Meadows Campground on Rabbit Ears Pass

 The Meadows was more to my liking. Great trees.

Our selected site.

Trees in every direction.

There were only a few other campers. We all selected tree sites.

Picnic table at our site.

Map of campground.

Campground road.

Another site.

Were the unit at the back of the pic.

Sunshine navigates a down tree.

Pretty trail but there was only one.

A little snow on the trail.

Blossom loves to explore.

Sunshine wants a drink from the stream.

Snow in July was all around.

Blossom on the trail.

Site more out in the open.

Road to the campground.

Not sure how nervous I should be about the hunters.

The meadow the campground is named after.

We saw four moose at this campground but since I didn't want to get stomped I did not stay around to get pictures. However, my husband did (take pictures, not get stomped).

We did not see the dogs mentioned below. Loved the sign that told people not to hit or throw things at the dogs. Hate to think that people did which is why they had to post the sign.

Do not disturb the dogs.

This was the campground where I woke up cold and asked what is this? Cold in my RV? We checked out the furnace and a rocker switch had some grit in it that prevented it from igniting. We rocked the switch a few times and the furnace was back to working.

Descending pass into Steamboat Springs.

Dumont Lake

There was some beautiful scenery on the drive from Wyoming, thru CO up to Rabbit Ears Pass

We had two potential campgrounds for the second night. The first was Dumont Lake.

 It was a little more alpine meadow than I was looking for so we took a look around. This would have been the view from our site.

 Blossom would have enjoyed the snow.

The lake was pretty and had some trails. But we didn't stay.

Headed to Dinosaur National Monument - first stop Vedauwoo

I am so lucky. This fabulous camping spot is 2 hrs from our house and we will be back. One night was not enough. The campground featured dramatic rocks, great hiking trails, an abundance of wildflowers, widely spaced sites and trees. The night sky was phenomenal. One of the best I've seen. The stars were all twinkling wildly, likely because of upper atmosphere disturbance but it made it all the more special.

The campground road.

Everyone is pleased with the site.

Blossom investigates our picnic table.

Trail from our site into the woods.

The dogs enjoy the shady trail. There were many mosquitoes.

Map of the area.

One of the many inane signs I saw during this trip. It became a hobby to take pictures of them.

Our camping spot. A moose came out from behind the big rock you see just before we left.

Sunshine checking out another site.

We love these trails say the dogs.

The moose that crossed our site just before we left. He ambled through most of the campground.

Big trip to Dinosaur National Monument - trip planning

We had a two week vacation planned but had done no research on where to go or what to see. We had discussed a rural CO trip at forest service campgrounds but I like to see some informative sites like national parks where they have lots of info so we settled on Dinosaur National Monument as our destination despite it likely being too hot.

Two days before leaving we started seriously planning a route and making reservations. We got July 4th and 5th at the monument so everything else revolved around that.  We wanted a route that didn't take I-70 from Denver into the mountains so decided to go up to Wyoming before heading back into CO and over Rabbit Ears Pass instead. We also decided to come back on 285 which is very pretty and low traffic.

Because of the likely heat we tried to get electric hookups everywhere we could but didn't worry about it at the higher elevations campgrounds as those are usually tolerably cool even in July.

We had a great time with many adventures. I will try to relate them in the following posts.

Dash AC fixed

We got the RV back from the shop. For $1471 we got the dash AC system pretty much replaced (new compressor, receive dryer, expansion valve, cooling fan clutch, flush and replace our old style coolant with the new stuff), the cruise control fixed (broken vac line) and the ground wire on the blower motor secured as it was loose. Seemed a little bit cheaper than what I saw on the web as far as what others paid. When I was as the shop I saw a much newer RV getting worked on so I guess were lucky ours lasted as long as it did.

If you are in CO these are the folks who did it. They were friendly and easy to work with. We got a recommendation for them from our regular car mechanic who has treated us right also.
http://www.maxaircolorado.com/locations.html

We had a garage try to fix the cruise control before and they said it couldn't be done. These guys fixed it for $40 labor as part of the whole AC package. So that was a big win for us.

The evening at Broken Arrow

We spent our evening enjoying the fish jumping and admiring the various birds.

We saw many fish jump and actually caught one on camera.

I think these are pelicans. We saw one flying low over the water also.

Before driving to Broken Arrow we had to decide whether to drive back from Sandy Beach to Two Moon to dump. Our 50 gallon fresh water tank and associated black and gray tanks can get us through three nights, but the last one is tight on black or gray water space. We decided not to make the 20 mile round trip because the road wasn't great and we had another 3.5 or so to Broken Arrow over unknown rough road. I was worried that if we went back to dump we might not want to repeat the drive to come back to Broken Arrow. The result was, we for the first time, filled up our shower tank and it flowed into the base. We have two grey tanks, the other one being the bathroom vanity, so the dust pan and trash can were utilized to scoop out the excess water and dump it down the vanity sink. We covered the shower drain with plastic cling wrap, a towel and put the bin of water bottles on top of it. As a result there was no splash out when we drove out the next day.

The black tank, which in our RV is for the kitchen and toilet, was dangerously close to full. We had filled it before and wanted to avoid doing it again. So we stopped using the kitchen sink, and switched to the bathroom vanity for all hand washing or dish washing. We also made use of the vault toilets at the campground. In the end we didn't fill it and were glad that we took the precautions early.

We didn't run out of fresh water but the sensor showed we were empty so we were probably pretty close. However, I was relieved to get to the dump, empty the tanks and get a refill on our fresh water.

Thus ended our second trip of the season where we had several adverse occurrences which turned into fortuitous events.