17 Jun 2015 at 4:43pm

For the last day here, we are going to step down off the mountains and onto the Great Plains.
The logical final part of a journey is, of course, to stand back and look at where you have been, so we are going to drive out to one of the least populated areas of America and turn around to see the Rockies as they would have been seen by all those Oregon Trail people, gold prospectors and the like at the end of 'the easy bit' of their journey.

The Rockies were just about visible here, near a tiny flyspeck town called Wiggins - great name!




We've been to the Plains before on our last trip a few years ago when we drove through parts of Alberta, Saskachewan and northern Montana but you never fail to be shocked by the never-ending sameness of it all.  The odd thing is that although this is well off the Rockies and flat as a pancake, it's rather surprising to discover that you are still over 1,000 feet higher than Ben Nevis.
 



We came across some of those massive circular fields with the pivot irrigation systems - a quarter mile long sprinkler system!  (Thread about it here)




On that trip to Montana we took some great photos of old prairie grain elevators so we were pleased to add this one to the collection.




This is the day's trip.  Those three straight stretches between Wiggins and Bennett are 53 miles.  53 miles and I only turned the steering wheel twice!



Journey's end.
We landed at our motel in Denver.
When we were making plans back at home and I was pondering about routes and things, I was thinking I would be looking at driving about 3,000 miles in total. We didn't take exactly the route I showed back at the beginning of this thread but my estimate was spookily close. There are 3,011 miles on the clock of the car!

Well Chris , over the last 12 days or so I've looked at your piccies in amazement , smiled at your adventures , and dreamed of such a journey . Probably when I retire now This has been a fantastic thread and a distraction from the mundane for a little part of my day . Well done mate and thanks for chronicling this journey , particularly the striking images . This is a thread I will return to in the future to relive your adventures once again and perhaps make it a reality for myself one day . Cheers for that .

Honeymoon ??

Thanks guys, I was a bit worried at times I might just be boring you with my holiday photos.

By the small miracle that is Google Earth, I'm able to display the elevation changes along the route.

I was posting notes for the text of most of the posts into a thread I started in the mod area of TAS on a daily basis, so I've copied the dates and times at the top of the text of each post in this thread as they happened.
We flew to LA via Washington DC on the 4th of June and set off driving on the morning of the 5th
Our flight back to Manchester via Newark was on the 18th June, so we finished the drive on the 17th.
So that makes twelve days of touring.

A couple of tips for anyone who fancies doing this type of thing:

National Parks
If you're going to be visiting a few National Parks then it may well pay you to buy what they call a multi-agency pass. It will let you into any of the 2000 National Parks and many National Monuments, National Forests etc. They last for a year and cost $80. Park fees range from $10 to $25 for a car-load of people, so it doesn't take long to pay for itself. They are also valid for more than one principal user, so you can pass it on to another member of the family or a friend. Some people sell them on Ebay when they get home but my view is that the Parks are such a fantastic resource that they should be supported properly and the best way of doing that is to pay the fees honestly. Though we buy a pass, I like to stick a little something extra in the donations boxes when I see them in the visitor centres. That way, the actual Park I'm visiting gets a little extra from me rather than it disappearing into the 'big pot'.

Sat-Navs
We bought a sat-nav loaded with 2015 US maps from a private seller on Ebay. It was cheaper than buying a new set of maps for our normal machine with European maps on it and much cheaper than renting one from the hire car company. When you get back, you can either hang on to it for your next trip or stick it back on Ebay and get your money back.
Some States don't allow you to use a phone or tablet as a navigation device while you are driving so if you're tempted to do that, you should check first.
Some States won't allow you to stick anything on the windscreen.  Some others, if they do, will only allow it in specific small areas of the screen - some models are too big to comply with this.  Car hire companies might not like it if you leave the gluey residue from a stick on hard plastic dashboard mount. Invest in a bean bag or mat mount or get one that fixes to a vent grille. If you're going to be out in the middle of nowhere and you pass a patrol car, it's best not to be breaking any law, no matter how trivial - those guys get really bored so don't take chances with something stupid like a sat-nav!

As promised to Brian a couple of weeks ago or so, here's a quick sketch of some of the other trips we've taken in the US and Canada.

Our first foray over the Atlantic was to Ontario, Canada.  We played it safe for this one!  
It was a two week trip and to start with, we booked a week in a cabin on the shores of White Horse Lake, which is one of the more than a million bodies of water in Ontario.  It was a place called Shawmere Cottages, a spot that is generally frequented by Dads and sons from New York State visiting Canada for a summer fishing holiday.  
The owner, a great guy called Chuck had just launched some pages on the "new-fangled-internet-thingy" and we were his first booking from the site - I expect he thought he had conquered the world when we made our booking from somewhere as far afield as Nottinghamshire, England!!

It was great, he hired us a boat to go footling about on the lake and we took day trips into places like Ganonoque and Kingston.  Kingston is the original capital of Canada and was built at the point where Lake Ontario is funnelled into the St Lawrence river on its way to the Atlantic.  We took a boat trip around the Thousand Islands, which was a fascinating and somewhat saddening glimpse into the lives of the first super, super rich Americans (under river heating, anyone?)  

Prior to going, I had made contact with a local forestry luminary and was invited to a meeting one evening of the board of the East Ontario Model Forest (1.5 MILLION acres!!!!!!).  I met some fellow foresters and we were invited to stay with one of their families in their lakeside cottage for a Friday night barbecue with a little light forestry survey work after breakfast the next day - lovely, lucky and friendly people. 
 
A trip to Ottowa was interesting, and I learnt that French Canadians are more militantly French than the French!  The locks on the St Lawrence Seaway were awesome exhibits of vintage engineering.

The second week we were based in Toronto.  Interesting,but when all's said and done it's a big city. A BIG one!  Not really my thing.  The CN Tower was good, and of course that and the obligatory visit to Niagara Falls were the highlights.

Here's the route we took.

I think it's about 200 miles, but guess what? It's the smallest one of the Great Lakes!
I lived on the edge of Lake Kariba in central Africa for a few years when I was a kid.  At the time, I think it was the 2nd biggest man-made lake in the world, but at least you could see across to the other side!  Lake Ontario might as well be a sea though.