Monday 22 April 2002 - Friday 26 April 2002

Day 1: Headed out eastwards at 8.35am after saying our goodbyes. Stopped off at WalMart for groceries and Camping World for a sewer valve - the handle broke this morning as we were packing up - then we went up into the Sierra Madre to about 7,200', where there was still plenty of snow around ...

Over the border into Nevada, where we stopped at the first casino in Boomtown for a huge cheap buffet lunch. Struggled to stay awake during the long afternoon drive through scrubby desert, with vast snow-covered mountains in the distance ...

Stayed overnight at Cimarron West RV and Trailer Center, an impressive name for a scruffy campground attached to a gas station / store / diner in Elko. Incredibly cold.

Day 2: Lots of steep up and down all day, except for the Great Evaporation Basin and Bonneville Salt Flats over the border in Utah ...

The flats look deceptively solid, and every so often you see tyre tracks heading out from the road only to veer back sharply as people think better of it. We saw a couple of vehicles that weren't so lucky: a car which had tried it and just dug one front corner in, and a huge truck which had pulled up at the side of the road with its nearside wheels just off the tarmac. It was so heavy that it simply sank and eventually toppled over completely onto its side. The driver must have felt such an idiot as it slowly and remorselessly fell over. Owners of tow trucks have a job for life out here, and must develop a very low opinion of human intelligence.

Stayed at East Bay RV Park in Sandy, south of Salt Lake City. Christine did a bit of family history research at the Family Search Center in SLC without much luck as, contrary to what they'd told us, they haven't yet released the 1930 census. In the evening we visited our friend Lisa whom we'd met (coincidentally also in Utah) last year; she and her husband Jay have settled down here, although Jay is currently doing consultancy work in Baltimore at a rate too high to turn down.

Day 3: Out of Utah and a long scenic drive through Wyoming, crossing the continental divide several times at around 7,000'. Horrid Chinese lunch, with violently orange but tasteless 'sweet and sour' sauce, at a diner in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of cattle, deer and buffalo roaming around, and we could get PBS (including some BBC programmes) on the radio which helped the time to pass. Made it over the border into Nebraska to Twin Pines RV Park and MiniMart at Kimball just before night fell; they had no water due to a broken pipe, but very friendly. Nebraska really does seem a god-forsaken place at this time of year: bleak empty countryside, freezing cold, and they were expecting snow imminently. Perhaps it's nicer in the summer.

Day 4: Packed up in the biting wind and set off at 8.30am. The best that can be said of today is that we made it out of Nebraska and 120 miles into Iowa to the Timberline Campground at Waukee. Somewhere in Nebraska we passed a 'scenic viewing area', a mound at the side of the road from which could be seen ... a completely ordinary stretch of nothing, similar to the previous and subsequent 100 miles of the same. Did laundry at 9.30pm, and had to queue for the machines; there's not much else to do round here.

Day 5: 552 miles to Tinley Park, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago. Miles and miles of gently rolling farmland, with occasional clusters of houses, silos, cows in small dirt yards, and farm buildings at the roadside, some shiny and new, others dilapidated ...

Still no leaves on the trees; spring comes very late to these parts. At the campground they eventually found us a site which wasn't already being occupied by someone else and at which we could reach the hookups, but this took some time. Drove into Chicago to see our friend Dianne, chatted and ate Thai takeaway until about 11.30pm, then drove back to the campground through miles of roadworks and some of the worst drunken weekend driving we'd yet encountered.

In the morning we set out for Cincinnati, Ohio to meet our friends Gabrielle and Andy and say our final goodbyes to the trusty truck and trailer (sob).