Monday, Aug. 26, 2013 – Travel Day to Iron Creek Horse Camp

Didn’t worry about an alarm this morning, as according to everything I’ve seen, it’s less than 60 miles, and isn’t supposed to take that long. Nevertheless, we were packed up and moving by 10:30, stopping at the interstate rest area to use their dump (I love it when that happens!), Tractor Supply, and RV store next door to pick up a 10′ hose, Flying J just up the service road for propane, Perkins down the road for breakfast, Wal-mart for shopping, the Keystone Post Office for my general delivery mail (though they officially closed at 2:30, it was already past 3:00 when we got there, but when I knocked, the lady was kind enough to give me my mail), gas at the only station in town for generator gas, then finally on our way, much later (as usual) than we had planned. Then we started twisting and turning up Iron Mountain, mostly 15-25 mph, with sharp curves, tunnels with 12’2″ clearance we barely squeaked through, and a few lovely signs warning large vehicles that travel on this road wasn’t recommended for vehicles over 40′ (yeah, right). Saw some lovely views, and even though it’s only about 5 miles from Keystone to the campground as the crow flies, it was much longer by road, and we ended up arriving around 4:00! This campground is just one large loop, but the center is fenced off so it’s unusable and the sites are essentially just parking along the edge of the loop, no back-ins, and only room for one vehicle. There were nice big round pens for each campsite, so we quickly got the horses squared away. Since the site next to ours wasn’t going to be occupied until tomorrow, we left the horse trailer in it, since all of our stuff for horse care was in it. It seemed we would have to park the van and trailer outside the campground on the side of the road, so we decided to break out a little canopy that we had bought years ago and never used, and put it over the picnic table. Between that and the awning, we figured we’d have enough room to keep all our horse food, saddles, and everything else we would need, so we wouldn’t have to run all the way out to the horse trailer for stuff. It actually turned out to be pretty easy to put up (despite the instructions recommending three people!), we managed to do it pretty quickly, and it did create a nice covered “porch”. It was hot enough that Hubby broke out both generators so we could run the air conditioning for awhile, though fortunately the temps dropped well into the sixties by the time we turned them off shortly after dark. Had just enough of an augmented cell phone signal to check my email and do a little web surfing before I lost the signal again. Got the satellite up and running (though the receiver hard drive crapped out, so we only have live TV, yuck!!!) but we found an old Clark Gable, Yvonne DeCarlo, Sidney Poitier film that was perfect, with no commercials, so the evening turned out to be quite nice.

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