The 'IT' factor......

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8:34 am - Friday - October 13 - Ririe, ID - 34º F, humidity 53%, wind 9 mph out of the south by southeast.......when you see windmills on the hill near your camp there is no way it is not going to be windy, right?

We awoke, finally, to a windless environment Friday morning.  I haven't talked a lot about the the wind, but over time wind kind of wears me down.   Any day I wake up without the ubiquitous sound of the wind makes me happy.  Our original Jello plan was to continue south from Dillon, MT on I-15 to Idaho Falls which is always a natural stop off point for us when traveling the I-15 corridor.  Sometimes we have stayed at a local in town RV park, or in the local Walmart parking lot.  As I was thinking Thursday night about where we might stay my mind kept rejecting these familiar options so I began to look outside of town for someplace new to stay for a couple of days.  I checked Freecampsites.net and found numerous free boondocking options, of which there are many in this area, but knowing the overnight lows would be in the very low 20's I began to look to places where we could at least have access to electricity.  Initially I thought we might stay at the local Elks Lodge, but they only offer 20 amp service with no water, or sewer, or dump station.  The price, $10/night, was attractive, but I really didn't want to be back in a situation where we had to think about what electric appliances we could use.....we did that all summer and, frankly, I'm over that.  I just want to plug in and not have to manage our electrical consumption, especially with the cold temps being forecast.  I checked Passport America, but none of the parks nearby had that 'IT' factor, even at a 50% discounted rate.  Finally I checked RV Park reviews dot com and found this cool out of the way Bonneville County Park which overlooks Ririe Dam/Reservoir.  This park seemed to have the 'IT' factor, so that is where we headed about mid morning.

We had one big pass, Monida (6,870' elevation), which stood between us and the Idaho border.  Fortunately the grade heading up to the pass is quite gentle and I was able to keep the Newell in cruise control the entire time.....that is rare......95% of the time I have to shift down to 2nd, or 3rd gear to get over most passes, or summits.  Our total driving distance for the day was modest......just 146 miles.  Normally I would take time before we leave a location to clean the windshield, but it was soooo cold I decided to put it off until we got down the road aways.  About 45 miles into our day I spotted a rest stop near Lima, MT which we had stopped at previously, so we pulled in and I spent the next 15 minutes cleaning the windshield and side windows......it was still quite cold!

We exited I-15 about 10 miles shy of Idaho Falls and took a few country roads over to US-26 which took us the final 6 miles to Juniper Campground, which is aptly named as there are juniper bushes everywhere.......

.......as we entered the park around 2 pm it was obvious that we would be the only ones there.....we essentially have the entire park to ourselves!  Most of the sites are long pull throughs so it was just a matter of finding one with the 'IT' factor, and then settling in for two days.  Since the overnight temps are getting below freezing most nights the water has been turned off.....that's cool as we had over 100 gallons of fresh water still left in our tank.....more than enough for two days.  At least we have access to the sewer to dump our gray tank water, and we have 50 amp service!

Around 7 pm we noticed we were getting a great sunset.......unfortunately, my meager photographic skills did not capture its true grandeur, and beauty......

.....we spent most of the evening watching the MLB game five between the Chicago Cubs and the Washington Nationals.....the game lasted over 4.5 hours and was ultimately won by Chicago 9-8.....the Nationals just made too many errors in a game they should have won handily.

Thanks for stopping by!

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