in moorgate, and here i was standing on it in america a year and a half later.

we had some beers and then went to the nautical inn, which is where bert used to be based for his water gliding operation here. we looked at some nice boats over the water, and then bert decided to be really embarrassing and ask a man for a ride on his boat. despite my embarrassment at this brazen act, the man said yes of course, and off we went - he was called don, and his girlfriend was gail, and we went off round the lake with them, and had drinks and swam, and had a great time. then we carried on drinking at the nautical inn and agreed to meet up the next day and that we would go on their boat up the topoc canyon, up river. how amazingly friendly of them, to take 2 complete strangers on a boat ride 2 days in a row, i was really gobsmacked. they were quite intrigued by our lifestyle and asked us lots of questions. gail had been in miss america once and had won the miss congeniality section, and don had recently been to jersey and stayed with a billionaire man who owned 2 concordes. whilst there he had tried to buy a pepsi in a shop with a us dollar.

that night me and bert parked monty out on an outcrop by the lake for free, and cooked pesto pasta, though i don’t know how as i really had had too much to drink. i had been looking forward very much to eating the pesto as i hadn’t been able to find it much in america apart from recently, so it was a bit silly to eat it when not in a fit state to be eating anything.

friday 9th october
we sat by the lake in our chairs and nearly went in the lake but it was a bit too cold. after a really good breakfast of huevos rancheros to soak up our hangovers we went off to meet don and gail for our trip up the canyon. they had brought beer and champagne which quickly got rid of any notions i‘d had of a drink free day, and their boat had tons of cool music on it. i don’t know much about boats, but this one was swanky, nice colours, like a james bond boat (it's the orange one on the right below).

we set off and went under the london bridge and on across the lake, then you come to a shallower bit of a channel. after a while of puttering up slowly through the shallower waters, we ran aground on a sandbank. oops, lots of other boats were having the same issue. so bert and don got out and started walking the boat through the shallow bit. first bert had to go under the water with a knife and chop all the reeds off the propellers that had got stuck round them. we thought this would help but it didn’t solve the shallow problem, but it did make us laugh as he got a load of weeds on his head and looked like a monster. i got out and helped with pushing the boat along for a bit, then we got some deeper water, then some shallower and basically this kept happening for a while. but as we were in no rush we didn’t mind, and just pushed the boat along and drank our beers. finally we got through the shallow bits and went off again at top speed, which always makes me fly back in the seat as though we've gone into warp speed, when really it's only 50mph. we went up the canyon after stopping at a big sandbank that is usually packed with party people in the busier months - lake havasu is a big party town full of rich people and people jet skiing around and boating around and going out and being drunk and crazy. it’s quieter at the moment as the summer is ending, so there were only a few other boats on the sandbank having drinks. the canyon was really beautiful, and at the end of it we were in california, and we stopped at the naked pirate bar and had a pizza and a cocktail.

topoc canyon

don and gail.

by the time we realised we ought to be heading back, the sun was already setting. we got through the canyon in the semi darkness (a little bit scary). we got all the way back as far as the shallow channel, which by now was even shallower and we promptly ran aground on a sandbank in the dark. bert and don got out to push the boat around in the dark for a while, while me and gail sat wrapped up in towels to keep warm. there was no danger as we were close to the lake now and could see another boat behind us having the same problem, so it was quite nice to sit and look at the stars on the boat. probably not so nice for bert and don who were getting cold in the water trying to figure out which way to push the boat. after about 45 minutes of this however, they figured we couldn’t get off the sandbank and maybe we’d have to sleep there. shortly afterwards 2 rescue boats came along - not to rescue us, they were responding to some phonecalls they’d had from other boats further down, but we talked them into rescuing us first - it’s more profitable as we weren’t members so they could overcharge us, and did so. they fixed a line to the front of our boat and dragged us out of our sandbank into deeper water where we could drive the boat properly back to shore. what fun this all was, and we went to celebrate our rescue by having a drink by the london bridge.

saturday 10th october
had breakfast with don and gail and looked at don’s house, he has a statue of a gorilla on his lawn which was amusing. we then set off to las vegas, which i wrote about in the last blog. the landscape, other than being filled with luxury boats and rich people and fast cars, is very arid and boring and deserty until you get to vegas - apparently the lights of vegas are the brightest ones you can see from space. how strange that must be going to space and looking down on the earth, kind of makes all our little problems seem very insignificant if you look at it from there. i always think it must be strange being buzz aldrin or neil armstrong and every night there’s the moon and you can look at it and say oh i’ve been there.

how weird to see palm trees again after all the cold and mountains we've been in.

