The Long Haul Home
Traveling over 1500 miles in three days after a full and exhausting vacation
Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I have spent the last six months delivering two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels. This is the final installment.
The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post.
Despite my careful planning (mistakes and all) for our family vacation to Yellowstone, I was clueless how to plan for our trip home. By the time we would finish our time in the national park, I knew we would be ready to be home. We would have visited five national parks, four states, and multiple stops along the way. We would be tired but satisfied.
We would also be 1500 miles from home.
My husband Jeff has slowly extended the number of miles he is willing to drive in a day while towing our travel trailer, but I still try to keep it under 400 miles when planning our routes. By that calculation, we would still need four full days to travel home.
During our last two nights in Yellowstone, Jeff and I looked at mileage and camping options across the desolate plains of Wyoming and Nebraska. He finally decided he wanted to make the four-day trip a three-day trip and we calculated new distances.
We left Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone National Park by 9 AM, sad to leave the national park but also ready to head home. We came out of the mountains and traveled through the canyons and past the rivers and reservoirs of the Wind River Reservation. As we traveled through the “blink and you’ll miss it” small town of Shoshoni, I pointed west to tell my two teenagers that I spent my sixth-grade year attending school in the town, and 25 miles past that, I lived in Riverton. It was too long of a detour to take them through the town I had lived in for five years, so instead we continued east, past Casper and then Douglass where we had initially planned to make our first stop.
That night we found ourselves parked in an RV park just outside of Wheatland, Wyoming. Jeff and I headed into town to get the last few food items we would need to get us home. When we returned to our campsite, I watched the clouds and lightning storm grow off in the distance as I walked the dogs. We remained dry, but I pulled my kids outside to see the constant streaks lighting up the entire horizon before we settled in for the night. I wanted them to see a least a little bit of the western storms I had experienced as a child.
We spent the day before we left Yellowstone looking at several Harvest Host options for our drive home, and found the best option closest to our route in York, Nebraska. The Diamond B Horse Motel took us to the countryside, far enough off of the interstate to be quiet for the night and close enough for an easy fuel refill. We joined travelers with horses who needed a place to stay for the night and other RV travelers looking for a simple stop on the way to somewhere else. Our daughter got to play with the host’s cat and we enjoyed looking at the horses grazing in the pens. As an added bonus, the host even gave us access to electricity, so we could run our air conditioning without running out of fuel in our generator. It was everything we could have asked for in a final night on the road.
And then we came home.
There was a lot to reflect on once we returned home, and those posts are for a different time. We returned to Indiana from our Yellowstone adventure tired but fulfilled. And I was already starting to plan our next adventure.
Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:
Support my writing
While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.
You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.
Check out my RedBubble store for related merchandise.
If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.
And thank you for supporting my journey 💗