Speedy Gets A Bath

It's provisioning day — again! After a stop at the visitor center at Moose Junction, we headed off to Jackson Hole for provisions. Speedy seems to get pretty poor mileage when slowly going around the parks, and Grand Teton's roads are not all that hilly, so we also needed fuel.

On our last trip here, we found that the secret was to go into the town and skirt the downtown gridlock by taking the truck route going west. This gets you onto the road out of town and the real stores are well outside of downtown Jackson Hole. We pulled into the Albertson's at the edge of town, bypassing the famous Jackson Whole Grocer, which we previously found small and over-priced. It is not a Whole Foods or even a Fruit Center.

Ellen went in to start shopping while I made a couple of calls, now that we had good cell phone coverage, to check on things at home. One of our neighbor's sent us a photo of a big dead branch on the old oak next to the house hanging down. Ellen's brother checked it and it wasn't endangering anything, which was good.

We bought a seemingly enormous amount of groceries, including small ice cream cups as the well-functioning freezer had a bit of room. Hopefully, this will keep us from starvation for a while. It was then off to fuel up. On the way, we noticed a car wash. Speedy was filthy, the outside was covered in the gray dust of both the badlands and the dirt roads of Glacier. None of it seemed to have blown off in the 600 mile drive to the Tetons. So, after fueling it was off to the car wash. It was one of the DIY ones with a tall bay, which we needed. A large number of quarters later, Speedy was shiny.

It was back to the park, stooping at the Dornan's complex at Moose for huge pulled pork sandwiches at the Dornan's chuck wagon and a browse through the overpriced gear at Moosely Mountaineering. They used to be Moosely Seconds, which had some bargains, but that seems to be no more.

We finished our day with a hike (what else!) out to Phelps Lake at the Rockefeller Preserve. We'd done a similar hike last year and saw a bear up close; no such luck this year, only a roadside moose view on the drive in along the aptly named Moose-Wilson Road.