anyway vegas was saturday night, sunday we drove to bakersfield in southern california, and the last week monday to friday we’ve been busy meeting farmers and farm supply people and grape growers trying to sell them tree wraps. so far no sales, but lots of positive response. which is nice, but essentially meaningless as it doesn’t pay us any money. we will do this for 3 more weeks, so i would hope we make at least one sale if not more. other things that happened this week: we had some mexican food and watched a bit of mexico v trinidad and tobago football match, and learnt that mexico are in the world cup as are england. but when is it? 2010? and where? we parked in walmart one night in visalia, and got woken up at 130am by a crazed mad man circling around monty with a giant hoover attached to his van. he literally drove around monty 20 times, by which point bert was wielding a club and ready to go and beat him to death. i told him not to incase the man was actually insane and maybe he’d kill him. then we realised this man’s job was to hoover the litter and things from the carpark and that he wasn’t a madman after all - i would say he was a little bit mad though and i’m sure he was purposefully trying to anger us. this was all very strange and slightly scary, as things can be in the middle of the night that wouldn’t otherwise be.

more to come on our weekend with the giant sequoia trees! bye for now earthlings. xx

leaving las vegas

a tub of hotdog relish.

howdy cowboys

today's blog is called leaving las vegas, which is artistic licence, which i use a lot - we actually left las vegas on sunday. we spent saturday night there, camped illegally in a casino circus circus's overflow oversized vehicle parking lot.

it was that or pay $46 for the cheapest actual rv park in the city - you can get a hotel room for cheaper, even the lady at the desk at the rv place said that. anyway we parked monty and walked down las vegas avenue, which is the main street in las vegas. they have a reconstruction of the eiffel tower, a venetian palace, that one at st mark's square and the bell tower there, there's a treasure island pirate ship place, a disney castle and lots more - it's kind of bonkers but fun. that is it's fun if you don't look past the bonkers-ness and get swirled up in what it all means and is humanity really that inane that all it wants is to spend money money money and have fun fun fun all the time time time. as you can imagine i did get a bit too over analytical about all this, as that is what happens with me. like i said, and in order to keep the first paragraph light-hearted, it was fun, and here is what we saw on our free night out: an elvis and a marilyn monroe lookalike; a whole bunch of people dressed up as jacobeans/edwardians/victorians; a water and light show outside bellagio's - like that bit in ocean's 11; some girls dancing in a cage, looking pretty bored; a really good pianist inside bellagio's; lots of people gambling; a volcano show (not very impressive, just water with orange and red lights behind it) at mirage (another casino/hotel); a sign for the cirque de soleil show love, about the beatles; a few newly wed couples; lots of people of lots of nationalities all having fun.


we were going to go and gamble $10 each on the one-arm bandits, but figured most likely we'd only lose it and we could live without the experience. we used our money to buy some sushi instead which was an interesting taste experience after our normal diet of pasta/sandwiches/chips and salsa.

it wouldn't seem that there is any kind of economic crisis going on anywhere in this country. i'm not saying there isn't as everybody knows there is, but people are out there spending money and going to shows and drinking and partying and gambling in their thousands, and that's only on one street in one city on one evening. i have never seen such wealth as i have seen these last few months in america - i was overcome with a need to close my eyes on the highway on saturday (don't worry i wasn't driving at the time) to block out the luxury boats and hummers and ferraris and houses and gleaming motorbikes and adverts for where you can spend your money next, as it was literally making me feel sick. yes i am aware that makes me sound like a self righteous wally, but i'm just not used to it and it there is something not quite right about people having so much money that they buy another house just to store their overflow cars/boats/shoes in round the corner, when on the same planet and in the same country in fact, but maybe not on the same street, there are people with absolutely nothing, not even a bed, let alone a house or second house to put it in. i know none of what i'm saying is particularly new or fresh or inspired, and who doesn't know about the inequalities of the world, but i suppose i've never felt it quite so strongly, having come from belize/central america to north america. there is something strangely paradoxical about the huge wealth of nature and wildlife in this country, and the huge and literal wealth of materialism. you'd think the former would somehow lead to a realisation that the latter is not so important. anyway such is the nature of the mysterious existence of human beings on planet earth and i am not qualified to expound any more nonsense about what it all means because i literally have no idea.

bert and i are currently in bakersfield in california. we are working this month - hooray - selling tree wraps to nurseries and vineyards out here. you may remember i talked about bert's friend jim in an earlier blog - we stayed at jim and amy's place in colorado and jim has a plant band/tree wrap manufacturing company. well, he wants to get new business out here in california but is too busy to leave colorado at the moment to do it, so he asked bert if he could do it. bert is quite the salesman - in his 20s he was a porsche salesman in california and was the top salesman of the whole company, and got to drive the demo porsche. so we are hopeful we will do well. today was our first day of work - i take notes and keep jim informed of what we are doing and how it is going etc. it's interesting - there are fields upon fields of grapes growing, and citrus fruits, and almonds and pistachios. one thing i wonder/worry about it that they grow them directly by the highways here, which must be slightly problematic in terms of dust and pollution i would think.

last night we watched the film elizabeth with cate blanchett, which i thought was brilliant - she is great, and the story was great, and i really have a hugely limited knowledge of english history and am determined to learn more about it. tonight we are going to watch a western film that bert chose, i can't remember its name.

