END OF THE ROAD.

 We leave the Badlands behind and turn east  into Nebraska towards home.  We  look for a rural highway and choose Hwy 20, and travel through dozens of small farming communities and pass miles of brown burned grass.  Like most of the country this year this area has experienced  a severe drought.  The only life we see are the herds of beef cattle huddled around the windmill or solar pumps.  As we move south and east towards Omaha the landscape becomes more hilly and the great Nebraska corn fields appears, watered by those huge circular irrigation systems that make much of this land useable.  After a weekend in Omaha  we head into Iowa and towards the town of  Dyersville  to visit the world centre of toy tractors. 

 there are two toy tractor manufacturers here and the world largest collection of toy farm implements.  We see the daddy of this Cat in the field in western Nebraska pulling 2 sets of disk that were 60 feet wide each,  I guess when your field is a couple thousand acres you need big toys.

Also in Dyersville is the Field of Dreams  made famous by the movie of the same name.  It has been kept the same as it was for the movie.

 When you are at the field of dreams you may as well live the dream and hit one out of the park in the bottom of the ninth to win the worlds series. (great form)

 later in the week we stopped at RV/MH  Hall of Fame in Elkhart Indiana. The above picture is one of the first RV's made in  about 1912.

This is the interior, not quite up to today's standard but useable.
This weekend we stop and visit some friends we know from our park in Florida.  Verlin and Virginia are two great people whose love for  the Lord shines through in everything they do. We respect them and love them a lot and had a great couple of days together.
As I type this we are only a few miles from the Ambassador Bridge that connects Detroit Michigan from Windsor Ontario.  And so our 2012 journey ends, 60 days and 8715 miles later.  We have seen much of North America in these last three summers of travel. We have been in 10 provinces and two territories of Canada and 44 U.S. states, we have seen and experienced so much and yet we are aware that we also missed so much as well.   We were made aware nearly everyday how great and awesome is our God who created all we have seen.. We have met some great people, some for only a few minutes  in passing and some camping neighbors for two or three days.  We visited with many old friends along the way and are very grateful for the kindness and generosity  we found with each of you.
Next week begins a new chapter in our lives as we relocate back to our old hometown in Windsor.   Moving, another house to remodel and make into a home, old friends to reconnect with and new ones to meet.  We look forward to the challenge and eagerly await the challenges ahead.
We thank you who have followed us on this blog and those of you who have kept in touch by phone and e-mail, we hope that you have enjoyed  traveling with us as much as we have enjoyed the trip. We love you and wish God's blessings and peace on each of you.

THE BADLANDS

 After leaving Wind Caves it is just a couple of hours to the Badlands, This area  appears to be more really hard clay and not rock like a lot of the parks we have seen.

 Again not much rain falls in this area however there is some ranching nearby.

Some of the area is fairly smooth, but mostly very rugged and inhospitable.

MORE SAND DUNES

Here are a few pics of the sand dunes that never made it on the other blog.  It is interesting that they  sit our in the middle of a vast area of nothing but junk land are about 65 miles from the nearest mountains.

 Geologist claim that the sand just blew off the mountains over millions of years  and fell here, we wonder why that did not happen at other mountains as well.  Maybe God had a hand it this.

SAND DUNES, CAVES and MORE

 We left Durango at about 12 noon the temp was 94* and headed east into the mountains.  Less than  two hours later we crossed the continental divide at 10,400 feet and the temp was 51*.  There is a highway maintenance yard at the top and the trucks all had snowplows on,  it can snow here any day of the year.  We had seen on the map the great sand dunes and as it is only about 16 miles from the highway we stopped in.

 The dunes cover 35 square miles of  pure sand.  The top is only about 500 feet high. The sand is stable but quite loose and difficult to wall in.  For some reason all the pictures did not show here. I may be able to post some more in a later blog.

 The sand dunes are in south central Colorado and we turned and headed straight north and I do mean straight. U.S. highway 71 in Colorado and into Nebraska goes dead straight for mile after mile, and we see nothing except miles and miles of barren land broken  every hundred miles or so will those unsightly windmills.  As we drove further north we begin to see beef cattle in the fields. we continued on into South Dakota to Wind Cave National Park.  The underground passages have been mapped to over 1300 miles and there is still more unmapped.

 This is the first natural opening found, the cave gets its name from the wind that blows out from the hole.  A 16 year old kid climbed in to explore the caves in 1890 and stayed underground for several weeks to explore using just candle power and food he carried with him.

