2014 Condo Week pre-trip, days 4 & 5

for maximum coherence, read all the posts from this trip in order, starting with THIS ONE. 

 

The day before yesterday, when I had checked into my motel in Valentine, Nebraska, I started the car to drive down to my room, and it made an odd noise. Sounded kind of serious. Yesterday morning, when I started it up again, it made the same noise, only worse. Uh-oh. You know a Jag is the prettiest car you'll ever see broken down by the side of the road, so we Jag owners tend to worry about noises.

I pulled into a gas station nearby to fill it up, and when I started it again, I heard that same noise, even worse.  Okay, I thought, I ain't a-gonna find anybody in Valentine, Nebraska who knows much about Jaguars, so I will just pray nothing breaks until I get to a bigger place.

fields in summer,
Rosebud Indian Reservation

Stopped for breakfast on the Rosebud reservation, and when I re-started the car, there was that noise again, and even worse. Sounded like a loud grinding noise. Stopped almost immediately, though, as it did each time.

Next stop was in Murdo, South Dakota for the Pioneer Auto Museum. An interesting collection of vehicles (along with toys and miscellaneous memorabilia, much like Elmer's Auto Museum in Wisconsin, which I saw a few weeks ago) slowly rotting away in dust and rust.

a '58 Ford hardtop-convertible

'65 Impala, one of my favourite cars

The horse-collar that doomed the car

a truly significant vehicle, the '38 Chrysler Airflow
Look at the condition this thing is kept in.

the first solar-powered vehicle,
poorly kept

I thought I could find someone who might have some idea about my problem at an automotive museum, but no. So I went on, intending to stop at the Minuteman Missile Nat'l Historic Site before heading over to hike in the Badlands, but along the way decided (after hearing the same horrible noise on starting up at the museum) to go on to Wall, a fairly sizeable town that might have an appropriate resource. I stopped at Wall Drugs (which is a sight in itself -- a city block of tourist attractions of all sorts, from western art to playgrounds to, well, a drugstore) and got directions to the one "pretty good" mechanic in town, but when I started the car, it made no odd noise 

At that point I realized the noise I'd been hearing is the noise you hear when you keep the ignition key turned too long after the engine has engaged. 

What a relief! And don't I feel stupid.

So I went in the back entrance to Badlands National Park. Stopped at a few overlooks, then got out at the Castle Trailhead for a short hike of an hour or so. Brought my water in a canteen and my safari hat and my walking stick just for this experience. 

The Castle Trail is 5 miles long. I obviously wasn't going to hike the whole distance, especially since, though it was only about 88 degrees, it felt like 105. I wandered around for about an hour, thinking there surely must be some kind of trail markers out there, but none were visible beyond a single red plastic pole near the start. Eventually I gave up on finding the trail --- it's all open country there, and you can see hundreds of yards in most directions, except where there's a small bluff or outcropping of rock. Headed back to the trail head, and as I came around the last little bluff, I saw a second red trail marker. It is not visible from the first red trail marker, and the ground is so hard and open that there is no indication of the path from one marker to the next.

Badlands National Park

Seems like they ought to do something about that.

Pulled into Rapid, where I had a hotel reservation, around 5:30, except that I'd gained an hour for the time change (I thought the time zone boundary was the state line). Could have gone another 3 or 4 hours, but for that paid reservation.  So no reservation for tonight, but I made it to Great Falls, Montana, after driving Spearfish Canyon, and

Spearfish Canyon, South Dakota

a detour to Red Lodge and Absarokee (to get a couple of new counties in southeastern Montana) and found a motel with no problem. Lucky me.

The air in Montana is thick with smoke from some forest fires somewhere; a couple of people told me they just started this morning and already the smoke has covered half of this huge state.

No idea what this is.It stands next to Hwy 87 in Montana

Day 3 of the 2014 Condo Week Pre-Trip

 for maximum coherence, read all the posts from this trip in order, starting with THIS ONE.

 

Drove up from Kansas into Nebraska today. This is the part of the country people think of when they hear the term "Flyover Country" but it's actually quite pretty, in a sedate sort of way. First stop was in Gothenburg, Nebraska, where there's an old Pony Express station that was relocated to a city park and restored. Nice little tidbit of American history. Always surprising how the pony express fixes itself into the national consciousness, even though it only lasted a few months. The three originators of the idea went bankrupt after 9 months of service, but the people who would later create Wells Fargo took it over and operated it at some profit for a further 9 months (by cutting the price of mail by 80%, which vastly increased volume and thus revenue), until the telegraph lines were completed coast-to-coast; at which point it became moot.

