{"id":11010,"date":"2026-09-28T21:39:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T21:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/?p=11010"},"modified":"2026-09-28T21:39:57","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T21:39:57","slug":"us-road-trip-4-midwest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/?p=11010","title":{"rendered":"US Road Trip 4 – Midwest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Day 8<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the last post, we read about how we picked up the motorhome from Indie Campers in Fremont, California, and travelled through Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, ending up at Monument Valley. The van performed flawlessly, apart from the dodgy brakes and the infestation of ants. Now we move into the Midwest of America on the way from San Francisco to New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We woke up in Gouldings RV Lodge nice and early for the planned 484-mile journey over to Pikes Peak in Colorado. The stop at Pikes Peak is not necessarily an interesting place to stay with anything extraordinary to do, but more of a convenient place to stop on the way to another location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On The Road<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Jo began the day driving out of Gouldings and Monument Valley. On the way through Forrest Gump Point again, we stopped as there were no big crowds of other tourists like us taking photographs of the main road that Tom Hanks once stood upon for a Robert Zemeckis movie.<\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We drove on past Mexican Hat Rock, which is a huge balanced rock on a pointy bit of rock. It’s an interesting attraction, but we didn’t stop there as we had a nine-hour drive. We went through Utah and into New Mexico, stopping at Fou<\/sup>r Corners Monument where the US Department of the Interior has surveyed and set in stone the point at which four states meet. Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado all join together under a metal ingot.<\/sup><\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The central point is at the centre of a small attraction, with an almost amphitheat<\/sup>re-like construction surrounding it. Around the outside edge are a few stalls selling<\/sup> handmade jewellery and souvenirs that are made by the local indigenous tribes. We stopped in the centre to wait our turn for a photo as other tourists were also there to do the same. We also stopped at the toilets on site, which was quite an experience. The toilet was a hole dug deep in the eart<\/sup>h, an<\/sup>d above it was a fiberglass toilet that was available to sit on. I was very close to switching my phone torch on to look down into the hole, but decided against it as I didn’t fancy losing anything I’d eaten that morning. Bleurgh.<\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back on the road again, <\/sup>we were into Colorado heading towards a stop at Wolf Creek Pass, which I’d found using Google to discover a point of interest between the start and finish of the journey. It had suggested the pass as an overlook out over the top of a creek. It was hours away yet, but we were on<\/sup> the way. The hills and mountains tha<\/sup>t surrounded us were breathtaking to see, but they were also causing a bit of thirsty driving for the van as it was pulling heavy uphill. Going downhill was also difficult with the state of the brakes, so I was trying to engine-brake rather than sticking my foot on the brake pedal.<\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we neared Wolf Creek Pass, there was a large number of forested areas and driving <\/sup>along hillsides with steep drops to the side. At one point, I suggested Jo look down out of the passenger window\u2014not because it was interesting there, but because I knew it might freak her out a little. She didn’t look again. We got up to a particular area when a sign came into view saying “Scenic Overlook,” so we stopped to have a quick squint. It was a lovely view over the valley, with rocks and trees filling the foreground. We climbed over <\/sup>a small wall and walked a bit further on to some rocks. Jo was holding her phone out with the Merlin app run<\/sup>ning, trying to identify some birds that were floating around. We saw a chipmunk on the hill behind us, too, w<\/sup>hich was funky.<\/sup><\/sup><\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back into the van again for the final push to Wolf Creek Pass, and as we got to th<\/sup>e top of the hill, the van mysteriously lost power. I put my foot on the throttle and there was nothing the<\/sup>re. I managed to crawl into a layby or pul<\/sup>l-off, but I was panicking that we were going to get stuck. I floored the accelerator again, and nothing happened. Then I decided to stop the engine with the key and restart it to see if the problem cleared. It did clear, and I got some power back underneath my right foot. We didn’t hang around i<\/sup>n this pull-off as it didn’t look like the right place, but as we were starting off downhill again, we went past the sign<\/sup> for the Wolf Creek Pass Overlook. We didn’t stop as I was still freaking out about t<\/sup>he van acting up. I said nothing to Jo, but I was imagining that we were going to be stuck here in the Colorado forests for the next couple of days while Indie Campers arranged a replacement. If this happened, then we’d miss out on the Mount Rushmore stop and perhaps more of the holiday that we had planned. As a result of this confused and rambling monologue, I drove straight pas<\/sup>t the sign and decided that we should aim to get to P<\/sup>ikes Peak as soon as possible before we got stranded.