Update through Sunday afternoon in Wyoming!

 Well……………quite an interesting turn of events………….

First of all we are in Alpine and at a spot where I have no phone coverage – so until I go to town a mile away there won’t be any updates or calls!!  So we’re kind of “off the grid”!  And we will be here for the next week and half so we will have to make do.!

 

We started out on Friday from Rock Springs just off  I80.  We stayed/shopped at a Walmart there – not a very big city but did have a Walmart….. it was the turning point for us to go north to Alpine so we stopped for the nite – 

At exactly 12:20 am I heard a knock on the door – normally I would wake Randy and have him deal but for some reason I got up and sure enough it was the police saying that someone had reported that we had dogs enclosed in the metal  boxes on the truck……….which wouldn’t be bad for the dogs anyway because we would have had them filled with bedding ……………but I assured him that all the dogs were in the back of the enclosed trailer all snuggled in their beds!!  He didn’t ask any more questions (could have been that I was speaking through the crack in the door naked…..) and was off!!!

Got a pretty early start in the morning and drove north and could see the mountain ranges looming ahead of us and a bit dreading the mountain driving – maybe if we were much younger it wouldn’t seem like such a big deal but it is for us – in fact Laura Bontrager who is up here gets nervous coming here so I guess It’s not jus us………..

 

What should have been a 3 hour “tour” (to use the Gilligan’s Island terminology……….) was in fact 5 because we go slower than the phone says we should be going  and when we hit the mountains we went really slow – for the first 2 hours it was mostly flat and then we started going up and up – in the 6500 ft. range – the flat was boring and just fields like most of Wyoming had been- but then it got interesting when we began to go through some of the little mountain villages – lots and lots of log cabin!!!  Like 50% of all homes!!!!  Beautiful scenery going through the pass through the mountains following the river – even saw some elk bedded down in a ravine and a herd of antelope grazing!!!!  But scary!  Apparently the road was as good as it ever gets in the winter but it was twisty turning steep and icy and made both of us nervous!!!  Reminded us very much of going through the Canadian Rockies on our way to Alaska!!!  Wasn’t great then and it’s worse 10 years later!!!

Made it finally to Alpine where we knew Bruce Magnusson and Laura were training and sure enough when we pulled into the snowmobile trailhead parking lot, there was Laura with a wave and a smile!!!!  Happy to be at our destination after 4 days of traveling!!!!

This morning we woke relatively early because we knew that Bruce and Laura were going to loan us the snowmachine to train today and wanted to be ready – both us short of breath and feeling queasy but the show must go on…………  we hooked up both teams and Bruce generously drove the snow machine with me riding so that things would go as well as good be expected – it is a heavily (and Bruce says it’s the heaviest he has seen in 16 years of being here!!!) travelled snow machine trail going up into the Rockies – probably had 100 snow machines pass us in the 8 miles and  the only way to turn around with a team of dogs is to veer off at a wide open spot and hope the leaders follow the snowmachine – the first team did great!  The second team probably would have as well but Randy put his foot down to put pressure on the mat as he was turning and forgot he had the “back up” sled and the mat is narrower and instead hit the ground and wiped out – I was thankful that both Bruce I and were there and could catch the team and straighten the team back out going back to the start!!!

So we went 8 miles today and it’s a beautiful trail going through the valley in the mountains with the river flowing next to it (some places it is pretty scary with a drop off cliff down to the river right next to you – wouldn’t want to pull off to the side too far……………)

Now we are both zonked from the altitude and the training!!!  Will try to keep you updated as often as possible but will depend on how often we drive into town – we can’t really unhook from the trailer because as we were hooking up to travel on Tuesday one of the mechanical/electric support arms at the front of the trailer went off track and we don’t know how to fix it……………….

Oh yeah…….I forgot to tell you about the worst thing that has happened so far……….Randy got up this morning and went to get his very very expensive hearing aids out of the charger and one was missing completely and only half of the other one was there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  We knew we had a mouse in the house but hadn’t set the trap we brought along yet- crazy huh??????????  So now we have a big communication problem!  I will have to search high and low and see if I can find where the mouse hid them!!!!!!