Just north of the tiny town of Arnold, Nebraska (where I made a short detour for the sole purpose of visiting Logan County), the northbound highway ended, but a city street that becomes a county road runs north. I took that. A couple of miles along, the road suddenly (and I mean suddenly) rises into the Sand Hills, several hundred feet higher and starkly gorgeous: rolling grass-covered hills with deep valleys, vistas in every direction. This goes on mile after mile (especially along the route I took), with only a few small towns to interrupt.  I wouldn't mind living in a place like this, if it never got colder than it was today (60 degrees when I left Kansas, 70 by late afternoon), or hotter. But that's pretty unlikely.

East of Valentine, Nebraska, I went out to see Smith Falls, the highest in the state. You reach it by 15 miles of good road under construction, followed by 4 miles of washboard gravel road, which must keep a lot of people away. The web site for the park claims the height of the falls to be 63', but there's a certain amount of unnecessary puffery in that. The main cataract, where a stream cascades off a cliff in a fascinating bell shape, is only about 30 feet high. The rest of the advertised height is made up of an unimpressive series of small cataracts dribbling away into the Niobrara River, a couple of hundred yards downstream. If they were bigger you might call them rapids.

see the other pictures

Still, it's a beautiful sight. The water on the left side of the falls courses down the rock in small sheets; in the middle, it falls through space in a bridal-veil cascade that spreads wide as it comes down; while on the right, the water is funneled into a sort of flume that gushes out and down, so the three parts of the falls seem to all be moving at different speeds. They all flow into a basin at the bottom and a stream carries it along to the nearby river. The whole falls is contained within a circular hole in the sandstone, making it seem utterly remote from the world. Certainly worth the drive, even if I didn't get a new county by going there.

This Year's Second Big Trip

Condo Week is coming! Condo Week is coming!

Yes, this year's Condo Week will be in Blaine, Washington, just across the border from the Great White North, and I'm already on my way. I left San Antonio yesterday, drove up the freeway (yecch) all day to spend a Monday night in Oklahoma City. (I had to put the top up when it hit 95 degrees; it topped out at 104. Today, by contrast, it never hit 80.)

Several years ago, Oklahoma City did some advertising that made it seem the kind of place I might like to spend a weekend in, so this trip started with a test of that idea. I think now that I'm cured of my desire to spend several days there.  The most interesting thing I saw was the pedestrian bridge across Interstate 40, which connects a large park on the south side of the freeway to what I hope is the seediest area of downtown. The old Union Station, now used for the city's Parking Division, sits at the north end of the bridge, but beyond that are about six blocks of absolute waste before you get to downtown proper.

Note the truck on top
of the self-storage place

From there it was off to Bricktown, an entertainment district in the corner of downtown between two freeways. It seems to be a recently renovated area where they've dug a canal in imitation of
San Antonio's River Walk. Looks like they bought all the old-style river barges when SA upgraded some years back. Maybe in 20 years it will be nicer, but it seems right now to be a shamelessly and pathetically commercial endeavour with none of the charm that makes the Paseo del Rio such an attraction. With luck, though, local businesses (as opposed to the national chains) will move in to give it a uniquely Oklahoma flavour that it now lacks. Right now it's more like a Las Vegas-style mall spread along a fake river.


The thing that most struck me was a sign I saw in a small grassy area next to one of the new upscale apartments just north of Bricktown. There's something radically wrong with the nanny attitudes of a place when they post signs that forbid letting your dog poop on the grass. I think next time I come to Oklahoma City I will save up my dog's output for a couple of weeks, and deposit it along the sidewalks in that area.

Early Tuesday I was out of the hotel, planning to spend a couple of hours hiking in Red Rock Canyon, about an hour west of town. A pretty place: you descend sharply on a tightly curving road until you're in a small forested canyon between sandstone walls. Unfortunately, the only trail in the park, Rough Horsetail Trail, was closed because of flood damage, so I only spent about half an hour in the park.


Then it was up to Liberal, Kansas, where I saw the Land of Oz, which, to be honest, was not worth stopping for. It's the kind of tourist attraction that gives small towns their reputation for being lame. It actually is lame, though I'm sure Liberal is a nice place to live.

From there I went up to Monument Rocks, possibly the country's best-kept secret. I was there a couple of years ago with a friend; this time I spent about an hour wandering around the hoodoos by myself, not another soul in sight. The sky, this time, was more dramatic, and it was later in the day (and much cooler!). I loved it, and took way too many pictures (most of which can be seen in the online album).

And if anybody (besides me) is keeping track, today I went through the last two unvisited counties in Kansas. Tomorrow I'm off to see a Pony Express station and the Highest Waterfall in Nebraska. And I should go through six new counties in that state this trip.