Highways of Happiness ! [Yellowstone]

[Southwest Dave]

Thanks Mark.

I wouldn't have described it as warfare, people were reluctant to wait a little longer [which I can understand having got up at 4am, to get on the first shuttle] but in the end a few stepped back with little fuss. I just couldn't afford to miss my flight and connection in NY and have to cough up another $2000 or so in air fares if I didn't make it on time. I must admit it was unlike me and I felt a bit guilty for taking matters in my own hands, but after taking nothing for granted and asking at the airport and front desk to double check everything would be ok, I wasn't going to sit around and drawer straws. lol

There will be a few facts and figures to follow soon.

Dave.

[glc]

With a 4am checkin time and the first shuttle at 5am, I think I would have bit the bullet and planned on taking a taxi to get there by 4. That would have cost you less than $10 including tip.

[Southwest Dave]

I know what you mean George, but it was about getting an extra hour in bed and even more so about one less hour spent hanging around in an airport which drives me nuts, especially when it's gonna be 20 hours plus before you next see the outside of an airport or plane again. To get up at 3am to wait in an empty airport didn't appeal. We have always got to the airport 3 hours prior to the departure time on previous trips and it feels like a waste of time. If there had been any doubts after checking with the airline or hotel about times and transport, we would have booked a cab as we had originally planned.

Dave.

[Southwest Dave]

In the report I mentioned a treat we had while in Yellowstone when we stumbled, quite by chance, across Castle Geyser as it was just starting to spout. This is an unpredictable Geyser, but it usually 'performs' twice in any 24 hour period so we were extremely lucky to arrive at the right time.

The hot water eruption usually lasts around 20 mins and reaches heights of 90 feet and then is followed by a steam phase that lasts for 30 mins or more. Here is a short video of it in action taken by camera.



Dave.

[shirohniichan]

Thank you for posting all the notes and photos. You answered a number of questions I had about driving US 93 north from I-15.

I hope your back has mended,

[Southwest Dave]

Hi shirohniican, I'm glad it's helped with your planning.

For the trip we purchased a cheap, lightweight 'in car' video recorder that has a suction pad to attach it to the windcreen, just like you do your Sat Nav. We wanted to capture some of the journey, but the main reason was to record our journey along the Going to the Sun road in Glacier and the Beartooth Highway. We were gutted to find out it stopped working a little while before and until after we had travelled these roads and everything in between them. [We think the card may have been full, but it did not inform us as it should have]

Anyway, for such a relatively cheap gadget it's not bad, so I stitched together some frames and have started a trilogy of US93 vids from Las Vegas to Kalispell. I didn't spend a lot of time on it and it shows, but here's the first. [Another annoyance is I did not choose to remove the date and time and niether is it set right. The trip started Sept 2nd. Duh !]

This Video starts out in Vegas and ends at Bonneville Salt Flats Speedway.



Dave.

[Mark Sedenquist]

Wow, that's a nice tool to have on a road trip!

Mark

[Southwest Dave]

They are pretty cool for road trips and I payed under £20 for the camera, windscreen mount, USB cable and 12v power lead making them really good value. The only thing you have to purchase, if you haven't got any spares already, is the SD/MMC card.

You can also use it for every day journeys and another advantage is it could be used as evidence in the event of a collision if there is any doubt to who is at fault. [I believe some companies are already using them for this purpose.]

Dave.

[Mark Sedenquist]

....We left town and headed for a drive through Echo canyon State park and had planned to loop through Spring Valley State park, but Ethel [GPS] had a bit of a 'wobbly'. It was a nice drive through the canyon and past Echo canyon Res. but it was a pretty remote area and the roads weren't signed. Ethel would not even navigate a route back to Pioche without insisting we need to go on unmade roads and she kept asking us to turn right into a random field or ditch.

I re-read this section of your great field report this morning and wanted to make a comment about voice-activated GPS products, I am not a fan. I won't allow any such device to be activated in a vehicle I am driving. Megan likes to use them -- but to avoid bloodshed while we are on the road, she disables the voice part and just uses the visual representation tools. I've never met a GPS yet that could "out-do" my ability to read a map.

Mark

[Southwest Dave]

I understand what you are saying Mark, but I better explain so that people who don't know me think I rely on Ethel for direction, it's far from the truth. The only time I tend to rely on GPS is when we are at the end of our day and I need to find my way to the address of where we are staying. The daily routes are already logged in my head which I refresh before setting out and after each stop during the day, using good old paper maps. This allows Lezli to sit and relax and take in the scenery while 'Ethel' gives me a little reassurance of route number etc. Ethel gets a lot of quiet time, which usually begins if she gets to the point of saying 'Turn around' for the third time. We rarely see eye to eye as Ethel likes Interstates and I don't, but normally she understands this and recalculates. On this occasion where the detour was a not high on our list, I did not have a detailed enough map showing the roads of this remote area, so I made my own way from memory. There were more road choices than I remembered ! We did not have too much spare time to get truly lost [shame] so I tried to get Ethel to take us back to Pioche a different way than we came to create the loop I had seen. That's when she threw her 'wobbly'. She is usually either 'On' or 'Off', but I quite like the idea of just silencing her !

Dave.