August 1st.

I have learnt a lot… I feel I have just been baptized into the Wander The West group. What an incredible way to travel (How fortunate I have been to have received so much help in making this trip and gearing up the FWC)… almost all back country, National Forest, BLM, dirt roads. The US Ranger’s Offices also offer free detailed maps of all the ‘service roads' at each station. An incredible resource. We have done hundreds of miles of off road travel in Idaho and Montana that was not in the plan. Panther Creek road off the Salmon River Road in Idaho is fantastic…. going from furnace hot 99 degrees up to the 7,500 pass where it was 49 degrees. Great fishing and boondocks sites that make you feel it is all yours. 

Even tonight, we left our last really wild boondocks site and traveled 80 miles on dirt roads out to route 93… real pavement. Then on down 75 and 21 … where we now, though we had a choice of 15 “campgrounds” we were able to find a solo site on the Payette River an hour out of Boise that was so rough no one seemingly wanted to deal with it and we are alone at the river’s edge…hearing the white noise of water over stone. 

I am bracing, though it never works, for the onslaught of the Americana Highway culture. Fast.  Tomorrow I treat my poor truck to a very well deserved oil and filter change, air filter, diesel fuel filter and top off of the essential fluids. Thereafter we will do our first stay in a hotel/motel… a shower and dinner out. On the next day (8/3) I am having suspension work done at Boise Spring Works, it should take most of the day but that afternoon we head east…. on the “slab”. “Anywhere USA” highway. I did this on the way out but Luann hasn’t experienced the numbing miles to cover, flying by what might be great things to see but relegated to stay within the white lines, 5 to 6 hundred miles a day. 

To keep the mind alive we have done one book on tape so far (Robinson Crusoe) … definitely a great story. We will listen to the “Portrait of an Artist as a Long Man” and then perhaps “Blue Highways”. I loved reading both a long time ago and will enjoy them again. It is strange how much has gone by our window and thankfully the time writing the blog has filtered some into a stream to coherently pass along some of the experience. I am looking forward to my little house in the shire of New England; up a dead end road in small hills. It seems so little compared to the big sky country, but it is definitely where I belong. I love the woods of the Northeast.  BTW… the last photo is our last boondocks location … last night.. an abandoned campsite along the Fayette river … very rough road for 25 yards… turns back all but high base 4WD. We were alone on a river. 

Boise is 101º (cooled down from 108º)... Irish melt at that temperature.