Flaming Gorge – we enter bear country

We leave the world of “hook-ups” behind and head for the wilderness. A “full hook-up” is an RV-er’s term for an arrangement whereby one plugs in one’s water, electricity and plumbing to an assortment of various plugs next to your site. All very convenient, and it means that you have the facility to shower, wash up, charge our multitude of electrical appliances, toast bread, and most importantly make coffee. I am in charge of the plugging and the unplugging. The girls help me here and there, and Monty loves watching the black and grey water emptying process. Other than driving the Reconnaissance Vehicle, these are my only jobs. At the first RV site (Zion), I was given the laundry job too, but I applied Clarkson philosophy and lost all the clothes. Completely disappeared – mountains of kids’ underwear and a couple of Sarah’s shirts. I am not given this task again.

So entering the world of camping proper is a different kettle of fish. In a 30 foot RV, it is never going to be roughing it exactly, and we still have our gas fridge and cooker. However, we no longer have our electrical mattress inflaters (separate) and the kids seemed to have played with them before we left the world of hook-ups, so Sarah is now committed to sleeping on top of a convex mound, while I slumber at the bottom of a concave pit.

We left Moab with a plan to head for somewhere where nobody else goes and we found it – Browne Lake in Flaming Gorge National Recreational Area.
The weird thing about this one was that Sarah saw some pictures of a campsite on the internet in the Flaming Gorge area that looked cool, but there was no clue where this place actually was.
We stopped here and there and looked at a few places (Eliza , ibid), but finally found this site on a lake 10 miles down a dirt road off the main highway.
We were up at 8000 feet or something so the morning temperature in the Reconnaissance Vehicle went from well over 100 degrees (Moab) to 55 degrees (Browne Lake) overnight. In due course, at Yellowstone this reaches 43. We stayed here for a couple of nights and only on the second day Sarah realised that our very site was actually the one from which the internet photo had been taken. A great, peaceful place where we spent the days walking, playing in the lake, hunting for bears, collecting firewood and generally having a very chilled time.