 Today we have stairs built to get us down 220 steps to start our tour, most of which is 200+ feet underground.

 This is called boxwork.  Ninety five percent of all the known boxwork in the world is here at Wind Caves.   It does look like boxes of all difference sizes and shapes hanging from the ceiling.

 There are rocks and all types of mineral deposits in lots of colors and formations.  This is called popcorn.

 Like all caves there are lots of smaller dead end tunnels, most of what we saw were just passages from 1-2 feet wide to several feet and not really very high or long.. The caves we had visited earlier in Oregon had huge caverns 2-300 feet in length.

There is lots of colour, this is caused by  mineral laden water evaporating and leaving the mineral behind.

DURANGO to SILVERTON TRAIN

We had  heard much about this train ride from others who have taken the trip, the tracks are narrow gauge and built in 1880 mostly to move people and silver to and from the mines in Silverton.

 The engine is coal fired and steam power and takes us from 6000 feet to 9,400 feet past this really pretty reflection in this lake that a man  dug for his wife.

 Today the silver mining is done and the railway remains as the longest continually operating railroad in the U.S.  As you can see there are lots of bends and curves.  The average speed is 18 mph.

 The tracks run the  entire way beside the Animas River.

The river is a magnet for rafters and kayakers but this year because of the unusually mid winter and low snow fall there are not many willing to  risk the numerous rocks.

We did enjoy the trip both ways, were not impressed with Silverton but did really like Durango.  We thought that the White Pass and Yukon trip last year was much nicer.

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK

We have so far spend our time visiting  God's creations across this vast area so today we visit a man made site.  We are told that natives lived in this area as far back as 1 AD and it was continually inhabited for over 1600 years.

 There are over 2000 confirmed site in the park, many are just a hole in the ground were past inhabitants had built wood, straw and mud huts.  The most interesting one are these cliff dweller ruins.

They chose large overhangs and uses natural rocks and mud mortar to build the walls  

 And uses wood to build floors inside to have 3 or 4 levels in the houses.

 Notice the nice square and straight corners, they were able to cut the soft rocks with harder ones to built straight and true right up to the roof of the overhang.

 Being under the rock overhang, kept the places dry and preserved them.  They are much the same as they were when "discovered" in the 1880's. 

Even here we had some tough climbs to get to the ruins.  One really interesting  mystery.
We are told that this area was  continually inhabited for over 1600 years and that as many as fifty thousand people lived in the area but there is no cemetery, no burial ground and no  human remains have ever been  found.

NATURAL BRIDGES NATIONAL MONUMENT

 A bridge or a arch?    They both look alike, so what is the difference?   Arches are found in lots of places, in the canyons, in the hills or in the mountains.  Bridges must have water flowing under them so are found only in the lowlands where river are running.

 This park has three bridges to visit. The first one is under  and behind the dome above.  The bottom land under the bridge is only 500 feet from the top of the canyon but the trail to get down is nearly one mile.

 And this is part of the path, There are a few level places but not many, there are, rock steps, metal stairs,

and  4 sets of wooden ladders like this.

And the climb down is really worth it.  This bridge is 220 feet in height from the floor to the underside of the arch, the span is268 feet and it is 53 feet thick.

 From the bottom looking up 220 feet above our heads.  Of course after you enjoy the view  and have a bit of rest you then have to hike the mile back UP.  Much harder but we made it.  We had planned to hike to all three but after the first one we decided to skip one.

This is a much smaller arch (and much easier hike) it is 106 feet high, spans 180 feet and is only 9 feet thick, but still pretty impressive.

Interesting meeting at the bottom here all three couple were Detroit  area people and tiger fans.

CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK

 Today is the fist time in 22 days that the temp did not reach 100* It was overcast and only got to low 90's.  The canyonlands is a huge park where the Green river and the Colorado river comes together.

This is the road down into the canyon, only 4 wheel, high clearance vehicles are allowed and it takes two days to cross.

 A nice easy 1/2 mile hike gets us to this arch.Behind the arch the canyon floor is  2200 feet straight down.

 This is looking down into the canyon at a dome of white rock that rises several hundred feet from the floor. The hike to get to this point was up hill about 5/8 mile.

The Green river on its way to meet the Colorado.   The place where the two rivers meet is at a different part of the park and a long difficult hike so we decided to pass.  Many of the pictures have a blue haze,  it is mostly smoke from the forest fires burning in Colorado and Utah.

A huge crack across the bottom lands, look closely and you can see the road.