Bill & Jan's Excellent Adventure: 2019 Recap, Part 3 It's a long one

I hope you're not too bored with all this so far, this is the last installment and also the longest. Grab an adult beverage and here we go.

We are here in Grand Lake on the back side of Rocky Mountain National Park at a kind of funky campground, Winding River, we are finally back on our original itinerary. We still have a niggling feeling about our cooling system and our new pump, it still is running higher than it has before. Oh well, time to get back into our travels. Lots of hiking, some fishing, and together an exploration into the park until I chicken out, then Jan by herself into the park to enjoy it.

RMNP

And some of its inhabitants

Jan on her solo

Then over to Casper overnight then to meet Karen and Tom in Sheridan, WY.

Not only did we see them, but we were extremely surprised returning to the awful park, Peter D's, yes I am definitely NOT recommending it, we see a Newell that looks familiar and sure enough friends Dave and Lingky are there unexpectedly. We enjoy a nice but very short visit as we part ways.

Jan and I, Dave and Lingky

We have good time there with Karen and Tom, get to visit and share several meals, then we also part ways. On to Cody, WY for us where we go into the east entrance of Yellowstone for a nice hike and a look see.

Along Yellowstone Lake

Then make the big loop over the incredible Beartooth Pass, Charles Kuralt's "Most Beautiful Drive in America"!

One of many views from Beartooth Pass hwy

Another

A beautiful rainbow from our site in Cody

Then up to Bozeman and the Gallatin River for some fishing, and bam a rock in the windshield of our new truck that we thought was repairable until we woke up in the morning and found it cracked from top to bottom.

Whoops

Another shot of the incredible memorial chapel in Big Sky.

Truly amazing!

Then on to Ennis, MT, one of our absolute favorite places. We did a very nice fly fishing float on the Madison River.

The fantastic view from our site in Ennis

Float trip on the Madison

With the temp still not right on the engine we figured we should try to clean the radiator stack, so we took on that project.

You can see how dirty it had gotten from all the ATF flying around

Then we started noticing our water pump was acting funny, yeah the new one, it was cycling and surging. Could it be our accumulator tank, yup. Replaced.

Tank replaced

Then we really get an unexpected bump in the road! I open my email one morning to a message informing us that our mail forwarder was shutting down, IMMEDIATELY! This is our legal address, where all our mail goes, determines our voting, this was a BIG deal. So we spent almost an entire day trying to figure out what to do and do it right now. So we switched over to another forwarder, tried to change all the addresses we could think of, and finally got it done. Killed a whole day.

We had been wanting to go see the Missouri River for fishing, so we went to the tiny town of Cascade, MT, a fly fisherman destination, right on the river, nice little campground, Prewett Creek. It was even visited on a regular basis by a herd of big horn sheep.

The mighty Mo

Our friendly herd of sheep

After conflicting reports on the fishing we elected to do a float, and oh wow, we were so glad, even though the guide was iffy the fishing and the enormous number of huge fish we caught and saw was astounding! We will go back.

Happy Jan with one of the MANY fish we caught

On to Missoula for 3 weeks. We had a great time there, with the fishing, exploring, eating, fishing, farmer's market, fishing.

Watched this bear with 2 cubs play in this field for over 20 minutes
at the National Bison Range

Also saw this elk eating plants from the river bottom
something we had never seen before or even believed they did!

We fished the Blackfoot a lot

One of many, many nice fish

Then on to boon dock right along the Big Hole River, such a nice experience.

Peaceful

And lots of fish here too

And then Ennis called out to us again and back we went.

Ennis, man what a cool place

Cheers, good bye Ennis until next time

Winter was bearing down on us by now, cold and blizzardy conditions were forecast to arrive in a few days, so good bye.

So we moved about 65 miles south to this incredible spot
on Henry's Lake, ID

But now we really needed to head south, it's the end of Sep and our Oct reservation in Durango is looming. So on to Montrose, CO first.

A milestone along the way

In Montrose we surprised Karen and Tom a day before they were going to meet us in Durango, and had a very pleasant dinner with them and their son Walker and Marisol.

Fall had arrived in Montrose

Beautiful

Aspens are turning

Then on to Durango in a caravan with the beautiful autumn colors.
We had a nice week long visit and did Spud Lake hike together.

Taking a breather on the way up

View from our site

Happy 46th to us!

Nice hike around Andrew's Lake

So we finally came to the conclusion our cooling problem, and the more we thought about it, our decrease in fuel mileage over the last year or so was a bad wax valve that was letting our cooling fan run nonstop, so we replaced it, and can say on the way back east we observed good cooling and at least a 1 mpg increase!

New wax valve

And another overdue project was replacing our rear slide seal.

Going in

Then a few more spots to visit and we had to say good bye.

A favorite view and picnic spot

Haviland Lake

Uh oh, snow, time to go

Jan squeezed in one more hike to Spud Lake.

Happy hiker

Just before we left Karen had come up on a maintenance trip and was visiting when we all caught a flash of brown, a mouse running under our dash. But not only did we all see it, Bert did too, he was on patrol the rest of the night, but the trap ended up catching it.

Bert on guard duty

Down to Taos for a last visit with Karen and Tom, but winter is coming, we even had snow on the ground several evenings.

On the way to Taos, baby it's cold outside

We pulled into Atlanta for a month to have time to fly to Buffalo to make up for our missed visit in the spring, and it was good we did, turned out Jan needed oral surgery, so what with visits with friends, docs, and her surgery, it worked out well.