As previously noted, Yellowstone was a great visit. I didn’t mention everything we did like places we ate or less deadly animal encounters. I think we ate at all the lodges and Inns. The buffalo chili was very good (hehehe, buffalo traffic jam revenge!), but DO NOT get the pork medallions at the Yellowstone Inn (It’s just over cooked Canadian bacon with a weird sauce drizzled on it). Other than the chili all the other food we got in the park was marginal, park food. We also ate in Jackson a couple of times. Liberty Burger, that was a good burger joint. I had a burger with burger, ham, bacon, hash browns AND an egg on it! Wow!
However, it was time to move on and our next plan was to head back down to the Rocky Mountain National Park and go back country hiking! Yeah!
It’s funny how you lose track of time and days of the week become a blur on a long trip like this. We didn’t realize we ended up back in Estes Park Friday of Labor Day weekend! We hadn’t planned that, therefore, It was tough to find an RV place to stay. And it was tough to find empty back-country campsites. After talking to the back-country ranger it was clear that it would be best to start our trek on Monday the 7th. Most people would be finishing up their back-country hikes just as we started ours. This also gave us time to go back down to Fort Collins and do a little shopping.
It was also tough to find an RV park with openings. We found one night in a KOA in Fort Collins and two nights in a nice Walmart in Fort Collins. We stayed one night in Walmart, then moved to the KOA, then back to the Walmart we liked sooo much.
I mentioned that we rented the main hiking components: backpacks, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, tent and bear container. This was surprisingly cheap. For 2 nights/3days all of that cost $114! I’ve had a funny rash ever since sleeping in that rented sleeping bag, but, hey, a new, 20* sleeping bag runs 2-300 bucks easy. Cha-ching! Money saved. The rash will go away… eventually.
In addition to the rented items we spent some time at REI and purchased a few items of our own like a camp stove. I got the MiniMo Jetboil stove. More expensive than a basic stove, but I do think it boils water quite fast with its patented boiler plate.
I needed a warm and lightweight jacket and REI had some nifty ones. I found some hiking pants on sale (they’re really Kuhl! get it?) and we won’t even go into all the stuff Tina “needed”. We bought a bunch of freeze dried food and as I mentioned, I didn’t enjoy them. We also brought way too much food.
It’s fair to say we spent a lot more an incidental items than on the rental of the core equipment.
We began heading west on I-70 to Utah and stopped in Vail for a quick visit. We’ve never been there before. It was nice. But we had to keep moving on.
Selfie of a selfie!
I’ll be your tour guide through Vail…. not.
Further down I-70 we hit some bad road construction. It was a parking lot. I was even able to convince Tina to just “mind the wheel” for me, while I got up and made some tea in the back and got out some sunflower seeds. We weren’t moving so what could go wrong? Well, traffic started moving slowly, but Tina was doing fine. This is great. I plopped my feet up on the dash, threw a wad of seeds in my mouth 
and relaxed! This is nice. I went back and sat on the couch for a while. Comfy. I looked through the fridge for more food. Why couldn’t we travel like this ALL the time?
But then the traffic merged into one lane. And then the traffic started speeding up. And then the lane got tighter and tighter with concrete barricades on either side. And then I tell Tina she’s not going fast enough and cars are starting to really pile up behind us (I realize I was wrong to say this). And then I tell Tina she’s getting really close to the concrete barricade on my side and I don’t want remove all the paint on just one side of the RV (again I fail to be a supportive husband) . Can you feel the background music reaching a maximum crescendo now! Finally we found an exit ramp. It was still very crowded, but Tina wanted nothing but to get out of the drivers seat! As we got to the stop sign we had a few brief moments where she could jump out of her seat and I could take over… Amazingly not a scratch on the rig. I’m pretty sure she hit over 35MPH on that little drive. Tina hasn’t driven since.
Now on to Utah.