One Man, One Dog, One Car to Yellowstone

[Old Henry]

Originally Posted by ford38v8

Henry, It was a leap of faith for me to turn out onto 191 south from Green River, just me and my '38 at 2:00 in the afternoon, but I never regretted it, and a couple hours later I was swimming in the reservoir. The real beauty didn't really start until crossing into Utah, my favorite State for scenery! I slept in Vernal that night.

That is a gorgeous drive. Last time I took it was in my '79 Datsun 280ZX. Even got a speeding ticket.

[tierod]

you should have been a photo taken man. Great photos. Thanks.

[Ken Crans]

Henry, That's how to live life. Just the dog and you. We sure don't have that scenery on the east coast. I still say the west is the best. Just beautiful... Ken

[Frank Miller]

Originally Posted by Old Henry

My mother begged and begged me with all her heart and energy not to take this trip. She thought for sure something terrible would happen although the worst she could think of was that I might have car trouble and have no one there to help me fix it. (She reminded me of the solo hiker that got his arm stuck in a rock and had to cut it off himself to get loose.) In all of these trips I always consider the worst case scenario that something breaks that I can't fix on the road, I have to have the car towed to a storage unit to leave and take a bus home to come back with a car trailer to get it later. Hasn't happened so far, knock on wood.

My mother used to say, "what if" I told her the only if I know is if I don't try it then I won't do it. So rode cross country by myself in 95 on a shovelhead. Made a few trips in my 49 by myself. Thank you for taking the time to share this with us. I just posted it to my facebook so all my regular friends can see how much fun this hobby is.

[Old Henry]

Originally Posted by Frank Miller

My mother used to say, "what if" I told her the only if I know is if I don't try it then I won't do it.

I learned from my long time law partner who tried climbing every tall mountain, including Everest, but rarely made it to the top, "You can't really know what you can do until you push yourself far enough to find out what you can't do."

[B-O-B]

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Thanks for the pics. Jackson Hole fathers day car shows is/was one of my favorites right up there with LARS. Spent a whole week one time touring around Wy,Mont,ND,SD& Id. No dog tho just Peggy & myself in the roadster. Maybe if you tried talking mexican to Pepe he might understand.

[Old Henry]

Originally Posted by B-O-B

Maybe if you tried talking mexican to Pepe he might understand.

We even tried that for a while. Tried Ven, Venir aquí, venga aquí, and even venir aqui ahora for some time. Made no difference. He has learned sit, stay, shake, roll over, play dead, stand up; and especially goin' out. That's his favorite. But any sort of come or here Pepe, here - no way.

[Old Henry]

Originally Posted by Seth Swoboda

Old Henry, In the past you have provided us with some of the best road trip photos.
Seth Swoboda

For anyone interested, here are the previous road trip photo stories:

Death Valley: https://www.fordbarn.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62705

Pike's Peak: https://www.fordbarn.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19141

Route 66: https://www.fordbarn.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57511

[41ford1]

Keep on keep'n on. Great pictorial. You and Pepe keep go on travels and continue to post the results. Beautiful pictures.

[41panelmark]

Originally Posted by Old Henry

When my wife and her sister went to their mom's for the week to help her with stuff I decided to do something I'd never done before - a road trip all by myself. Except for my nightly 30-60 minute cruise in "Old Henry" all of my driving has been with and for others, including driving my 10 kids to all 48 contiguous states, driving 13 members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to Salt Lake City in my van for 6+ years, and recent road trips in Old Henry with the "Queen Mothers" in the back seat. Neighbor guys had told of the one man motorcycle road trips they'd taken and I wondered if I might like it. So, I gave it a whirl - 859 miles to Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks in three days starting Monday, Memorial Day. This is the story in pictures. (Please pardon some wide ones but the landscape panorama shots just didn't seem right at 800 wide.) There are 8 photos with Pepe in them. Can you find them all?

Here is Pepe, Old Henry, and me starting out.


Nothing of much consequence until we reached Afton, Wyoming with its famous Antler Arch.


In Afton I spent about 30 minutes on my one and only repair - getting the window in my door back in its channel so I could roll it up and down.


Next stop was Jackson Hole, Wyoming where we stayed for the night. This is just one of 4 antler arches at each corner of the town square. You may have guessed that Gaston, the villain in Beauty and the Beast was from Wyoming as he sang, "I use antlers in all of my decorating." (No, the girl wasn't with me. As I said, I was alone, except for Pepe.)


Next morning we headed for Grand Teton National Park.


There's a great little one way drive along my favorite lake - Jenny Lake.


One of the things I love about Jenny Lake is that it goes right up to the base of the Tetons.


Although Pepe had his nice big soft bed on the seat right next to me he much preferred riding right on top of me which I didn't mind a bit.


North of Jenny Lake is the huge Jackson Lake still in the Teton park.


Then we were into Yellowstone park.

I'm afraid I didn't get out at Old Faithful geyser to wait for it to blow. It's not as faithful as it used to be. But, in the parking lot I saw something that was way more interesting to me - a Stallion three wheel motorcycle that I'd never seen before.


I think we crossed the continental divide 4 or 5 times driving through the park.


Had to take at least one picture of Old Henry by some steaming ground since that's what the park is most famous for.


"Oh, Give Me a Home, Where the . . ." you know the rest. Except, these critters that are most often called buffalo are not buffalo, they are bison. Buffalo are those critters that wander the serengeti of the African plains.


A road carved out of the cliff above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.


The east side of Yellowstone is very different from the west side - beautiful green flowing hills rather than dense forests.


