The Red Writer takes a timeout from Easterly driving

 ASHLAND, NEBRASKA - After catapulting from Scappose, Oregon to Pendleton, Oregon to Boise, Idaho, to Perry City, Utah, to Rawlins, Wyoming and to Ogallaha, Nebraska, The Red Writer has put into dry dock at the Eugene P. Mahoney State Park to regroup, rest and rejigger. A planned overnight will now be three nights. Biscuit and I both needed to get off the highway. (The bottom photo is our view of the small lake below our campsite.)

The trip from Scappose through Perry City was covered in in the last post. But the trip immediately after leaving that oasis to where The Red Writer sits comfortable today has been, well, a real trip.

With R. Biscuit Fitzfox navigating, we left the KOA in Perry City on a sunny morning, reinforcing our decision to take an extra day there to catch up on details - like writing my Write On column for the Finger Lakes Times. We blasted out at 8 a.m., hope to easily fetch Rawlins, Wyoming by 2 p.m., a time frame including several rest stops and lunch along the way. Mother Nature had other plans.

We dragged out butts into Rawlins at 5 p.m. after battling hellacious winds, winds famous (we learned!) on the stretch from Utah's border to central Wyoming. It was a tail wind - but gusting over 50 mph. The sustained wind was 40+ all afternoon and into the evening. We stopped three times in five-plus hours - twice at rest areas, the third for gasoline. Just outside Rawlins at a rest stop recommended someone suggested I pick Biscuit up and hold him tight so he didn't do a Toto and go flying off to Kansas. 

The Red Writer found safe harbor at the Rawlins KOA, But the facility is only a rock's throw from I80 and in the direct path of the wind. We rocked and rolled in the trailer most the night. Just before dawn the air went so calm, so fast, it was unnerving. So we hotfooted it at 5:45 a.m. and ran for Ogallala like the devil was on our tail. (Photo at left)

At Ogallala I was pleased to find that a RV camp area I had visited many times in past cross-country jaunts had become a KOA franchise. But it still has the same family-run flavor to it while upgrading everything. 

Then Wednesday the run from Ogallala here to Ashland, was another slog, this time with wind in the face and on-and-off rain. I conferred with Biscuit once we had parked the trailer and he gave me a paw's up to stick around for a few days. The site is large and he can roam. The only downside is the heat. Lots of it. And humidity, lots of it, too.

Saturday we will leave and continue eastward to Newton, Iowa where the KOA campground has a pull-thru spot with out name on it and two working laundromats on site. Given the volume in our dirty clothes basket, we might need them both. 

And by the time I post another one of these missives, perhaps I will have figured out how to post captions properly. Maybe.