bert petting a dinosaur.

since the last huge blog update we spent the week driving down from colorado to california - via the grand canyon, new mexico to visit bert's son timothy, lake havasu in arizona, las vegas in nevada and now california. i have to go and watch the western now but will write about last week's adventures soon. i am currently reading milan kundera's immortality, which is interesting/challenging/philosophical. i realised the other day that there are 4 words that i always spell incorrectly, and i made myself learn them properly - they are: opposite, separate, desperate, and recommend. i didn't have to cheat by looking at my notes that time. i came up with a ground breaking equation, which is as follows:

proximity to fridge + inactivity/boredom factor = likelihood to become fat potentiality

i came up with this after my 100th visit to the fridge whilst driving along somewhere that had particularly boring scenery and realised i was becoming fatter and fatter. tonight we're having soup for dinner in an attempt to feel thinner.

elucidation enlightenment and clarification

hello readers, and sorry to have been so absent recently.

today (sep 30th when i wrote it) is drizzling rain and big dark clouds as i write this - we are staying at friends of bert’s, called jim and amy zieset - they have a plant band company in southern colorado, just outside of a town called salida - if you are like me you won’t have come across plant bands very often but it’s the cardboard square that goes around plants in nurseries, and you can plant them in them and then they disintegrate. jim is an engineer and designed and built all the machines that make these, we watched the machines whurr and buzz and spin around yesterday which was interesting. they supply plant bands to argentina, portugal, australia and new zealand as well. they also make tree wraps which you put around the trunks of new seedlings and vines that are growing in your fields. bert has gone to work today with jim on the machines as he likes that kind of thing, i warned him not to get his arm eaten off by an angry machine. jim is a long time hang gliding friend of bert’s, they used to run a business together at lake havasu which is in arizona, doing water gliding, which was where a boat towed the hang glider with bert (or other hang glider pilot) + passenger in it up to 2000feet and then they flew around for a bit then landed on the water. bert came up with the idea and jim did all the boat making for the operation. anyway, i am taking the drizzly day opportunity to get back on top of the blog and tidy up monty.

so, as an explanation of what is happening now, basically we are driving back south from montana to either belize or maybe just mexico, depending on certain factors. we are, as i said, currently in colorado, and heading out on sunday to new mexico to visit bert’s son timothy who lives in albuquerque. then up to california, and then south again. i have until november 14th until my US tourist visa turns into a pumpkin, but i think we’ll be able to fit everything in in that time frame.

below are more blog posts (8 of them, wow i just counted them) covering the last month’s activities from august 22nd - i know it’s really a lot of blog to read in one go which can detract from the enjoyment of reading it, so i have determined to write much more often and shorter from now on, providing i can make it to an internet connection. i will put more pictures in too now i’ve figured that out, so it’s more fun.

yours rather cold and winterily - and happy blog reading - lucia pepinillo x

ps you have to read it backwards, starting at blog post the grey ghost and going upwards from there.

on the long and winding road less traveled (jack)

sunday 27th september: cooke city, wyoming to casper, wyoming
set off heading south, drove up into a big cloud that was rolling over the mountain top - this is called rotoring when a cloud does this - see below, it's quite hard to make out but i'm sure you can do it, cloud kind of merges with top of mountain:

drove over a gorge and wondered how they made free standing bridges over such deep canyons, like how do they stick the sections together when there’s no supporting structure underneath?

bert waving goodbye before jumping off the bridge, having experienced my driving...

listened to a song called watch out for lucy, by eric clapton, on our one-sided tape player. i also heard a song the other day called loose lucy, by the grateful dead. hmm, somebody should write some more positive lucy songs if you ask me. we read in today’s paper (oct 1st) that the girl that inspired lucy in the sky with diamonds had died. bought some pencil crayons so i could do some drawings of all the nice scenery we were going through; so far i’ve drawn a buffalo and some trees - what do you think?

i drove the rv for a while, which was a bit hard work as it’s so wide and veers a bit to either side.

also saw some antelope on the side of the road; tidied up monty and cooked chicken with orange and honey marinade; stayed the night in walmart carpark in a place called casper in wyoming.

monday 28th september: casper, wyoming to arapaho national forest area, colorado
ate breakfast with the scenic view of the denver mattress company and walmart and various other outlets. i bought a pencil sharpener for my new pencils. i wondered why it’s so much colder in montana, wyoming, and colorado where we now are, than in england, even though when you look on a map England is at a higher latitude than these states. i presume it’s to do with altitude too. it really gets freezing cold here which is no good for monty, we have to be careful not to let anything freeze up, like the water heater, pump etc.

i counted up the mileage that would be involved if we drove all the way to belize, and miscalculated it to be 5000 miles, on checking again we figured it’s more like half that distance. maybe i’d got my km muddled up with my m’s. anyway it’s a long way, but once you set off on a long journey it gets shorter as you go along, and it really isn‘t the big deal you anticipate it will be. it‘s funny how our brains get all worked about things that are yet to happen and then when they are happening it‘s kind of obvious how they pan out. we stopped for a coffee in a place called fort collins, and stole some internet from a nearby hotel. this is a very fun thing to do getting wifi connection for free.