<\/sup><\/sup><\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I say Saguache, you say Sa-Watch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The journey continued with me feeling very apprehensive about the performance of the vehicle, and we eventually stopped for a break in a small town called Saguache, pronounced “Sa-watch” according to some local signs. Jo was super hungry and had found a vllage pub called the “Village Pub,” so we headed there, parked nose-first on this small street in a quiet town, and headed into the pub. It was dead quiet, and Jo had a pint of cider and a pasta meal. However, they only had pasta meals, so I had nothing but a pint of Guinness Zero. A quick walk back to the van via someone’s yard and an apparently abandoned VW Beetle.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As we neared Pikes Peak, still nervous about the van, we pulled into a McDonald’s for some fries and a milkshake, but the guy behind the counter gave me a strawberry shake with no strawberry flavouring as it had run out. He said “I didn’t know,” then got back on with panicking for the other 20 customers getting grumpy with him, so I just had a flavourless milkshake as I didn’t want to be a bigger knob.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then into Pikes Peak RV Park, we pulled up at the registration shack, but it was closed; it was 20:00. There was our paperwork in a pigeonhole so we knew where to park, and then we connected the electric up before connecting the waste pipe to the ground pipe and dumping the black waste and then the grey water. After this, we had a quick wander around the nearby small village. There wasn’t th<\/sup>at much where we walked, but we saw a few bats flying around before going to a liquor store and grabbing a large bottle<\/sup> of Corona. It seemed like it was a big skiing location, as there were some shops selling chairs and furniture made <\/sup>of old skis and snowboards. I could see it being a good set of slopes, and we’<\/sup>d driven past a few chairlifts on the way towards the place.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the van, I started downloading some of the videos and photos from my digital camera, drone, and phone onto a portable HDD, and began backing them up to OneDrive using the site Wi-Fi. We both had a Saily eSIM that was great for map data and organising trips, etc., but it wasn’t going to be up to syncing 60GB of data. It does a couple of GB per day and then throttles, so it would have taken all night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Day 9<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Awaking in the morning we had a big drive ahead of us once again, it was nearly 500 miles or 8 hours to get to the KOA at Palmer Gulch, near Mount Rushmore. The evening before I had searched for attractions on the way and had found Carhenge so this was popped into the sat nav on the way. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Jo began the day driving and was still behind the wheel as we went through Denver, Colorado. The road was huge and confusing, with different lanes leading down different slip roads and we were in tune on the navigation here. I did manage to annoy her a bit by waving my hands around when saying left and right but that was to ensure we were on the same page. I could see Denver out of the passenger window and it did look like a large city but not on the same scale as a New York or San Francisco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We came across our first Toll Road here too, our Google Maps was set to avid a toll road and we were unsure as to whether we should pay, but soon figured out that this applied only to the Express lane and we then relaxed for the remainder of the drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A switch of driver occurred at some point and we ended up entering Wyoming at one point on the way too, before landing at Alliance in Nebraska and the tourist attraction based on the Neolithic English stone circle, famous worldwide. We pulled up in the Motorhome and got set for a short stay walking around the strange attraction. It featured cars buried or piled on top of one another in the same formation as the real stonehenge<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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See how the layout of the stones on Google Maps is really similar to the layout of the cars as per my drone photo below. The Station Stone, Sacrifice Stone and even the Heel Stone are represented, along with the stone\/car on the right side of the photo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Carhenge, from drone. Bob Griffiths<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Some of the cars are painted on top of the grey that they were all originally painted, some of them with abstract colour art and some with images of dancers etc and it was great to walk amongst the cars and see how they have been adapted for this artwork. There were a couple of other cars up the hill a little that were set up to be something else, one with huge wagon wheels planted on each corner. We stayed here for a bit, I bought a postcard or two.<\/p>\n\n\n

