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Death Valley National Park & Mohave National Preserve, CA
On the last Friday of January, we headed to Death Valley National Park. We had inched closer the night before and stayed an hour away at Preferred RV Park in Pahrump, NV to do chores. Knowing there was no internet, we only planned to stay for the weekend and explore the popular Furnace Creek area. The highest temperature ever recorded on earth was 134F at Furnace Creek, so January was a good time to visit. Neither of us had heard much about Death Valley and we didn’t have many expectations, but we really enjoyed this park! Death Valley didn’t end up being as scary as it sounds, but maybe that’s…
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Lake Mead, Las Vegas, & More Red Rocks, NV
There are a lot of camping options of every type at Lake Mead National Recreation Area. We settled into a spot at Government Wash, a popular and free (with a National Parks Pass) dispersed camping area close to Las Vegas, planning to stay for 2 weeks. In Nevada, we are now on Pacific Time and will be for the next few months. Michael works Eastern Time hours. This works perfectly for us since we are morning people anyway and this schedule gives us enough daylight hours to explore in the afternoon before the sun sets around 5 pm. The first thing we had to do was check out the Hoover…
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Red Rocks & Sacred Sedona
Sedona is in Arizona’s high desert at 4300ft elevation so it can be pretty cold at night during the winter. When the weather looked good, there was no question whether we should spend the week there. We found a great boondocking spot on Forest Rd 525 in the Coconino National Forest, 15 miles outside of Sedona. Despite the fact that it took 20 minutes to drive 4 bumpy miles to the main road every time we wanted to leave, it was one of our favorite campsites so far! Sedona is a small busy tourist town, even in the off-season. In some places, like Devil’s Bridge, there was a line for…
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White Sands National Park
There are only so many destinations you can reasonably drive to in one day from Big Bend NP. White Sands NP, in south-central New Mexico, looked doable (under 400 miles) and was certainly worth a visit. While visiting, we boondocked just 4 miles away from the park on property that Holloman Air Force Base allows. It was not a bad place to spend the work week! The sky was absolutely amazing every night. Unfortunately, you can’t have any contact with the lake since it’s toxic; and sadly, there were a lot of ducks there that can’t read the posted signs. White Sands NP protects the largest gypsum dunefield in the…
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Big Bend National Park
It was nothing short of a miracle that we left NC “on time” in a new tow vehicle and with the same 14-year-old adventure cat, Lynx. The cat had been minutes away from surgery to remove bladder stones before it was determined that the surgery would not have been successful. For now, she will just live with her stones until her behavior indicates that she is too uncomfortable. Also, after finding out that our Ford needed its second expensive repair (both recall items on other models), we decided to buy a new truck. We were happy to find a RAM, during the national truck shortage, that had several features we…
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Following Fall Through PA & VA
Pennsylvania We were very excited about our plans to stay at Moon Lake Recreation Area in Pennsylvania’s Pinchot State Forest. Moon Lake is free (permit required) and has miles and miles of mountain bike trails. There are 10 numbered campsites and a rig our size will only fit in numbers 1 and 7. Unfortunately, we had a few “dips” in full-time RV living this week. There was a lot of rain, in the forms of a nor’easter and a bomb cyclone, whatever the heck that is. A lot of rain is not fun when you are towing your 10,000lb house up and down dirt roads and it caused us to…
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Rhinebeck, NY
Our NY friends had suggested stopping in the Hudson Valley on our way back to NC and gave us a lot of good ideas of things to do, which we accomplished about half in the week we were there. We stayed at Interlake RV Park in Rhinebeck, NY. Our Sunday travel day from Boston to New York was not the best. First, somewhere along the MA turnpike, we heard a loud BOOM followed by about 65% of a tractor trailer’s tire flying through the air toward us. Thankfully, it landed in our lane before it reached us, and Michael was able to drive around it without incident. Then, we arrived…
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History Lessons In Beautiful Boston, MA
Boston wasn’t a huge detour off our route south and we have always wanted to visit! We stayed for one week at Minute Man campground in Littleton, MA, which put us within commuter train distance from downtown Boston’s North Station. The RV park was close to the Minute Man National Historical Park. This NP commemorates the events that occurred on April 19, 1775, when Paul Revere went on his midnight ride to Lexington and Concord to warn militiamen that British troops were coming to raid supplies. After a skirmish in Lexington, where Revere was captured, it is at the North Bridge in Concord that militiamen opened fire on the British…
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The White Mountains & Lakes Regions, NH
I have realized that the formatting of my pictures doesn’t always work with the emailed version of my blog posts. If that is the case, please go to the website. There are a lot of pictures in this one! After our month in Vermont, we moved over to New Hampshire where there is no sales tax or seatbelt law if you’re over 18 and the state motto is “Live Free Or Die”. We had booked another month-long stay at an RV park from mid-September to mid-October and chose Ames Brook Campground in Ashland, NH because of its reputation of having great campsites. Of course, we weren’t in one of the…
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Burlington & Stowe Area, VT
We decided to “camp” a little differently during our visit to the Green Mountain State and booked a month-long reservation at an RV park. We had imagined a busy summer camping season and difficulty finding sites on the weekends. Also, camping seems to be more expensive in the northeast. A monthly discount would bring our camping costs down to around $30 per night instead of $50+. Maple Grove Campground was about 20 minutes north of Burlington and 45 minutes from Stowe. The campground was small with about 30 tight spaces but luckily we had trees on two sides and we enjoyed our stay from mid-Aug to mid- Sept. One of…