we noted that colorado scenery hadn’t been quite as stunning as montana. we saw some goats eating some antifreeze at the side of the road - that’s what bert said they were doing anyway, and that they would die soon which was a shame. it was indeed a shame, but i guess we will never know if that is really what happened, hopefully they just sicked it back up.

we came to a place called estes park, on the outskirts of rocky mountain national park, and looked at some elks on a golf course.

hey mr elk, can't you read!

we then drove through the park (free entry thanks to bert’s national parks card hooray).



we drove right over the top of the mountains, which goes up to 12,183 feet, which is very high. i ran a little bit to look at a view, and nearly vomitted due to lack of oxygen. the views were stunning and the sun was just setting so it was a great time to be there.






really cold - i touched some snow.

it was like the alps up there, and we weren’t expecting it as we hadn’t even planned to visit this park, it was just a nice looking detour from the highway and was going the right way. always much nicer to come across places like this i think, rather than plan to go and see them and look forward to them and then get there and they don’t quite match up with your expectations. best to have no expectations of anything. we ate biscuits with cream cheese all the way down on the other side, i think the altitude had made us hungry.

bert's special watch that is also an altimeter, amongst other things - we didn't record the highest height as bert wouldn't stop because he said we'd cause an accident. he is sensible like that.

we slept in a lay-by on a side road near a lake over the other side of the park, and i woke with a jump in the night to a big banging noise. i didn’t know if i’d dreamt it so i didn’t mention it, but a few hours later it started again. it turned out it was the heater, not firing up properly, maybe due to the cold. we drove off somewhere further from houses so we could fire up the generator to try to mend the problem, which seemed to work. all in all a strange night’s sleep.

tuesday 29th september: arapaho, colorado t0 jim and amy's house, salida, colorado
had porridge and coffee by stillwater lake, watching the sun come up.



i looked at some little information boards about the continental divide, which basically divides the country to east and west in terms of water, so that any water to the east of it drains in to the atlantic, and to the west it drains into the pacific. i don’t fully understand this, but that’s it in a nutshell.

we found out that a fuse had blown as half our lights weren’t working. i got the little monty instruction book out and found where the fuse box was and to my glee i found the broken fuse (you can just about see below in the picture, the broken middle bit of the fuse):

we stopped at ace hardware, which really is ace, and bought some new ones and put them in and lo and behold the lights started working again. this was very very satisfying as it meant i had understood something vaguely technical.


we saw a hot air balloon on the ground and then in the air.



went over another high pass, of 11,000feet this time; we ate a muffin (seems to be a common theme); stopped in a mining town called leadville (presume they mine for lead) and looked at the thrift shops - i bought the screenplay of 2001 a space odyssey by arthur c clarke as i have never understood what happens at the end and here it was for $1; bert bought a bucket because that’s what men buy.

some colorado views:

note the amazing tree colours - they don't come out too well on this pic, i am working on a drawing of them

falling rock, the famous indian.


ace clouds

mt princeton, the highest peak you see here just left of centre, is where bert and jim and others used to hang glide. they once got up there and none of their radios would work, and they saw flashing silver lights zooming around the sky. the local sheriff got wind of this weirdness, and came and videod it, and it got on the news. the local radio station hadn't been able to broadcast either that day. spooky. the peak is 14000+ feet.

we arrived at jim and amy zieset’s place just outside of salida in southern colorado that afternoon and looked at the machines that make the plant bands that i talked about earlier. writing this blog sometimes makes me feel like i’ve gone through a worm hole in time and space because it gets confusing writing it in stages and having to jump backwards and forwards. i am determined to write it in the traditional order from now on, ie not going backwards and upside down all the time.

that night we went out for drinks in salida with jim and amy. amy is making a dress for a wedding they’re going to in boston next week, so she showed me a picture of it. she won’t let me take a picture of her in it because she doesn’t like having her picture taken. it’s a vintage type green dress, i’m amazed at anyone who can sew things and then wear them - it’s all i can do to not have a breakdown at sewing a button on (i did 3 buttons today and am still recovering). i drank a mojotini, which is a mojito with a splash of champagne. this is about the swankiest thing i’ve done for a very long time - i think it even beats my walmart wedding shoes, which are kind of sparkly. after our drinks we went to see jim’s son Zach briefly, and then to see jim’s planes in his hangar - he has a sailplane, which is an enclosed fixed-wing glider, with a really long wingspan - you have to get towed up to fly it as it’s got no engine. he also has a cessna 320, a 6 seater little plane, like the one frank the mennonite has in belize. it’s really a nice plane, i hope we get to go for a flight in it before we leave.