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As we got back to the van in the car park I decided that I would pop the drone up over the site too, to allow the photos that I include here in the gallery, this is to capture an overview and also some slightly different angles than I would get with the camera at my eye height.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After setting off from Carhenge we were back on the road again for another long drive that I was behind the wheel for. We found a good long straight road too that wasn’t too busy so I busted out the drone switched seats with Jo and found somewhere where we could pull over and prep the drone. I launched it and flew it around 500 m in front of us if not more and then Jo started driving at about 30 miles per hour closing in on the drone moving towards us. Once we went under it I spun it around and had it chase the van for a short while. Lookign at the footage now I can see that I was changing directions too frequently and it doesn’t produce a smooth video if your altering your path. I’ll post a video on my YouTube channel and then see if I can share it on here. In the mean time here is an animated GIF showing the straight road and the flat desert landscape..<\/p>\n\n\n

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Woes Return<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On the way into Mount Rushmore area and near the KOA I was driving down a steep hill with a left turn at the bottom which then rose uphill. As I got near the bottom the power went out on the van again, there was nothing when I pumped the throttle and I feared getting stuck in the centre of this road. With the idle it was enough to turn the van into this side road and then pull over on the right facing uphill. Again I thought that I would turn off the engine, restart it and all would be good, but it wasn’t instant like on Wolf Creek Pass. The Check Engine Light also illuminated on the dashboard but it soon allowed us to drive again. I was unsure as to what was happening but kept on towards the KOA anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We limped into the campground and registered before being pointed at the pitch we would be on for the night. A young couple with three kids in the next pitch warned us about the large amount of Yellowjackets (wasps) around the pitch and told us to be careful. We were, I hate those stripey gits, even with all of the good they do in the ecosystem, I can’t bear the thought of getting stung by one of them With the van connected to the mains power and the A\/C switched on Jo got changed into her swimming cossie and we headed for the hot tub, which was full of people including loads of kids jumping around and shouting. I sat on the side and waited whilst guarding Jo’s glasses and phone etc, there were loads of wasps around here too, the bins having not been emptied recently by the pool seemed to be attracting them, unsurprisingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We went to get a quick drink at the shop that sold wine and I had a zero alcohol beer, we sat outside the shop to sup the refreshments but there were wasps everywhere again. We necked the drinks and headed to the van to prepare for going to Mt Rushmore for the evening. The engine light was still on and I was unsure whether we’d make it to the Mt Rushmore attraction and back, but it was only 15 minutes up the road so we took a chance. It behaved itself relatively well with aone small blip, but the engine light remained on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We got to the National Park and after driving the van in the wrong entrance, and being watched by the local State Troopers whilst they were shaking their heads at the tourists. We parked up and headed into the park after getting the tickets scanned, we walked down the Avenue of Flags and at the end was the visitor centre, amphitheatre and in the distance was the Mountain that was famously carved with the four heads of the US Presidents, selected for varying reasons. We went into the museum and read up about the sculptors, designers and the teams who got the work done. The conditions were scary and the elements troublesome but despite this there were no fatal accidents at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were some moquettes and some scale models that were used to document the dimensions so they could be used hanging plumb bobs off the cliff to carve to and it was an impressive way of performing this work. Once we’d been through the museum we went into cinema room where a film was shown explaining everything that we’d just seen in the museum part. Into the gift shop next where I bought a pack of postcards, the one postcard showed the Rushmore memorial and I used the stamps on the counter to mark it, as I had done at Alcatraz