Mountain Home, Idaho

 
We last posted from Boomtown, just after discovering our kitchen slide would not open.  

Saturday we drove to Winnemucca where we spent the night.  A decent watering hole in the middle of the Nevada desert, mining continues to drive the economy. On Sunday we drove to Mountain Home, Idaho. Unless you drive north to Oregon, it seems you can't leave California without crossing the desert.  Imagine what it was like when my family emigrated to California a hundred years ago.  They would have traveled by train, riding in a wooden carriage pulled by a locomotive with a boiler burning wood or perhaps coal.  My first trip across the desert was in 1947 in a black '47 Chevrolet  pulling a seventeen foot house trailer.  With my parents and two sisters, all five of us lived in the trailer during that trip.  There were canvas water bags hanging off the front bumper to be used when the radiator over heated.  I say "when" because over heating was a common occurrence in the desert.  We scheduled our trip so that we crossed the Mojave Desert at night to avoid the heat.  Now we travel in our Ford F-350 land yacht in air-conditioned splendor listening to Fox News or Blumberg on satellite radio. We are pulling a 31 foot fifth wheel equipped with television and a computer linked to the internet providing us with email and access to worldwide news.  Life has changed!

After heading north from Winnemucca we traveled through cattle country on highway 95.  There were snow capped mountains in the distance.  We drove through Boise.  This was our first trip to Idaho.  I was surprised by the extensive agriculture including large acreage of fruit trees.

And here we are in Mountain Home!  We'll spend five days attending a New Horizons RV rally before heading for Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.  Gathering every eighteen months, this  is an opportunity to get toghether with other New Horzons owners to socialize and compare notes, and maybe figure out what's going on with our slide out!  On our first night we listened to a two hour presentation on driving to Alaska. Useful information.

We are still working on the problem with our slide.  We hope to reach a conclusion tomorrow on what to do about it.

Comments

[Ellen]

Great post, Fred. Small world- I crossed that desert the same summer of 1947, in a green 1938 Ford, with my sister and parents. I remember the canvas water bags on the car. We would start out about 4am,and stop for breakfast about 9am. The car did not have a radio, so we would sing alot. The seats were made of wool, and in the heat, it was scratchy and uncomfortable. We stayed in tourist cabins, and ate in old lodges. We spent the summer in Beverly Hills, my Father was a visiting professor at UCLA. Your family were early RVers. Did you stay in campgrounds then ? I was interested in the comparison between 1947 and 2010 RV's.

[Russ]

Fred,

In the summer of 1948 we crossed the Nevada desert on old Highway 40 then north up Highway 93 into Idaho, eventually across the Arco desert to Salmon Idaho. We moved that summer from California to Idaho and crossed the desert several times in the move.

I describe some of our adventures in my book on Cobalt. We alos had water bags that hung of the front bumper. When it got hot we drank from the water bags then spilled some on our T-shirts so that the wind blowing in the window of the moving car would cool us.

My grandfather had a small swamp cooler that attached to the passenger window of the car, blowing cool air into the passenger seat. He filled the bottom of the swamp cooler from the water bags in the front bumper. Now we just switch on the AC.

Now when going to Idaho and from Idaho in our Airstream trailer, Ellen and I have always stopped in Winnemucca at one of the RV parks on the east side of town. It was just the right distance for the first night on the road from Nevada City. We soon preferred the one closest to town. It had the best WiFi coverage and cleanest bath house.

[Fred]

We didn't stay in RV parks. I don't recall if they existed then. We stayed in national and state parks, or where ever we could find a spot. The rig wasn't grounded, so if the electric connection was inverted we received a shock whenever we touched any metal on the rig. My parents slept in a bed at the rear, and my sisters slept in a converted dinette. I slept on the floor. We broke an axel in the midde of the desert, and spent the day waiting until my Dad could hitch a ride into the nearest town to find a mechanic. My mother was a square dance caller. The purpose of our trip was to attend a course offered by Pappy Shaw in Colorado Springs. "Pappy" was the father of modern square dancing. We initially traveled south through Las Vegas, visiting the Grand Canyon and Gallup for the Inter-Tribal Indian gathering in August. That was the highlight of the trip for a seven year old. Then we headed north to Colorado. We drove back to California via Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake.