2019 Trip to Crater Lake and beyond

In July, 2019, we took a trip to Crater Lake National Park and beyond.  Where beyond?  We went to Craters of the Moon National Monument, City of Rocks National Preserve, Grand Teton National Park, Custer State Park in South Dakota, Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Park, Badlands National Park, Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, Mount Rushmore National Monument, and Devils Tower National Monument.  For this last set, we camped in Custer State Park and took day trips to the other sites in that area.  On the way home, we stopped in Salt Lake City to see friends and enjoy dinner with them at Red Iguana.

The reason for our trip was that we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in Crater Lake.  Wile we were out, we continued on to the other places, most of which we had seen before and wanted to see again.  Because the hotel at Crater Lake is the absolute best place to be when in the park, we stayed there and parked our trailer in the parking lot, and then camped in the trailer at the rest of the stops.

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We had a first time experience while on this trip.  When we left Crater Lake, we planned to cross Oregon and then find an RV park to stay overnight somewhere just into Idaho.  We learned that this part of Idaho is very busy during the summer and we could not find a park with a space for the night.  We ended up staying in the parking lot of a Walmart.  We had heard that you could do this and it's true, at least in Caldwell, ID.  It was very hot that day, and we learned that we could indeed run our air conditioner on the trailer using our Honda generator for power.  Thanks to RVParky.com for helping us find a location to stay.  It has proven to be a great app while traveling and planning a trip.  Based on this experience, we then made reservations at other overnight stops so we knew we would have a place to stay.  Some of them were full when we stopped, so this turned out to be a better way to travel.

Here is a map of the places we visited.  As I have done before, this was generated by using APRS on my amateur radio which was in the Jeep as we traveled.

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