Ep. 41: Do It Now! | RV travel Utah Wyoming South Dakota camping

Hey folks, welcome back to Grand Adventure. I'm Mark Guido, your host, and today's our big day. We're actually on the road, finally, full-time in it for at least this summer and possibly longer, so stick around for this travel day on this episode of Grand Adventure. Stay tuned. So we're heading northeast out of Salt Lake City. We are heading out of Utah into Wyoming and points beyond. Patricia's not with me right now, although you guys don't normally see her. She tends to be a little camera shy. I'm picking her up in Montana in two weeks. Other than that, we really have no plans whatsoever, and that's honestly a refreshing feeling. The theme of today's video is going to be Do It Now. There are a number of things that give rise to that theme. For one, this has only been made possible by the fact that I resigned from my employment the end of last month. There were a number of factors involved. It had become a pretty toxic environment. I was pretty unhappy, so it was time to go, but I figured we'd take advantage of that situation. I mean, it's hard to get a week off, much less more than a week, so most of our camping has either been in Utah or the immediately surrounding states. This gives us an opportunity to take a few months off the life and figure out what I want to be when I grow up. There's another fat component to the Do It Now theme, and that is, let me explain to you what's going on. You may have noticed in the last few episodes there was a lesion underneath my right eye. You can see a little bit of scarring poking out there now. I can tell you right now, you're not going to see me on a video for probably a couple of months without a pair of sunglasses on. Right now, I look like I went 15 rounds with Vander Holyfield. Toward the end of May, I went to a dermatologist, they biopsied the lesion and determined that it was basal cell carcinoma, in other words, skin cancer. So I scheduled a surgery for May 31st, it's known as a Moore surgery, at the area removed. What they do is they remove the cancerous area and what they believe is a small margin around the area, and then they test it immediately to make sure that they got all the cancer. If there's still any cancer on the margins, they go a little further. Well, it turned out to be a two-inch by one-inch section of my face they removed. It was up into my nose, up into the corner of my eyelid, the corner of my eye, my lower eyelid, and the Moore surgeon, wonderful as he was, decided that given the proximity to my lower eyelid, he really didn't want to be the guy to put me back together because it wasn't to maintain the status of the functionality of my lower eyelid. So he rushed me off to a nearby hospital to see an oculoplastic surgeon where I was sent in for a second surgery, where that guy, Dr. Del Canto in Salt Lake City, said, sir, you blow my mind. What he did with my face is nothing short of miraculous. So do it now, applying to that circumstance, is if you think there's anything wrong with you, and I mean anything, I'm the guy who tends to wait, and I probably shouldn't have waited as long as I did. I didn't wait as long as I probably wanted to before I got the area checked out. Quite frankly, had I done it a little sooner, it probably would have been a little less invasive, and we probably wouldn't have had the plastic surgery reconstruction. So, 52, and this was a massive person. Third on the do it now, and this kind of goes back to the story I told you in the beginning about how I worked with a guy named Alan Clamp. Usual thing, worked right until he was 65 years old, and he turned 65. A few weeks later, so basically his whole life was spent. An opportunity to head on out and experience much of the western United States for the next few months is something I want to do. Let's hit the road. Enough of this philosophical garbage. We headed east past the wind farms of southwestern Wyoming, sticking to I-80 as far as the town of Rollins, then turning northeast on secondary roads, finally arriving at Arkova Lake, about 25 miles southwest of the city of Casper after hundreds of miles on the highway. So after seven hours on the road, we've reached our campsite for tonight. We're at the Black Beach Campground on Arkova Lake. We're about 25 miles southwest of Casper, Wyoming. We've covered most of Wyoming today. Today was our big travel day. You might as well now know where we're heading. Our first stop is going to be in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We'll finish that drive tomorrow. I want to get a dispersed camping location on Thursday before things get too busy for the weekend. This is a beautiful campground. It's run by the county, Natrona County. I think it's Natrona County. I think that's what it's called. Ten bucks a night. It's just a cash drop envelope. It is dry camping, but look at these beautiful lakefront sites. We have a nice gazebo with a picnic table. The dogs have access to go swimming in the water. There's a fire ring back there. Somebody even left us a little bit of wood. Nice pull-through site. Didn't even have to unhitch, which is good because this is a drop-and-go kind of stop for us tonight. We'll pick back up tomorrow. Casper on I-25. There is absolutely nothing but antelope out here. Got about another 300 miles to go to get to where I plan to camp in the Black Hills. See what today brings us on the road. Heading north towards Gillette, the landscape doesn't change much. Wide open, high arid alpine prairie. There's nary a tree in sight. This is cattle and oil country. One thing that's been really nice is that every Wyoming rest area that we've stopped at, even those on secondary roads, has had free RV dump stations with potable water and a dumpster. Head east from Gillette on I-90, however, and the landscape is suddenly punctuated by the island hill here and there studded with ponderosa pines. And we made it to South Dakota, a new state for me. We headed up into the Black Hills. To try as I might, I couldn't find a free boondocking site in the National Forest to save my life. Well, my usual strategy is not working out. I got the motor vehicle use map for the Black Hills National Forest and I've lost over two hours now, one, wandering around trying to find dispersed camping. Through all the roads that are marked as legal for dispersed camping, you know, I'm used to seeing campsites all over the I'm not finding anything. I haven't seen one person camped along a forest road at all. I haven't seen one campsite along a forest service road at all, even though they're legal for dispersed camping. I think at this point I'm going to be happy just finding a campsite and paying for it, a campground, National Forest campground, but even they're expensive around here. This just isn't working out very well. After a couple of false starts at sites the left me less than impressed, we rolled into Pactola Campground and found a walk-up site close to the water at $30 per night, including $4 per night for having two dogs. It was pricey for dry camping, but at this point beggars can't be choosers. So we hope that you've enjoyed coming along with us for the ride from Salt Lake City to the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Black Hills have a tremendous amount of things to see and do while you're in the area, so that's what we're going to do in Episode 42. So if you're not yet one of our Grand Adventurers, hit that subscribe button and ring that notification bell to get instant notification of each one of our new episodes. If you have any questions or comments put them in the comment section down below. We do our best to try to answer those in a timely manner to try to help you out the best we can, and if you like this video give us a thumbs up down below as well. And until next time please remember, life is nothing but a Grand Adventure! We'll see you soon.