Random Shots

We haven't done anything with le tigre recently.  Except take a ride with Kipper to our friends' house for dinner and football.  Kipper seemed to like the  view........

Maybe he needs a seatbelt?

We bought a big wall map so we can put pins where we want to go to help us plan our initial route.  We quickly ran out of pins.

Mt McKinley! Denali National Park!  Anchorage!

Yellowstone!  The Grand Tetons!  Devil's Tower! (where, hopefully, we will see some UFOs)

My birthday was a couple of days ago and my dear friend gave us a couple of books that will add to our growing library of road-worthy books, gifted to us by friends, family, and Half-Priced Books (well, Half-Priced didn't "gift" them per se, but they're so dang cheap there!).

We've also been Netflixing "Ken Burns: The National Parks-America's Best Idea."  It's a 6-part series about the history of the national park.   It's pretty interesting (or depressing, depending on how you look at it), if you like the story of the war between the  conservationists/naturalists vs expansionists/commercialism.  Of course, the money won out and millions of animals and people and acres were destroyed in the name of progress.  But amazingly, somehow, a little bit of common sense prevailed and Yosemite was born.  And Yellowstone followed.  And more and more parks came to be.  And there are some beautiful places out there!  And there's proof that progress can be smart and not all about destruction.

Cabella's

Last weekend, we went to Cabella's to look at camping supplies.  Good grief, what a place!  It's HUGE and there were approximately 763,420 kids running all over the place.  I think Cabella's is an actual weekend destination for familes.  They go to just hang out.  There are stuffed animal corpses all over the place and games to play and a cafe, so I guess it's a good place to spend a hot afternoon.

We, however, were on a mission. 

We were looking at:

camping toilets

with clever names,

 

showers,

(We're going to set up some sort of outdoor shower with solar heated water. 
But they'll have to be very short showers, so I think I'm going to try this out:

so I don't have to use a lot of water rinsing out shampoo. 
It's either that or cut all my hair off....)


 

sleeping bags,

(This sleeping bag is for two people and actually looks pretty comfy. 
We'll get something similar and just use it inside,
cuz that's where we'll be sleeping.  Of course, we'll get a mattress for under
 the sleeping bag, for super comfy-ness.)



and coolers.

(This thing supposedly keeps ice icey for 5 days!!)

Aaaaaaaaand, that's about it.  We didn't actually buy anything, we were just checking out the things we need.  We're itching to try out le tigre......soon, very soon!!!