jim showed us a promotional clip that some tv channel (discovery channel i think) had made about him and bert’s water gliding business, around 10 years ago. it was really weird to see bert on tv looking 10 years younger, which wasn’t that much different. he comes across very intelligent - they both do - apart from the bit where he says - ‘well, dara (dara torres, the olympic swimmer was interviewing them and going for a flight from the boat), the great thing about water gliding is um you’re gliding over water‘… tee hee. it’s really unfair of me to pick on bert like this as he doesn’t have a chance to retaliate as it’s my blog, so please don’t think i’m really being horrible, it’s all in the name of art.

jim and amy have a really cute dog called mundy, she sat next to me in the car and i stroked her. i would like a dog like her for the rv.

wednesday 30th september and thursday 1st october and friday 2nd october
basically i’ve been busy writing my blog these last 3 days; i also sewed 2 buttons on my thrift shop coat, and one on bert’s shirt; found an old bees nest in one of our exhaust pipes; met a man who knew lots about rv-ing and gave us some tips; had dinner with jim and amy and their friend bob gomez who bert told me was from mexico so i asked him where he was from in mexico, but he’s not from mexico at all he just has a mexican surname, and later i told bert he can’t assume people with mexican surnames are from mexico.

carry on camping with abi and andrew

tuesday 22nd september: glacier park

today bert and i cycled from apgar campsite up the road to do a small walk called the trail of the cedars. when i say small i really mean it, it was around 1mile this walk. but the cycle ride each way was 14 miles, which justified the smallness of the walk i think. plus don’t forget we were cycling on the falcon death trap and the old mountain bike, so it was more of an effort than the kind of bike ride i’m used to. the bikes coped fine, luckily there weren’t any major hills, up or down hill - down hill on the falcon is pretty scary as the brakes scream and cry out for mercy, and the headset shakes like there’s an earthquake going on, and you feel quite precarious on the narrow handlebars.

anyway there were no incidents other than tired muscles as we hadn’t done much exercise like this for a while. we stopped regularly to either look at the view, de-robe as we warmed up, or eat our cereal bar snacks. bert did a u-turn to take some close up pictures of some grizzly bear poo he had seen on the road - it was huge poo with lots of berries in, you could see it from miles away. we didn’t see the grizzly bear that made it.

the walk itself is on a wooden walkway or paved paths, through a forest, which has cedars, western hemlock, douglas fir, and another tree whose name i can’t remember.

there haven’t been fires in that part of the forest for over 500 years which means it has these trees in it rather than the more quick to regrow spindly pines you get in areas of frequent burning. hemlock has this crazy deep bark which must be half a foot thick, it’s very strange.

i made sure not to accidentally eat any of the hemlock trees in case this is where hemlock the poison comes from. we ate our sandwiches whilst looking at a typical montana view of a mountain with a river in front of it. some people came along and said hi and had we seen any animals and bert launched into the whole 5 bears and moose story from our big hiking trip. he likes telling stories, but i got the feeling these people didn’t have that much time to listen to them all in great detail.
us sitting in a tree.

we looked at cedar leaves carefully and compared them with pine leaves, we looked at a wall with water dripping down it, and at all the moss that grows on the stones and trees there, and watched the sunbeams coming through the forest in a narnia type way, and it was all very beautiful.

a cedar leaf at close quarters

then we cycled back to apgar on our deathtraps, stopping at lake macdonald lodge on the way. this lodge is very old (in american terms anyway, built in early 1900s), and backs on to lake macdonald, in fact that is the front as that used to be the only way to get there before the road was built. we looked in the gift shop and took a photo of me with a big cuddly bear.

we got back to apgar just as we were getting tired from the cycling, i wouldn’t have wanted to carry on any further on the falcon, nor bert on his bike. we were pretty impressed with our active day and rewarded ourselves with an ice cream and bert had an espresso but only after we’d had an argument about what an espresso actually was, he seemed to think i didn’t know what it was and that there wouldn’t be enough for us to share it, i said i only wanted a tiny bit anyway and i knew that espressos were tiny to begin with yes. he dumped his ice cream in it so it was no longer an espresso anyway but a coffee ice cream.

we got back to our camp and abi had left us a note on our door which was very exciting. she and andrew turned up around an hour later. andrew is a friend of hers that she met after she’d left me last year in belize, and gone to america to do a trek in the grand canyon. weirdly it was pretty much a year ago to the day that abi and i had gone our separate ways after our 2 months travelling together, and as well a year to the day that she had met andrew in america.

it was really really cool to see her again, and we talked about england, and what people were doing, and about our travels, and lots of other things too as we cooked our hotdogs on the campfire. except abi couldn’t eat the hotdogs as they were chicken based ones and she has a fatal allergy to chicken, which i had forgotten, so she had to eat bacon.

we cooked veggies on the fire too which tasted great but it’s hard to control how burnt they are getting. andrew is from england but lives in germany, he used to live in montreal until last year. he designs windmills, as in wind farm wind mills, which is a pretty cool job if you ask me. he used to sail for great britain, which we never got round to talking to him more about, and he also had some pretty scary stories about flying, like one where they had to land in the brace position as a bit of the plane had fallen off. he is really into photography, as is abi, so we all went to lake macdonald which was just round the corner, to take photos of the sunset. i had bought abi a present which was a small candle holder made of a bear holding a little piece of tree, which is where the candle goes.

