2026 Leepin’ Across America

The best travel days are the ones that are uneventful. Doesn’t matter if you see anything neat on the drive as long as there’s no issues then it’s a great drive day. That was not today.

While we were getting ready to pack up and leave Bryce Canyon at Ruby‘s Inn. We noticed a 12 to 15 inch crack in the windshield. The cracks started from a rock chip and cracked overnight. While we were here the temperatures during the day were in the low 80s and we were facing west with the sun shining on the windshield but at night it was getting down to the mid 30s. We think that that big fluctuation and temperature and the sun shining on the windshield made that rock chip turned into a crack. We put a piece of clear tape over it just to hope that maybe it will stop the crack, but we’re not sure if that’s gonna work or not. Right now it’s not in a line of vision and it hasn’t extended yet. Knock on wood. So we’ll see what happens.

As we continued to pack up and get ready to move, we started retracting the slides, and the front kitchen slide would not go all the way in. It would retract to about 7 inches to go and then stop. The benefit of traveling with friends is you have someone to help you when you need it. From 10 AM until 1 o’clock we tried everything we could to get that slide to retract. Checkout time was 11 so we had to move the rig out of our RV space even with a slide partially sticking out. Luckily, there was a large space in the campground where we could pull both rigs off to the side and not be in anyone’s way and continue to work on the slide. With a boro scope , we inspected every inch under the slide and could not find anything that was stopping it from retracting. We called the manufacturer and tried to get some information on how to bring the slide in manually without the motor, but to no avail, we could not get it past that sticking point. After four hours of messing around with it, I think Mike about had it, and just started rocking the crap out of the slide from inside and it finally budged and retracted. We heard a big pop when that happens so something is not right. But we got the slide retracted enough that we can drive. The slide will stay inside, not extended, until we get to our service appointment at the end of September. It makes it a little bit tight in the kitchen, but is definitely still livable.

That makes it bad thing number two out of three and they say that everything happens in threes. As we finished packing up to leave the baggage doors (the little basement doors) would not stay shut on one of the doors no matter what Mike did when he locked it it would not stay locked. So our fear was driving down the road and the door come open and all of our stuff go flying out. So we spent another 30 minutes trying to get that all situated. We ended up bungee cording it shut. That’s bad thing number three hopefully that’s it for a while.

We finally left the campsite at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, which is extremely unusual for us to ever leave that late in the day but we wanted to get on the road into our next reservation. Luckily it wasn’t a very long drive to Baker Nevada, but while driving it seemed everyone in a car, driving around us, was determined to cause an accident in front of us. They were all driving so erratically and cutting off in front of us. We were hoping that we could just make it without any problems.

Once we got off the interstate we were on this lonely, 2 Lane Rd. headed to Baker Nevada on Utah Route 21. We were glad to be away from all the traffic. But driving on this little 2 lane road for 100 miles in the middle of nowhere was crazy. I mean really this is the most desolate remote road we have ever driven on in our entire lives. You can look out and see absolutely nothing but sagebrush for hundreds of miles. There was no houses no towns nothing it was crazy. I’m just so glad. Nobody had any issues driving on the road cause this was not the place to breakdown.

Finally, we arrived at our campsite, which happens to be behind the gas station in this very very very small town. It’s not a campground. It’s just a couple of campsites that the owners created behind the gas station. The total population in the town of Baker is 41 people, so really it’s a small town. But it’s right outside the entrance to great basin national Park and that’s our next national Park to visit. This will be national Park number. 25 out of Total 63 national ParksЧитать далее