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Published: July 26th 2012
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200,000
The Van turned 200,000 today, in the beautiful Colorado Rocky mountains near Copper Mountain. This morning, we succeeded in being on the road by 8:15 (which included breakfast and drying some towels and clothes that had been... umm... left out in the rain yesterday).
We passed (again) the continental divide and copper mountain and continued to drive eastward. Just before Copper, our Van turned 200,000 miles (yay). We stopped and took the obligitory pictures, which we plan to send to Toyota!
As were were climbing the hills, which were usually at a 6% - 8% grade, we discovered the downside of carrying extra gas. As we climbed, the gas cannister expanded and then out-gassed INTO the car, which filled the car with fumes. On pretty much every major uphill, we now need to open the windows to vent the fumes. By the way, Western Utah and Eastern nevada have a LOT of major uphill sections.
As we approached one set of mountains, we noticed it was covered with rain. The radar showed a pretty intense cell travelling towards us, following the road. It started raining, then harder, then really hard. At the summit, we noticed that the trucks were starting to pull over, so Anne followed suit. The rain was so hard
Bye Colorado
Colorado was fantastic... moving on to Utah. that, even parked, we couldn't see very far ahead. After about 5 minutes, the trucks pulled out which was our queue to do the same, and the storm thinned and then passed.
A little down the road, we started coming on another storm, and hit it's forward wind bank. The trailer was blown around quite a lot and there was a reasonably large sandstorm associated with it. The road, thankfully, took us around the sandstorm, save for a short 500 ft section where Anne and Michelle could experience the joys of sandstorm driving.
Through Colorado, Utah and then Nevada we drove through quite a few spectacular canyons and LOTS of summits and passes. We paralelled the Colorado river for a long time, watching it grow as it picked up water from tributaries. I think we may plan a trip where we go down route 50 slowly and go to a lot of the interesting sounding side-trips along the way.
In one of the valleys, we drove by a windmill farm where the windmills were lined up in a grid. As we drove by, we noticed that we lined up with the top of the windmills and it
Hi Utah
Let's see what Utah has in store looked like all the blades were attached to one mill.. we took picture and video.
We pushed through all the way to Ely,NV. In total, it was about 650 miles, and took us about 13 hours. Looooong day. Tomorrow, we have an equally long day (expect about 11 hours) all the way to Petaluma, CA.
Tony's Trailering Tips: When travelling with extra gasoline, try to store it outside of your vehicle as the container will out-gas when you go significantly uphill.
Anne's Anecdotes: If the truckers are pulling off the road during the heavy weather, perhaps you should too.
Michelle's Musings: Today I finally finished all of the movies I want to watch in my DVD collection.
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