Mount Saint Helen

I had seen the destruction from Mount Saint Helen in 1981, while driving on I-5 North. A lot has changed since then, the trees have come back, but you can still see the path of destruction from 1980.

All along the way we have been seeing these beautiful flowers and I finally was able to get a good picture of them.

The visitor center at the Johnston Ridge Observatory is definitely worth seeing. The movie was pretty cool, explaining what happened and at the end they opened the curtains and you had this beautiful view of the mountain. You can clearly see the path of destruction this volcano took.


It was another great day of exploring and I am sure glad we came to see this area.

Mount Rainier

Doug had been here with his mother and brother with family a long time ago and therefore had certain expectations. I on the other side have seen Mount Rainier only from the distance in Seattle and was very excited to see it up close. The roads are in need of some repairs and we should have not gone there on a Saturday, but it was breathtaking.

The glaciers have shrunk in the last 20 years, but it was still pretty cool. We actually got to play in the snow a little bit after we finally found a parking spot at the top visitor center. Here are some more pictures of a beautiful day.

Graham, WA

We arrived here on Friday and I have to say this campground is quite different from the places we have stayed so far. We are at Mt. Rainier Adult RV Park and we have a beautiful view of Mt. Rainier right out of our rear windows.

There are no fire rings here, no kids are playing outside, if you are over 40' long, you will not fit. The sites are a little bit tight and it will be interesting to pull back out next Monday, but the view is just beautiful. It is very quiet here and we are in a perfect spot to check out Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helen and Seattle and surrounding areas while we spend our 4th of July weekend here.

Leavenworth, WA

I was actually pleasantly surprised by Leavenworth. Always suspicious about "German towns" this was actually impressed with this replica of a Bavarian town.


We walked around for a couple of hours checking out the town, actually found two bottles of my favorite German curry ketchup and had a nice "German" dinner. I was hesitant to come here, but in the end was glad we did.

Grand Culee Dam

It was not at all what I expected. First of all, I picked a campground at the wrong side of the lake. I thought the dam was at the bottom of the lake in Culee City, well I was wrong. Luckily it was only 27 miles north of the county campground at the bottom of the lake. We had only driven 125 miles from Coeur D'Alene, so it was still early enough in the day to go check out the dam.

Culee City is the first town in a long time that actually had no internet. So much for the Verizon commercial, claiming they have internet pretty much everywhere! We found the spot that they don't!!!

So we drove up to the dam in the early afternoon. It was a beautiful drive along the lake.


We checked out the visitor center and watched an interesting film about how and why the dam was built. It is very different from Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam is a lot higher, but this one stretches out for over a mile long, so it is the biggest dam in North America. It just did not look as impressive than Hoover Dam. We decided to do the dam tour and unfortunately, I have to say it was a big disappointment. We knew that the elevator was not working, but at the time did not realize that the whole tour depends on this elevator.

We went to the third power plant to start the tour (had to leave my purse in the car for security purposes) and started walking out to the dam. We were brought into an area where you normally load the elevator and stood there for about 15 minutes looking at the dam.

This is all we got to see. We never went into the power plant at all. I am glad we decided to stay in Culee City for only one night and move on to Leavenworth the next day.

Coeur D'Alene

We have been in Coeur D'Alene since last Wednesday. It has been a great week at the Coeur D'Alene RV Park in Post Falls, ID. Here they charge only $3 per day for my car, instead of the $10 that the Wolf Lodge outside of Coeur D'Alene wanted. We got here in the early afternoon and of course it started raining about 5 minutes after we were done setting up. Good timing!!

We were going to relax on Thursday after four days of driving, but after checking the weather and seeing that it was supposed to rain again on Friday, we went for a beautiful scenic drive around the lake on Thursday.


Lake Coeur D'Alene and the houses built around it are just fascinating. It was a beautiful day for a drive and we thoroughly enjoyed the beauty of the lake.

Friday was a raining day and we went out exploring again on Saturday. This time we went up north to Lake Pend Oreille, which is the largest lake in Idaho. Again, we had a great time driving around the lake and found this really nice restaurant at a marina for lunch. Doug drove almost 250 miles that day by the time we got back to the rig, but that is what we bought the little car for. It is just so much easier and cheaper to get around in it.

