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Camping & Hiking Around Phoenix, AZ
After Christmas with our family, we beelined to Arizona on an unoriginal route for us, I-20, even spending nights in mostly unoriginal locations along the way. It’s not my favorite drive, simply because this is the 3rd time we’ve done it. But, it’s the most direct from NC, and it avoids most winter weather issues we could have this time of year. I’ve had a couple of campgrounds near Phoenix on my radar and we were excited to be back in the land of the saguaros, yet exploring a part of Arizona we have not spent much time in. We made it to our first weeklong destination, McDowell Mountain Regional…
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Heading South: Lexington, KY & New River Gorge National Park, WV
Even though we’ve been parked in NC for over a month now, our blog is still stuck in Chicago. Back in November on our way home, we stopped in Kentucky for horses and bourbon and in West Virginia to visit the country’s newest National Park. In Lexington, we spent a week at the Kentucky Horse Park, which is an “equine theme park” owned by the state of Kentucky. They were already in their winter season which meant less was happening with the horses, but we paid cheaper fees and also had Christmas decorations in our campsite! We spent a morning exploring the horse park’s barns and museums. And then spent…
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Visiting Family & Friends in Chicago
The most exciting stop on our way east this year was seeing Michael’s Aunt Mary & Uncle Roger and my college friend, Erin, in Chicago! We got to see everyone twice which made it a very wonderful week. We arrived in downtown Chicago on a Saturday afternoon and had a 24-hour reservation to stay in a truck marshalling lot for the McCormick Convention Center. This was probably the craziest place we’ve ever towed and parked the camper but it sure was convenient after we got there. We were about 3 miles south of where we wanted to walk around so we took an Uber up to Millenium Park, where The…
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Heading East: Scottsbluff, NE & Winterset, IA
Neither Nebraska nor Iowa is probably on anyone’s travel bucket list unless you want to visit every state like we do. They were both new states for us on a new route back across the country as we headed back to NC. Scottsbluff (the city) and Scotts Bluff (the National Monument) in western Nebraska was the most interesting place we could get to in one drive day from our previous location in Ridgway, Colorado. We spent the 3rd week of October at Robidoux City RV Park. Scotts Bluff is a towering silt and sandstone formation near the North Platte River with a lot of historical significance. The river was a…
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Return To The San Juans, Colorado
I had been planning to earn 7 more state stickers for the map on the side of our RV as we zigzagged across the middle of the country back to NC but Michael just wanted to stay in Colorado. We compromised and stayed until mid-October. Much later there could be snow on the high mountain passes. We should still be able to earn 5 stickers, visiting 2 states for the first time. Ridgway State Park gave us easy access to the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. There are multiple campgrounds and I was able to get us a full hookup site at Pa-Ca-Chu-Puk on the Uncompaghre River. Ridgway was…
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Rocky Mountain National Park
A few months ago we were lamenting our mistake of skipping over Rocky Mountain National Park, all because of one closed campground that we wanted to stay at. From Taos, NM to Jasper, AB, this has been the year of the Rocky Mountains and we didn’t even visit the namesake National Park. So, we returned to Colorado and stayed at Lavern M. Johnson Park during the last week of September. This city park is in the teeny tiny town of Lyons, about 30 minutes east of Rocky. The small campground was just a parking lot but it had full hookups and was within walking distance of everything the adorable town…
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South Dakota’s Badlands & Black Hills
We had two great weeks in South Dakota. The weather has a huge effect on how much we like an area and it was absolutely beautiful when we visited in mid-September. We started out in the town of Deadwood in the northern Black Hills, dry camping Saturday night in the Days of ’76 museum parking lot which was not free but was within walking distance of all the action. Deadwood is an old mining town notorious for its lawlessness and is still packed with bars and casinos. We watched an entertaining show at Saloon No. 10, where Wild Bill was gambling the night he was killed. The show ended with…
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Theodore Roosevelt National Park
We’re slowly working on visiting all National Parks and RVing in every state. But a stop at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and nearby Dickinson, North Dakota was special for me because it’s where my Grandpa was born and raised. We had a dry campsite at Cottonwood Campground inside the park booked for the week of Labor Day. Luckily as soon as we arrived and dropped the trailer, we drove the scenic loop, visited some overlooks, and saw a lot of animals because a few hours later an apocalyptic amount of wildfire smoke showed up and settled in for several days. We only spent one night dry-camping before moving to an…
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Banff, Canada
I don’t have too many photos to share of our 2 weeks in the town of Banff. The best thing to do is visit Moraine Lake and Lake Louise, and we’d been there the week before. There were a few days of smoke and/or rain and Michael took a work trip out of Calgary. Banff is the main food/lodging hub for Banff National Park visitors. The Tunnel Mountain campgrounds have over 1000 RV/tent campsites and are so popular that our entire Canadian Rockies route was planned around the 2 weeks I was able to book at the end of our trip only after school was back in session. The Trailer…
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Lake Louise, Banff National Park
Our 6th week in the Canadian Rockies was a vacation week for Michael. We were in Lake Louise, the most iconic and most popular area of Banff National Park. Lake Louise is a teeny tiny village with a huge campground, a ski resort, and a stunning turquoise lake with a resort-style hotel. There is an even more stunning lake named Moraine Lake (cover photo) nearby that is one of the most photographed sites in all of Canada. We stayed at the Lake Louise Hardsided Campground, which has been our least favorite of the amazing Parks Canada campgrounds we’ve stayed on this trip. It’s an electric-only campground and 99% of the…
