Police at midnight

I haven’t been told to “move along” by a cop since I was a teenager necking in a car parked at a roller skating rink in Oregon. (Roller skating? Yeah, it was a long time ago. I am THAT old.)

How did this come about? We have a new camper van! It’s an amazing camper van full of modern conveniences. But it does seem to put us in a certain fringe category that we don’t usually fall into. And it didn’t help that we were in Salt Lake County. But let me start at the beginning of the story.

A full day’s drive northwest from Placitas toward Idaho puts one at about Salt Lake City. So I identified a campground in the mountains east of the city and we headed there. But we had hardly started up the forest road when we encountered a huge sign saying the road was going to be closed the next morning for construction! Not wanting to get trapped, we turned around and drove north to the next road going into the mountains.

By this time it was pitch black, past our bedtime, and the forest road was narrow and curvy. We decided to pull off in a large parking and turnaround area, where other cars were also parked for the night. We assembled our bed (first night in the van!) and fell sound asleep.

At around midnight, there was a sudden, loud knocking on our van door and a holler of “Police!” We were startled awake and confused. I remember saying, “Don’t open it unless you know it’s really the police.” And John replying, “I can see his badge.”

The front seat was full of luggage (that had been in the back of the van), so I have a hilarious memory of John laying on his stomach on a pile of luggage, trying to get the window down to talk with the officer!

Apparently there is no overnight camping within the Salt Lake watershed and he was clearing out everyone who was staying along the road that night. He helpfully gave us directions out of the county (run out of the county by the police!) but the county line was well out of our way to the east. So instead, we decided to turn around and go back to the freeway and just keep driving north.

So for 3 hours in the middle of the night we drove north without a clear idea what to do next. But John remembered that his brother had told him that in a pinch, Walmart allows overnight parking for RV’s along the back edges of their large parking lots. So around 3:00 or 3:30 AM we pulled off and parked at the Walmart in Pocatello, Idaho, amidst a number of other vans and RV’s. We fell promptly asleep.

Luckily we didn’t sleep in because at 8:30 AM, Walmart security rapped on our van and apologetically asked us to move along, saying that overnight parking was not being allowed during the eclipse travel period.

Ironically, when the security guy came by, John was in Walmart buying stuff. It had been a long, hard night. So must buy stuff!