So there we were. No tow car, which had been dropped off at the junkyard, and we were down to just the RV. It was pretty smelly, having been parked next to a raging car fire for an hour or so. Ivy quickly deemed it too stinky to sleep in, so we rented a motel for the night – our first one on the road.
The next day was spent cleaning up as many messes as we could. All of the clothing and bedding in the back of the RV had to be washed and the cabinets cleaned to get rid of the burned smell. The bicycles, which had been hanging on the back of the RV, suffered relatively little damage and were still working fine, aside from cracked mirrors and some melted plastic around the derailleurs
. The tow bar was in good shape – it’s made out of solid steel – but parts of it were covered in melted plastic and/or soot, so a major cleanup had to take place. Lots of other miscellaneous checking out and refitting was in order.
The RV itself was in remarkably good shape, considering. The rear tail light fixtures were pretty badly melted and would have to be replaced, but other than that there was little real damage. We decided to move on to Twin Falls, Idaho, where the resources for repair were more extensive. The RV was deemed livable again, so we stayed one more night in the same Ely RV park we had used last time, and the next morning headed off for Twin Falls. After an uneventful trip we landed in a full hookup site near Twin Falls and settled down to work on the recovery issue.
First and biggest issue was, we needed a new tow car. We had very specific requirements – manual transmission, curb weight under 3,000 lbs, good mechanical condition, able to be towed with a Stowmaster 5000 tow bar, which we had. Those requirements narrowed things down a bunch, and most used car places were only able to come up with one or two possibilities. We spent a lot of time and looked at a lot of cars, finally settling on a 2005 Hyundai Elantra that seemed to meet all our requirements.
At the same time, we were looking for some help fixing the lights and a few other minor items. We found a local RV mechanic who was able to fix most of that stuff and that got the RV more or less back into shape. So we had a new tow car and an RV. But the towing problem still needed to be solved. We moved on to Idaho Falls, where there were more extensive repair facilities, and managed to get the tow bar parts shipped from Vancouver, Washington and installed on our new toad. So after a little more than a week, we had a functioning unit again, in time to head off for the Grand Teton National Park.
Through all this, our major focus was the tow car and getting our whole menagerie reconstituted and back on the road again. But it wasn’t all work. We managed to do a bit of sightseeing as well, in some pretty scenic parts of Idaho. We took a tour of the Teton Valley, a high mountain valley on the west side of the Grand Teton Park, in Idaho. We got some great views of the Tetons from that side, though road access is pretty much non-existent.
We were camping for a short while in Rexburg, a town north of Idaho Falls. It's a very interesting place, with mountains of new construction, almost all due to the local Brigham Young University campus, which has been built up here over the past years. The countryside was lovely, mostly plains, but with dramatic thunderstorms moving through. and some interesting birds. It's odd, somehow to see pelicans and ibis in Idaho. I just didn't associate that kind of country with them, but there they are.
We didn't really do justice to the southern Idaho area, because of our need to find a new car, etc. We missed a lot of the Snake River gorge areas, but we got to see quite a bit between shopping expeditions and internet searches. It's a beautiful part of the country, which we hope to visit again sometime. But for now, we are resuming our trip with the new tow car, still pretty close to our original schedule but with some unforeseen changes.
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