Tomorrow we will move on again. Next we will stop at Coulee Dam, go up to Leavenworth for a day and we will spend the following week south of Tacoma, WA.

Driving, driving and more driving

Normally, when we travel we drive for a day and stop for a couple of days before moving on again. Well, we decided to get through the state of Montana with only overnight stops. Montana is a huge state and it took as four days to get from Dickinson, ND to Coeur D'Alene, ID.

I am not used to driving 200+ miles a day for four days in a row. We got lucky every day to pull into a campground every time before it started raining and thundering (it did that every day). The highway was not to bad at all and we found out in Bozeman that we are really 13' 2" tall, since the bridge clearance to the campground was 13' 3" and we still have the air conditioners and the satellite dish on the roof. I held my breath the whole time he was under that bridge.

As we were driving west in Montana we started climbing into the Rockies again. This is the first time our truck is pulling 20000 lbs over the Rockies. Last time we went over, we had the Excel, which was about 4000 lbs less than the Teton that Doug is pulling now. I am very proud of Doug and the truck, since they did just fine getting up and down all these passes we had to navigate. And guess what!!! The Rockies in Montana are so beautiful. It is so green with all these pine trees covering the mountains and I was glad that my sense of appreciation for the beautiful has not dulled as I had feared in Dickinson.

We finally pulled into Coeur D'Alene on Wednesday and decided to stay for a week to take a break and check out the area.

The way we look at things!!

A strange thing happened while we were in Dickinson, ND. We decided to go to Theodore Roosevelt National Park to get a look at the Badlands. Well, we drove the 36 mile loop in the park and even though we saw some buffalo and a couple of horses, we never saw anything that made us stop the car and want to get a closer look at. We did stop once, because I saw some scrubs with silvery looking leaves, which turned out to be sage and smelled great.

If we would have gone to this park before we traveled last year, I am sure we would have stopped more and "ahhh" and "ohhh" some. But we have seen so much beauty in this country already, seen a herd of wild buffalo in Custer Park, seen boulders in Moab that were so much more impressive. I was wondering if our senses were getting dulled. It is a strange thing that the human mind seems to always need something to compare to what you see to give it a value.

The park was nice, but just nothing special. We starting moving again west on Sunday and I was wondering what would be next.

The Enchanted Highway

On the way to Dickinson we saw sign for the "Enchanted Highway" and it sounded intriguing. This experience falls under the category of unusual.




See the threatening clouds behind the sculpture, we were able to take all the pictures I wanted before the rain came.

The sculptures are stretched over about 25 miles of road in the middle of nowhere. We saw so many pheasants on the way, but the would not stand still for me to take a picture. This was a fun way of checking out the country side. North Dakota is pretty flat with some rolling hills. It reminds me of a big green carpet.

Assumption Abbey

We have moved on to Dickinson, ND. I have never been in a monastery and Assumption Abbey in Richardson looked very nice on the website. There really is not that many things to see in North Dakota, so we decided to check it out.



It is a very nice church, but it was not at all what I expected. On the website it sounded like this was a really big church and gardens in the middle of nowhere. Well, it is in the middle of nowhere, but not as big as I thought. We still had a good time checking things out and the monks that we met were really nice.

Finding the White Buffalo

We have conquered another state! Now I just need to update the map. We came to Jamestown, because I have never seen Albino buffalo. Well, I would not recommend the campground we stayed at, but we did get to see the buffalo.


There is actually three white buffalo, a mother and two of her offsprings. They are still at the winter pastures, instead of by the campground, but at least we did find them.

And then we went to check out Frontier Village. It was interesting to say the very least.

Now this is a big buffalo!!!!

Heading West!

We went to Walker and they found two more leaks in the kitchen area that have now been fixed hopefully!! Not much to see and do there, but we found the birthplace of Paul Bunyan in the next town. Did not know the guy really existed and was soooo tall.


We left Walker on Friday and went about 80 miles west to a RV Casino Campground in Mahnomen, MN. It was a nice campground and there was a 5th wheel that make me take a second look,

There was actually somebody leaving in there. I have never seen a 5th wheel that small!!!. Today we are moving on to Jamestown, ND, since I want to see the Albino Buffalo. If I get to see them, I will post a picture.