Today was another travel day. We gathered up our junk and departed the Lakeside RV Park in Provo. The park had full hookups but very skinny spaces such that you could spit out the window and hit the neighbor’s slide-out. Also, their wifi was junk.
Today was our longest scheduled drive on our entire trip west but we were so afraid of the durability properties of the Chinese Tow-Max tires on our trailer that we started the trip with a diversion to a Les Schwab Tire Store in Provo. The manager was as unimpressed with the previous set of tires as we were; we have had a 50% blowout or tread separation rate with the Tow-Max tires despite none of them being worn down to 50% tread life. The manager and I went over to the desk where he started a furious procedure to credit us for blown tires, bought back the two that remained and gave us four, 14-ply steel belted radials to replace our 10-ply bias tires. By the time he was done with the computer, we got out of there about $400 richer than we thought we would.
After about an hour and a half at the tire store, we started our drive from Provo toward Red Canyon near Bryce. For the first 150 miles we drove south on I-15 with the stunning Wasatch Range on our left. A bit after leaving the Provo area, we encountered stiff headwinds as we crossed through many mountain passes of around 6000 feet elevation. We turned off I-15 south of Beaver and headed east over some very steep roads over the mountains to Panguitch. Panguitch was a dusty little burg when my family had a fuel pump failure here back in 1961. Fortunately, at that time there was a good mechanic there and we were soon on our way although it involved an overnight motel stay.
Panguitch is much bigger today with some artsy-fartsy shops, not less than 3 gas stations, nice hotels and spiffy-looking restaurants. We kept up our eastward progress toward Bryce Canyon until we pulled into the Red Canyon Village, Cabins and RV Park having covered something over 200 miles today. We were assigned the RV space on the end of the row so our satellite antenna works perfectly, they have cable TV (we get about a million channels between the satellite and cable), there are full hookups, they have tolerable wifi and the owner gave us a discounted weekly rate so we will be here for seven days. In our assigned space, nobody can block our fabulous view of Red Canyon, a Utah state park bordering Bryce Canyon National Park. A week here should be stunning and, after our last few days, we will be happy if nothing goes wrong. We did note that we are camped at a 7000′ elevation and neither of us can go very far without making funny wheezing and hissing sounds. Fortunately, sitting and admiring gorgeous landscapes works for us better than standing.
There’s a couple pix. Click the asterisk *