Snake River, just below Palisades Reservoir, about 16 km south of Palisades, Wyoming
Distance for the day: 468.5 km
Cumulative distance: 7,880.5 km
Top speed: 127 kph
Moving average: 87 kph
Temperature: 17.6 - 40.6
Only one bar of cell service, so no pictures tonight. Tomorrow. I promise.
We are going camping. Camping spots are hard to come by so we were up early in hopes of not being denied, with a target of Alpine, Idaho. There are a few campgrounds near there with one having first come - first serve spots available and one other that is entirely first - come first serve.
We woke at 10 to 7 and we were loaded and on the road by 8:10.
We gas up in Kamas, not far from Park City. I'm not terribly motivated because we have gone only 323 km on this tank so plenty of milage to go but for safety sake, this trip I have generally filled up when we have used 300+ km of gas.
We started out by riding through the Wasatch National Forest just north of Park City. Amazingly beautiful. Ironically, we pass by a dozen or more campgrounds right up to the summit at 3200 metres and beyond. Plus, with it being a National Forest, people are allowed to camp anywhere they damn well please so there are many roadside turnouts with flat areas near lakes and streams wholly occupied by campers. Most campers outside of campgrounds have motor homes or trailers, which is a good thing because who wants to see people near the side of then road doing their business, as Nan saw this morning.
It is a fairly long ride through Wasatch partly because the roads are twisty but also because there is a lot of traffic of people going home from the weekend.
We get to Evanston and I note this is the location of the next gas station after Kamas, which means I would have been into our tank of gas to about 450 km and thus, i would have been sweating bullets."How is this MY fault?", she would have asked. When we ran out, or nearly.
And since Evanston was our first real opportunity to stop for a break and have some breakfast, especially as it is about 10:20, we are desperate. We stopped to get cash and check the map. NONE of the ma and pa places downtown Evanston on a Sunday morning are open so we choose Rotten Ronnie's because they generally have good coffee. But we are thinking they have some healthy options for breakfast, too.
Turns out the healthy option is black coffee. Still, we fill up.
Alas, with it being a Sunday, people were packing up and clearing out, so would have been plenty of beautiful camping spots to occupy had that been our choice. However, we are motivated to go further and have our choice of spots for Monday night because we think we will be up and on the road early Monday.
It warms up some more. We get to Alpine and the town is packed. They have some kind of summer festival happening so our hearts sink because we think everything will be occupied but we see a motel with vacancy and we regain our hope. It turns out these revelers are just getting all they can out of their weekend. Good for them!
We come to the first campground and ride through and all the camp spots are reserved save one, which is a double spot for $40. We ride onto the next one and there are plenty of spots open including a couple of lovely ones by the river, so we claim one for our own.
We go to bed early - before sundown in fact and so it is still so warm we are laying on top of our air mattresses, using our sleeping bags as pillows. I'm sure that will change.
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