she had brought me a sticker, and some things from mamma mia pepinillo in england, contact lenses, and a new camera as an early birthday present, which was really exciting, as we only have a not very good little olympus one. this one is turquoise, my favourite colour. so it was all very exciting and fun and then we all slept in the rv, and realized we had run the battery down which wasn’t so good - this happens if you use the lights/anything else that runs off the battery, without making sure the battery isn’t going flat. whilst driving obviously the battery charges itself from the engine but we hadn’t driven for a while. we vaguely panicked about this but then fell asleep.

wednesday 23rd september: kalispell to butte, montana
the battery had come back to life, hooray! panic over. bert went off back to kalispell to go to an appointment he had, and me abi and andrew went off to the trail of the cedars, to do another walk from there to avalanche lake. this was around 5 miles round trip i think, which was a nice amount for the morning. abi had injured her knee playing netball recently so was wary of walking too much, but it seemed like it was doing fine. she even climbed a tree that had rotted away in the middle.
avalanche lake was beautiful, like the lakes we had seen on our hike to the belly river a few weeks ago, really glassy and still, with the whole mountain reflected in it like a mirror.

a man told us he had seen lots of grizzly bear poo nearby, so we had a little panic, but then got over it. i told abi and andrew about uncle sid and his pet bears, and andy said what a cool story especially when he learnt the names of the bears. i said yeah isn’t amos a cool name. then realized he meant andy, because that is also his name. he thought i was being really sarcastic but really i did mean isn’t amos a cool name. i think maybe it was one of those things that are funny if you were there, but not when you explain them, but it was funny honestly. another thing about andrew (the person, not the bear cub) was that he had met the world’s tallest man on a plane. this man was 8foot 4, the tallest man before that was 8foot 1, this new man had been just discovered in turkey in a small village, and had previously never had clothes that fit, and had never worn shoes, but the guiness world record people had got this sorted for him and were looking after him. andrew showed us a photo of the tallest man in the world with 2 air hostesses, which made the air hostesses look like dwarves. perhaps it was actually that they were the smalles air hostesses in the world, standing with a normal man. andrew said it wasn’t though.

we made sandwiches by a river after we’d finished the walk, and skimmed some stones, and i commented that i didn’t think i’d ever cut cheese and tomato for a sandwich directly onto my jeans before, and that it seemed to work quite well really. we looked at some big ants, and talked about penicillin. i said wasn’t it invented from bread mould, but abi said said it was something to do with a lemming coughing onto a dish. i had misheard and actually it was fleming that invented penicillin, not a lemming. again it may have been funny just if you were there. i thought fleming would have been busy writing all those james bond novels, but he was obviously a multi-talented man.

we met up with bert in kalispell, who said the doctor had told him he was in very good health and had the fitness of a man half his age. this is good to know. we said goodbye to abi and andrew, and the plan was that we’d all reconvene in yellowstone park, which is in wyoming, the state directly south of montana. about a mile of yellowstone is in montana actually, but the majority of it is not. we weren’t exactly sure how we’d communicate as bert and i don’t have phones and abi and andrew do but they don‘t always work, but we figured we’d leave a message for each other at the old faithful lodge by old faithful geyser in the park. bert said this is what people used to do in the olden days, ie pre mobile phone days. we hoped there was such a place called the old faithful lodge.

on our way from kalispell, we stopped off at kirk’s house as he had some apples and beer for us and a hang gliding video for bert. he has a house up a mountain, where you could launch a hang glider from right there, it has an amazing view over the whole flathead valley. on the way to kirk’s house, bert had pointed out a buffalo jump, which is where the indians used to herd buffalos up and get them to fall off the cliff to the plain below, which is really quite mean, but they needed the buffalo for food. it’s a bit misleading calling it a buffalo jump, as that implies the buffalos chose to go there and have a good old jump, whereas actually it should be called a buffalo killing area. did you know bison is just another word for buffalo, i didn’t until now. we carried on south to missoula, then to butte where we spent the night in walmart carpark - you can park there the night in your rv for free, which is really a good thing to know about as there are walmarts everywhere, and we are always looking for free things. i guess walmart figure that the people parked there will buy things from walmart, which we did one day but not every time. it’s not exactly scenic, but it is very handy.

our rv only has an old stereo system with a tape player that plays out of one speaker, the one on the driver’s side. we had bought some tapes from thrift shops which really took me back to my youth thinking about tapes, and how i used to record songs from the top 40 on the radio each sunday on to a tape and then listen to them during the week. especially that time that bryan adams was at number one for 16 weeks, i’d run upstairs during dinner to put it on to record around 7pm when the top 40 finished. and i’d record it again the next week, in case i happened to get it for a bit longer if they didn’t start speaking over it so soon before it had finished. on our rv stereo you put the tape in and the tape player goes mental for a few minutes, and you have to press all the buttons for a while until it calms down and decides to do its job and just play the tape for you. it’s quite annoying, but i suppose it adds personality to the rv.