and also back in Japan last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After this it was outside to wait for the show in the amphitheatre where the ending was the memorial being illuminated. We waited a good while as it filled up, a ranger came on stage and explained what would be happening. We were soon the recipients of a good old brainwashing video that seemed to go on for ages. Then there was a small talk again about the memorial followed by a sing song of the National Anthem and another well known song, I recorded it on my voice recorder but can’t remember the title of it. Once this singing was done, the illumination began and the spotlights atop the visitor centre which was impressive but tricky to take photos of. Once this was complete there was another rendition of the national anthem as a group of volunteers from the assembled ex-servicemen and woman, or their families, lowered the flag and then folded it into the triangular parcel as seen in the movies when a US Soldier dies. Then it was time to leave, so it was back to the van, engine light still illuminated and we drove carefully back to the KOA but it was mostly downhill from the top of the mountain to the gulch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once there we connected back up to the electric and the a\/c was back on again so I used the opportunity to connect with Indie Campers on their live chat website. They were quite quick getting back to me and after a discussion about the symptoms, oil pressure good, engine temperature good, fuel good, etc they suggested trying the reset process. Turning on the engine and turning it off, without revving the accelerator, then repeating for five times in total. I told them that I couldn’t do that as there were families (and wasps) all around us so it would have to wait for the morning. They also suggested getting to a garage to get error codes read on an OBD2 scanner so I found a garage in Rapid City and Indie said yes, do it tomorrow. I did not sleep too great that night as I was worried that this was the end of the holiday and we might be stranded here or in Rapid City waiting for a replacement vehicle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we slept the odometer sat on 32138 miles, a total of 2117 miles travelled so far. We had been through Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota states today and we’d also seen some good wildlife. We had seen on the side of the road some buffalo and also a coyote as well as many prairie dogs and also two dead racoons. Tomorrow was planned as a 370 miles (6hours) drive to get to Sioux Falls but first we had to visit Rapid City to see a mechanic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Day 10<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sunday 2nd August<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Waking up early in the morning ahead of the 372 mile drive that would now also have to include a trip to Rapid City to visit the Firestone Garage. We had to visit the garage at the advice of the Indie Campers staff on the online chat that I’d been discussing it with the evening before. They had wanted me to try the reset operation, which consisted of turning the engine on and off five times, but when I put the key in the ignition and turned it for the first time I noticed that the Check Engine Light had switched off. It must have had enough time to settle and reset overnight so that was a bit better. They had stated that if anything got worse we should stop and get towed, then see what the next steps were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Upon arriving in Rapid City at the garage we pulled up in the yard and locked it up, not sure if we would be moving from here again. On the way the Check Engine Light had stayed off and we had no further power loss so Jo’s driving was smooth. The engineer came out of the bay where they were working on another vehicle and asked if he could help us. We quickly explained the symptoms and how we’d been told to visit them by the Indie Campers team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that he was not going to touch it, he wasn’t going to help, even when we just asked him to connect it to the OBD scanner. He said that the company tell them not to touch vans or other larger vehicles, but to me it seemed like he jsut didn’t want the hassle with some thick British tourists and a camper van hire company. He told us that the route we’d taken to get this far and where we had experienced the issues was particularly hilly and this was likely to be the cause of the issue. In my brain this was what I was thinking anyway. For me it felt like a fuel starvation issue that was exacerbated when going up and down the steep hills we’d been visiting but without the scanner talking to the ECU we might never know. Once we’d accepted that the mechanics were not going to help us any further we decided that it was time to head onto the next stop but first a quick chat with Indie Campers on the instant messenger where they told us to proceed cautiously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sioux Time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sioux Falls was a stop on the way to get to Chicago area but there were some nice places to