Friday 31st March – a massive drive

We awoke to a chilly grey Montana day, but thankfully no snow.  Having come to the conclusion that we would have to bypass both Craters of the Moon and Crater Lake National Parks due to the snowy conditions it has made our onward journey more straight-forward.  We are now making a dash for the Pacific coast again as fast as we can so that we can see more of the scenic route 101 up the West coast on our way to Astoria and then on to Seattle to meet the Baileys. 

We certainly did some mileage!  We’ve broken the 18000-mile mark today and traversed the rest of Montana, the whole of the Idaho pan-handle and we are now in Washington State, making 38 states visited in total!  And reviewing our mileage over the last few weeks – we’ve done 4000 miles in the last four weeks, so that explains where all the fuel has gone!  Again, despite sticking to the Interstate to cover the miles more rapidly, we can’t grumble about the scenery.  We were driving through fir tree-covered mountains next to babbling creeks for much of the day.   

We may not have seen much of Idaho but we did stop off a couple of times – once for a large Walmart shop to stock up for us and our guests, and then again at a Costco for yet more gas.  I know, that’s three times in the last four days that we have filled up there.  We are spending a fortune on petrol.  But we’re only going to be doing this once!  We opted to do these menial tasks today as we gained an extra hour when we crossed the Stateline into Idaho, so what better way to maximise our time?!

The winding road to our remote ACE site

Having already spent our weekly budget in two days I was adamant that we must manage to have a free night somewhere in Washington state.  There seem to be limited BLM sites in the North-East but Simon found one in the Juniper Dunes Wilderness so we started heading there.  I was dubious.  Reading the instructions on how to get there I was afraid we would be ending up off-roading on sand again.  Not ideal.  We’d also noticed some sites labelled as ‘ACE’ sites by the Snake river nearby.  We only found all of these sites via the Allstays App that I have mentioned before – an absolute must for anyone RV’ing over here. A little internet research informed us that ACE stands for Army Corporation of Engineers.  Well, it’s very nice of them to equip some camp grounds in South Washington State with benches and fire rings AND to not charge any fee at the Devil’s Bench camp ground.  Less than a twenty-mile detour from the main road and not a single other soul there.  We arrived in daylight making finding it easy and picked a riverside plot.   

 

We may not have phone signal or electricity but we did have pizza and beer.  An ideal Friday night in an idyllic spot, watching the odd otter swimming by.