10 Weeks Out West in a VW Van

From T and K Out W...

Kristin and I have been home for sometime from our journey across the country and back that we took this fall. For those of you that do not know, I have taken an offical leave of absence from The NC Solar Center/NC State University. So, when we return from all of our travels I will return to work at the Solar Center. Kristin sadly left her friends and patients at Doctor's Vision Center as a vision therapist. She is not yet sure of her plans when we return.

The picture above is from a sunrise at the northern end of Glacier National park. It was one of the most spactactular moments of the whole trip. Their was a very very beutiful sunrise on one side of the road and then a huge bright double rainbow appeared on the other side of the road. We have a great huge panaramic photo that we stiched together from about 12 photos that shows the entire double rainbow with the van below, but we forgot to upload it and the handful of other stiched panaramics to our Picasa page before we left. We will get them up once we get back and fire up our computer.

The trip started in late September. See the prior post for a better verson of our first week or so. We picked the van up from the shop just in time to load it and Kristin's car up with the last few things in our house before we had to be out. We dropped those things off, dropped off Kristin's car in Burlington and were on the road. We were headed for Glacier National Park first, well with some planned stops in South Dakota, and a long unplanned stop in Misourri (transmission died).

In South Dakota we saw hundreds of buffalo, ate at a must-eat-at restarunt, Alpine Inn, saw the rock carvings of Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, and toured some intriqing caves. From here we headed northwest to Glacier National Park. We saw our first snow of the trip as we approached. It was amazing, from a distance of a couple of miles there appeared to be a wall of snow. Before 'the wall' there was no snow at all, almost felt sunny, at the wall it was coming down hard and the ground was bright white. As we approached the wall it became a little more translucent. In fact it took about 30 seconds to go from dry to nearly an inch of coverage. We camped just a few miles from 'the wall' in Buffalo, MT just a coulpe of miles from the park. There are several photos of us in the snow at this campsite.


The next morning we head into the park. The roads are clear but there is up to four inches of snow on the ground and it is very windy (see recent video post for example). We tour the south and east side of the park before driving around the bottom of the park to get to the west side. About 10 miles of the single road, Going-To-The-Sun Road, through the middle of the park was closed for scheduled 10-year maintance, but would have been closed very soon, if not by then, due to snow.
The west side of the park was much less windy than the east, which was releaving. We did several hikes while in the park, including a 13 mile round trip hike to Sperry Chalet, the second half of which had us hiking through snow nearly up to our knees. By this time in the fall most of the park was closed for the winter, all the lodges, some of the roads, all the park shops, and about half of the campgrounds were closed. The other campgrounds were in 'privative' mode, no running water and only pit toliets. We did see people throughout the park, on trails, and in the campgrounds, but they were few and far between. The highlight of our time in Glacier, besides all the amazing views, was three or maybe four moose walking through our campsite. It was just starting to get dark and we were cooking dinner in the bus when Kristin saw them. They were just meandering along about 10 feet in front of the bus. We got to see them for just a few seconds before they got spooked and took off. Then we had fun tracking them through the snow and mud through the campsite.

From Glacier we headed through Idaho to meet our friends Ben and Elizabeth (House) Brodhead in Seattle, Washington. We were with them when we set up this blog and made our first post many months ago.....

more to come as we have time to write it up...