visit there apparently. We set out from Rapid City and got on the I-90 for a long stretch behind the wheel. We didn’t see much of anything along the way but did see many signs for Firehenge which seemed like a copy of Carhenge and when we went past at 65mph we noticed there was even an aeroplane balanced atop the attraction. I saw a road sign for a place that made me laugh in a Bart Simpson style before going past another sign that read Belvidere, which is the name of my secondary school and is usually spelled Belvedere so it was unusual to see it spelt the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With no further engine warning lights we arrived at the Sioux Falls KOA and then pulled into the registration area at 16:30, and we had lost an hour due to the timezones that we would travel through on the way eastwards. It was another thing that the planning hadn’t accounted for, it was 15:30hrs back where we had started the day but the extra hour meant we had even less time to visit the sights of this place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After registering and connecting to the mains electric we arranged an Uber car to come and pick us up and drive us into the Sioux Falls city. The Uber driver was a bit rude and she turned up her music quite loud and then began to sing, almost as if she thought we were record company execs and she was auditioning for a deal. We got dropped off at the park whihc held the falls and we found an observation building that we could go up and look out over the park. It was a good viewpoint if a little windy. Jo found out to her detriment that the wind was a bit strong for her hat and as it floated to the ground below, we arranged that I’d stay and keep an eye on it from up here and Jo would go down and see if she could retrieve it. It was a good giggle and I took a couple of pictures of the hat sat on the lawn way below me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We had a walk around the waterfalls which were quite pretty and interesting to see how these were made out of the natural resources. We had a quick walk up the road after a listen to the crashing waters and we found a bit of a pub and restaurant area where we stopped and had a dinner. In the Blarney Stone Irish pub we had a large meal and the waiting staff were well below par as they didn’t listen to the order correctly and made simple mistakes. It was an ok location but the staff didn’t seem to care too much, we watched a bit of baseball in here too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then when it was time to head back, we used the Uber app again and a driver whose dashboard was covered with religious symbols who spoke in a tone so low that it was contacting submarines in the Pacific. He dropped us at the gates of the KOA and we sat outside on the picnic bench with a drink and a snack, whilst I downloaded the images from the camera and drone onto the laptop and the external USB drive. There was some very loud background noise from the cicadas or other bugs in the trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Into bed a little earlier tonight as we had a big 10 hour plus drive ahead of us tomorrow as we needed to cover 573 miles to get to Indiana Dunes State Park at the bottom of Lake Michigan. We didn’t know it yet but the drive would feel significantly longer than 10 hours due to a catastrophe at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the last post, we read about how we picked up the motorhome from Indie Campers in Fremont, California, and travelled through Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, ending up at Monument Valley. The van performed flawlessly, apart from the dodgy brakes and the infestation of ants. Now we move into the Midwest of America on the way from San Francisco to New York City.<\/p>\n

Read more..US Road Trip 4 – Midwest<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13,2342,14,693,5,8,2037,2549],"tags":[2609,630,2577,49,68,2615,88,2552,2608,1524,2617,688,2618,2616,2614,191,2613,271,983,770,2574,2605,2610,2611,351,1002,2612,1894,2606,2607,2619,2604,451,2620,2062,476,2603,478,2551,2576,609],"class_list":["post-11010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colour","category-digital-photography","category-drone","category-film-photography","category-photographers","category-photography","category-street-photography","category-travel","category-us-road-trip","tag-alliance","tag-america","tag-arizona","tag-art","tag-black","tag-breakdown","tag-camera","tag-camper","tag-carhenge","tag-check","tag-chevrolet","tag-city","tag-conquest","tag-engine","tag-fault","tag-film","tag-hills","tag-light","tag-loss","tag-mechanical","tag-motorhome","tag-mount","tag-nebraska","tag-new-mexico","tag-photography","tag-power","tag-rapid","tag-road","tag-rushmore","tag-saguache","tag-starvation","tag-states","tag-street","tag-travel","tag-trip","tag-unibob","tag-united","tag-university","tag-us","tag-utah","tag-van","excerpt","zoom","full-without-featured","even","excerpt-0"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11010"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11143,"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11010\/revisions\/11143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}