Last time I was in Yellowstone was at the end of the biggest forest fire they ever had in 1988. In 24 years since most of the burned out areas have new trees that have grown up from the ashes about 8-12 feet tall. Pretty cool to see the natural regeneration of the forest.


The east side of the park got up higher and had much more snow still on the ground.


The Yellowstone River meandering its way toward Yellowstone Lake.


It was funny because so many places along the road people were stopped and bunched together in groups with their spotting scopes, huge binoculars, and cameras with lenses a couple of feet long trying to get a glimpse of the wild life such as this elk that was just in one parking lot where we were about the only ones to see it 15 feet out the window. (I think the elk was surprised to see Pepe that looked pretty much like the elk but much smaller. See the resemblance?)


Got back to the motel in Jackson Hole late Tuesday night after 13 hours of driving through the parks. Next day headed home but not without stopping at this amazing place.

You 1939 fans will love this. This is diner number 1107 built by the Jerry O’Mahony Co. of Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1939. It then went to the 1939 New York world's fair and thereafter spent 14 years in Fall River, Mass. (Anyone in Fall River remember Al McDermott's diner with the moniker "Justly Famous since 1939"?) It was then bought by Tommy Borodemus and moved to Middletown, RI where he operated it as "Tommy's Deluxe Diner" until 2006 (any RI reds remember it?) when it was moved to the little town of Oakley, UT, pop. 948, an hour from my house. It has been fully restored and re-named the "Road Island Diner" in honor of its journey from there across the country to Oakley. It really took me back today for my first visit there and I will return again with a load of folks in my car and hopefully some others. (Read more here: http://www.roadislanddiner.com/history.html)


Well, so, my take on the trip:
It was extrodinarily relaxing (except for the 30 minutes I chased Pepe all around Mammoth Hot Springs trying to get him back in the car while the car sat idling with the door open on the side of the road ). It was so wonderful to just do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it without worrying about how everyone else in the group felt about it. I could live off of bags of Turtles candy and salted cashews if I wanted to and go to bed when I wanted and sleep as long as I wanted.

All in all, I'm pretty sure that when my wife leaves again for "family duties" I will definitely do this again.

P.S. One strange thing about this whole trip - of the hundreds if not thousands of cars I saw on the trip I never saw one single classic car anywhere, on the road or off. Maybe I'm just too weird to be doing this sort of thing. Doesn't matter, I'm doing it again.

This is the way my wife and I do it, keep on truckin. Great photos. We were up there doing the same a few years back.

[IVT1]

Lots of people have good stories, you had the pics to go with a great story thanks for both

[Old Henry]

NOTE: Something happened with some of the images in the quote in post #50 so go to my first post to see the pictures.

[kp4150]

What a great trip and an even better photo journal. Thanks!

[1937pickup]

Why are your pictures so big in your posts?

[PeteVS]

Originally Posted by 1937pickup

Why are your pictures so big in your posts?

Henry puts his pictures on a photo website (PhotoBucket or similar.) Then, instead of uploading a photo to the FordBarn server where it will show in the post as a "thumbnail," he enters the address of where he posted it. FordBarn, then, gets the full photo from that address. No thumbnail. A little bit more work on his part, but no work required from you. Also, he can post larger photos than FordBarn will handle.

[Lawson Cox]

That was a great adventure Old Henry. I would love to have been along with you but then that would have spoiled your "quiet time" with Pepe.

[Old Henry]

Originally Posted by 1937pickup

Why are your pictures so big in your posts?

Originally Posted by PeteVS

Henry puts his pictures on a photo website (PhotoBucket or similar.) Then, instead of uploading a photo to the FordBarn server where it will show in the post as a "thumbnail," he enters the address of where he posted it. FordBarn, then, gets the full photo from that address. No thumbnail. A little bit more work on his part, but no work required from you. Also, he can post larger photos than FordBarn will handle.

I used to go one more step and reduce the size of them to about 1,000 pixels wide but then realized that PhotoBucket would reduce them from my huge original size to 1024 pixels (but narrower if tall, i.e. portrait format. That's why the tall pictures are narrower than the short pictures. They are all as big as PhotoBucket shrunk them to.)

The one draw back to not uploading my image to this forum is that once in a while an image on PhotoBucket gets corrupted which shows on this forum and I have to upload a new pure image to PhotoBucket then put the new address for that new image in my post in place of the old one on this forum so that the new image will show instead of the corrupted one.

It may sound kinda complicated but once you've done it a couple of times it's pretty automatic, just like most things.

Maybe that isn't really answering the original question that wasn't really "how" do I get them so big but, really, "why"? It's like the wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood, "The better to see them with, my dear." or something to that effect.

[Old Henry]

Originally Posted by Lawson Cox

That was a great adventure Old Henry. I would love to have been along with you but then that would have spoiled your "quiet time" with Pepe.

Never forget, Lawson, that it was your write up of your trip to Pike's Peak in the V8 Times that inspired me to do the same and more after that. Can't thank you enough for that inspiration. And, I love doing road trips with someone else that loves them as much or more than just by myself. It's just kinda hard to find people like that. Right now my very favorite passenger is 93 year old Betsy Williams that went to Death Valley with us. She's in an assisted living center now and I know I can call her anytime to take her for a ride and she is rarin' to go. She loves it more than anyone else I know (even my wife, dad who bought the car 53 years ago, and/or Pepe).

[chuck stevens]

Gotta love driving these old Fords, I'm heading down to Georga next month. I guess a lot of the 47's are still running! We drove the Lincoln Hiway thru PA in 2009, and this summer went on the new england tour, great time.

[dude]

Thanks for the memories, Made that trip a couple years ago. Country is beautiful and Jackon Hole is a hoot. Thanks.