another thing i thought about on the drive today and discussed with bert but neither of us had any answers, was a lexical question to do with rivers, lakes and mountains. my question is why is it mount everest, but teakettle mountain? or the river thames, but yellowstone river? or lake havasu, but flathead lake? our best guess was that it just depends who got round to naming it first and their own personal preference. whether or not there is an answer, i like the fact that i noticed it and have recorded it here for more people to ponder over.

thursday 24th september: butte, montana to west yellowstone, wyoming
bert got up at 4am and started driving, so we would get the rest of the way to yellowstone in time to hook up with abi and andrew, even though we didn’t know how far they had got on their drive yesterday and where they were now etc. bert figured it would be better to be in yellowstone nice and early to sort things out. he is good at things like that, like being early and organised for things. so i rolled around trying not to fall out of bed and thinking blimey this is a bit strange. it’s like when you’re on a night train or a night bus and you try to sleep but then you think that the bus/train is veering off the road/tracks, because it seems to be so strange to travel lying down and your brain gets in a muddle. so i kept waking up and hoping everything was ok up in the front, which seemed like a long way away from the bedroom at the back. i eventually got up around 7, as i was getting a bit tired of rolling around panicking whilst trying to sleep. we got to west yellowstone, the town to the west just outside of yellowstone, at around 8 and found a payphone to call abi and andrew from but couldn’t get them on their mobiles. we rang old faithful inn, who said they weren’t a message centre thank you very much. we went for a muffin and a coffee and drove on into old faithful to investigate things. on the way down there we passed tons of geysers and bubbling bits of ground and pools and mud pools.



we realised that i pronounce geyser - geezar - like with the meaning of old man - and bert pronounces it gi-zer - like apparently it is supposed to be pronounced. i don’t think there is a ruling on which is correct so i kept pronouncing it my way.

we found the old faithful lodge, there is an inn, a lodge and a snow lodge, and we left a message for abi and andrew, there was no messages for us. we left our message saying we were camping at madison campground and to come and find us. we watched old faithful geyser going off, which was pretty cool - lots of water shoots up in to the air and lots of steam pours out - we got a shower from the water as the wind was blowing our direction.

then we drove back to madison campground to check in. when we got there there was a message from abi and andrew saying they were camping there and what pitch they were in. cool, so we went to find them, but they had gone off again in the car. so we sat in the rv and bert rested as he was tired from his crazy early driving day and his flu and pneumonia shots he’d had the day before.

i looked at my new camera and took some photos. the landscape of yellowstone is totally different to glacier - it’s got big wide huge yellowy plains, wide flat blue rivers, herds of buffalos off in the distance like you see in wildlife documentaries. it has mountains too but not great big huge ones like in glacier park.

abi and andrew found us that evening and we went to their campsite for camp fire dinner - pasta and pork and veggies. turns out they had left the note at the campsite without having got our one from the lodge, but by chance we were all camping at the same place, which was funny.

friday 25th september: madison campground to fishing bridge campground, yellowstone park
up at 545am to go and see animals - the best time to see them is early morning, or evening, this is when they are moving around, eating and the like. apparently bears are moving around getting food to fill up with before hibernating, and it is rutting season for elks, so it’s a good time generally to see animals. the first thing we saw was a coyote or wolf crossing the road, too dark to get a good photo. then we saw a herd of elks - they are like big deer, not as big as a moose (which we still haven’t seen), around the size of a horse. the men ones have antlers. they are very majestic animals. the males (bull elks) seem to hang out with a big group of cow ones, as they are looking for girlfriends, and they trot around them herding them up and watching them eat grass, whilst deciding which one to ask out on a date.

they bugle every now and then, which is when they make a big loud kind of trumpetty noise, which apparently is a sign of their size and strength and prestige etc - to attract the females and to ward off other bull elks from their pitch.

we watched all this for a while, then bert spotted a buffalo on his own on the other side of the road. i had read that buffalos are dangerous and have gored many visitors, so we didn’t go close to him. buffalos are very cool, they just mosey around hoovering up the grass, they have big heads and a hump which gives their head a kind of snow plowing power.

after all this excitement we went back to ours for pancakes and bacon and to look at our photos. we then set off to fishing bridge campground in the east of yellowstone, but on getting 20 miles or so away from it, the traffic was all being turned around due to a fire blowing over the road. they aren’t allowed to put out fires that have started naturally, this one had been started by lightning striking the ground a few days earlier. (another law of yellowstone is that you’re not allowed to imitate a wolf howl noise). this is when we saw the huge pyrocumulus cloud which i put a picture of in an earlier blog. so we went back to old faithful to have some drinks and play cards, and keep an eye on the situation via the ranger information.

