July 4 Road Trip

This story is from my father, Gary Schwertley, who just got back from a road trip.

Holiday greetings to my friends at YW. May you all be having a fine Independence Day holiday. I have recently returned from a long trip through the northern central and some of the Midwestern states. I covered over driven 5,700 miles in about two and a half weeks. My itinerary was from Edmonds WA to Spokane, WA; Missoula, MT; Livingstone, MT; Cody, WY; Gillette, WY; Rapid City, SD; Mitchell, SD; Harrison County, IA; Sedalia, MO; Joplin, MO; Goodland, KS; Fruita, CO; Elko, NV; Reno, NV; Carson City, NV; and return to Edmonds, WA via northern California and Oregon. Along the way, I stopped and saw some of the tourist attractions such as Yellowstone NP, Devil’s Tower WY (where Close Encounters was filmed back in the late 1970’s), the Black Hills in South Dakota including Mount Rushmore and Deadwood. After I had waded through summer tourists in these places, it was refreshing to get away from them.

On this trip, I was able to visit old family home areas in western Iowa and Fort Leonard Wood, MO, where I was stationed for a time before I went to Vietnam.

My Ford Crown Victoria logged an average of 27.95 miles per gallon for the entire mileage on the trip. That includes some arduous non-interstate driving over the Rockies both coming and going. I was prepared for the high cost of fuel on the trip, and was surprised to find that it was usually under $4.00 per gallon in the northern central and Midwestern states. It also seemed that my mileage was a little better on the fuel purchased away from the west coast. What I wasn’t prepared for is the increase in lodging costs. In the past year, it seems in my experience that lodging costs have risen from between 50 and 100 percent. Motel 6 often no longer posts their room prices on roadside signs anymore; I guess they change often enough to cause this, or the much higher prices they charge might scare away travelers. What used to be an under $30 room at Motel 6 now costs anywhere from $40 to $76 for a single. In fact, not once did I stay at Motel 6; I found that for less money or only a little more, I could stay at nicer places. Food was about what I expected, from dining out around my local area. It’s high, like everything else. I did get to eat some good barbeque while on the road.

I stopped and did some shooting along the way on my trip. I took along an 8mm Mauser, a .22 rifle, and my Ruger SP-101 little revolver. I did some target shooting way up around 9,100 feet in the Big Horn National Forest in north central Wyoming; some plinking along the Missouri River in Harrison County, Iowa, and more target shooting at the city rifle range in Carson City, Nevada.

I’ve got a few little stories resulting from this trip that I will relate in separate posts for anyone interested.

Link to the original posting: http://yesterdaysweapons.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5500