After d's family left for Riverside, CA, Liz and I continued to stay on the Zollinger farm for a few more days. On July 28 we decided to take a scooter ride to the City of Rocks, an area with scenic rock formations that we had never been to. Along the way we took a side trip up Howell Canyon which passes by Pomerelle (ski resort), goes by Lake Cleveland and ends up at the top of Mt Harrison. At 9265 ft there are some pretty good views of the valley.
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| Lake Cleveland |
We drove on to the City of Rocks, stopping first at a little museum at the entrance which has some good background information. Liz grew up in this area so we bumped into several people she knew or that knew her family both at our lunch stop and at the museum. The City of Rocks had many towering rock formations reminiscent of Lake Powell - they were beautiful.
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| Church along the way |
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| Lunch stop |
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| Road into City of Rocks |
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| Liz in her scooter outfit |
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| One of the rock formations |
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| Beautiful rock wall |
Most COR visitors take the well graded dirt road in from Almo, ID and turn around at the end to return the same way. However, there is a dirt road that goes out the other side of COR and ends at Oakley, ID. At the museum they warned us that the road to Oakley was in poor condition with lots of washboard sections and they recommended not to take it. But we thought that on the scooter we would be able to navigate the road and we wanted to see Oakley and the towns on that side of the mountain....so that's the way we went. It was every bit as bad as they said and when we got to Oakley we had been thoroughly bounced and vibrated so we stopped to rest. When we were ready to go again, the scooter would not start...wouldn't even turn over. Since there is no other way to start the scooter, we were stuck. Several kind gentlemen stopped to offer help and we tried to jump start to no avail. We were just getting ready to call Thales at the farm and have him bring out a trailer to take us home when I tried the starter one last time......and it started! We quickly hopped on the scooter and drove all the way back to the farm without stopping. When we got there, I turned off the scooter and it wouldn't start again. Over the next two weeks we tried a number of fixes including checking the fuses and replacing the battery but nothing worked. However, every once in a great while, quite randomly, it would start when I turned the key. It operated this way for the rest of our summer trip so it became very unreliable transportation. Whenever I got it started, we would jump on and ride around making sure not to turn it off until we were back at camp. When we got home to Texas I took it into the dealer for service and it turned out that the fly wheel and stator needed to be replaced (a very expensive fix...the stator serves as both the alternator and the starter motor). Fortunately, Honda stepped up and paid for most of the repairs because the scooter was less than 2 years old. We really did miss having the scooter available for exploring on the rest of the trip.
On July 29 we packed up our things and got ready to leave the farm headed for Logan, UT. Liz was ready to back the RV out of its parking spot in the back yard behind the farmhouse but it wouldn't budge. She put it into gear and it would just jerk but not go.....transmission trouble. I check the transmission fluid level and it was very low. I happened to have a quart of fluid with me in the RV so I added it and that seemed to solve the problem. Of course, there is always a deeper reason for a failure like this but we'll find out about that later. In the meantime, we headed to Logan and stayed at the Walmart that night.
The next day we drove back to Paris, ID for the Zollinger reunion. We parked the RV in front of Grandma Price's house and got a ride with Barbara (Liz sister) to Jacob's (Liz brother) cabin where the reunion would be held. We stayed in the cabin for 2 nights and the first night we went to a play at the Pickleville Playhouse Theater. The next day after a healthy breakfast we went to Paris, ID in search of Grandpa Price's dry-goods store. We found that it is now a museum for the city of Paris and is run by a cousin of the Zollingers. We ate dinner at a restaurant in Garden City, UT and went back to the cabin that evening for a lively game night.
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| Grandpa Price |
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| Grandpa Price's original dry-goods store in Paris, ID |
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| Grandpa Price's Store now a Museum (Jim, Anna Maria, Elizabeth, Lee, Thales, Bonnie, Barbara, Kimberly, Jacob) |
On August 1 we got a ride with Bryan Ellsworth (Dorothy's husband who joined us at the reunion) from the cabin back to the RV in Paris and we were ready to begin the next part of our summer adventure. It was great to be with Liz brothers and sisters for a few days.
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