an artistic shot of my camera reflected in my shades, taken whilst having a drink at old faithful.

bert would make a good ranger we decided, and it is what he would have been if he hadn’t been into flying. we trapped a wasp under a cup, and abi said careful when you let it out as it will probably make a beeline for us. i said surely she meant a waspline. we looked at the old faithful inn (the oldest lodge in america apparently), there was a little crow’s nest bit on the top floor that overlooked all the other floors, which is now closed due to an earthquake in 1959 in yellowstone which made the timbers unsafe. in the past though an orchestra used to play up there whilst people danced around on the balconies.

we heard the road was back opened and set off all excited to our next site. we had to drive through all the smoke and bert saw flames in the trees off to the left whilst i was filming the smoke over yellowstone lake on the right. it was a bit scary to be that close to a fire, but exciting too, and obviously safe enough otherwise the ranger wouldn’t have sent us through. the ranger told abi and andrew not to stop under any circumstances, even if they saw a bear on fire doing cartwheels across the road. he didn’t say anything to us, bert figured it was because we didn’t look like tourists so we didn’t need advice. maybe, maybe not.

that night’s site was a bit of a busy and not very pretty rv site, all the rvs rammed in next to each other as close as possible, so you can watch your neighbour’s tv or watch them doing their washing up. we got a full hook up though so could have the lights on to our heart’s content.

saturday 26th september: fishing bridge campground, to cooke city (montana/wyoming border)
up again at 6ish to go look at wildlife.

firstly i saw some otters swimming through a river, about 6 of them. then we stopped to look at some fairly close buffalo, walking along in a herd, hoovering the grass, and drinking down at the lake. after a while they had surrounded the car, and all other cars around us. one of them, the alpha buffalo, was growling lots and loudly, and hounding one of the girl buffalos as she tried to eat her breakfast. one of the other ones fell down a sandy bank towards the lake and rolled around for a while unable to get up properly, which was pretty funny. i think he was trying to cover up his fall and make it look like a planned roll around in the mud, but it definitely wasn’t.

i was freaking out to be that close to all these huge buffalos even though we were in the car, and not really at a big risk. i was worried one would put his head through the open window and try to eat us. bert told me to shut up as he was trying to video it all.



nobody else seemed scared, as usual. i scrambled over bert to the other side of the car when one of them came too close for comfort, then we watched and giggled as they headbutted the car behind us. we saw a few other lone buffalos and some more herds along the way, but no other species of wildlife. we really wanted to see a bear or a wolf, but these are harder to spot. it’s funny how the first time we saw that lone buffalo we were totally amazed and taking tons of photos, but after the whole herd then seeing some more, you just go oh look a buffalo on the road, let’s go round him. it becomes normality very quickly.

a grizzly bear, abi, and andrew

after another bacony pancakey breakfast we went on a 6 mile walk along yellowstone canyon to a place called point sublime. we stopped loads along the way to take photos and look at the view, which was stunning - a huge deep canyon with red, yellow, white stone sides, and some huge waterfalls along the way.


on arriving at sublime point, we decided it wasn’t that sublime compared to the other places we’d stopped en route, and that we would have named it anticlimax point instead. perhaps the people who named it were coming the other way, and comparatively to that maybe it was sublime. we also thought there should be another point called ridiculous point so you could go from the sublime to the ridiculous. we took some photos of gummy bears (see earlier blog), and tried to decide whether that funny noise we had heard was a bear or a tree blowing in the wind. me and abi though the latter, but bert and andrew said it was definitely a bear. the walk back took 1 hour 15 mins instead of the 3 hours it took on the way there as we had stopped to look at things so much.
a bird


a waterfall

a canyon

a tree (dead)

us at the end of the hike

after this we drove up dunraven pass to look for bears as we heard a ranger saying that’s where they are at the moment. there were lots of photographers out with big huge cameras and lenses, they’d been there pretty much all day waiting for a grizzly to appear that supposedly appears each day around 6pm. we looked for a bit but then gave up. me and bert left to carry on heading south at this point, and abi and andrew were going to go back up north towards calgary where they had come from last week. when we left them we did in fact see a black bear loping down the hillside, at quite a distance so no good for photos. was cool to see one at a safe distance after our previous close encounters. apparently the bears eat this one particular type of moth to fill up on calories for the winter hibernation period, because the moth is more calorific than the equivalent amount of elk meat or other meat would be for the bears. they tip up stones to find the moths and then gorge on them. weird that such big animals survive on things like moths and berries.

we planned to try to find a campsite in the north east of the park but the sites were all full, so we carried on out of the park and stopped in a town called cooke city for a beer and to see if they had advice re places to park. not really, but they gave us names of other sites. in the end we parked in a parking lot on the wyoming/montana border.

it’s great paying nothing for your night’s accommodation. we wondered where abi and andrew had managed to camp that night, but had no way of contacting them, they must have been ok and not eaten by bears as i have heard from mammamia that abi is back in england now.