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Finger Lakes Region, NY
This will be my first blog in a series that I’m calling New York: more than just a city. The mountains, lakes, and gorges with waterfalls are beautiful. And there are so many state parks. 215! The only state with more is California. Originally, our plans for this summer were to leisurely explore western New York state while ‘living’ at and taking care of our fellow RVing friends Mike and Betty’s home for two months while they traveled themselves. When their trip got canceled, we modified our own plans a bit. We still visited them and used their driveway as a home base to see the Finger Lakes Region for…
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North Carolina – June 2021
After our first successful RV trip exploring the southwest, we plopped ourselves down in my parent’s driveway for the month of June, enjoying lots of great family time. Thanks, Mom and Dad! Western NC, where both our parents live and where we both grew up, will always feel like home. We think that being able to come back and stay with them will ground us, balancing out our travels and wanderlust. Besides hanging out with our siblings who came to visit on weekends, the first two weeks were mostly all work and no play. The major project was trying to organize our garage (the bed of the truck). We had…
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Heading East: Carbondale, CO & Saint Peters, MO
In mid-May, it was time to leave the southwest and start a 2-week trek back to NC to see our family! We drove way too much on the weekends but our workweek stops were great! The first stop was in the mountains of Colorado and the other right outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Our intense driving schedule was slightly complicated by picking up our new kayaks! We knew the particular kayaks that we wanted after trying out our friend’s Pungos by Wilderness Systems. After trying unsuccessfully to find 2 of them used, we decided to start calling stores that were along our route. Turns out, they were also hard to…
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Zion National Park
When we started out on this trip to the southwest, the only camping reservations we had were 10 nights in early May at the Watchman Campground inside Zion National Park. Zion (actually pronounced Zi-in) was at the top of our list of places to visit since several people had told us that it is their favorite park, and we can see why. Also, it’s RV friendly (we fit!) and there is a great cell signal (because the campground is close to the town of Springdale), both of which are uncommon in NPS campgrounds. Coming from Bryce, if our rig setup had been less than 50ft long, we could have entered…
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Bryce Canyon National Park
We weren’t originally planning to visit Bryce Canyon National Park this year because we would then be backtracking for the reservations we had at Zion National Park right before heading east to North Carolina. Located at the top of the Grand Staircase, Bryce is also at 8,000 feet elevation and still below freezing most nights during Spring and some of their trails do not open until the Summer. However, 4 weeks prior we had been able to snag appointments in the nearby town of Panguitch, UT for our first dose of the Moderna vaccine and wanted to be close for our second. So north on US89 we went and ended…
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In & Around Grand Staircase National Monument
After moving every weekend for the past month, we settled into a boondocking spot on BLM land 15 minutes north of Kanab, UT for two weeks in mid-April. Kanab is a really nice small town in a great location. It borders the Grand Staircase Unit of Grand Staircase-Escalante NM, is 30 min from the eastern entrance to Zion NP, 1 hour from Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs NM, and 1.5 hours from the north rim of the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon NP, and Lake Powell. This entire area is a huge swath of public land with endless places to explore. Sometimes our stay here was frustrating because we couldn’t get to some…
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Glen Canyon & Lake Powell
We spent a warm and sunny first week of April at Lone Rock Beach on Lake Powell, a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River created by the Glen Canyon Dam, that straddles the Arizona/Utah border. This sprawling lake and land to the north are part of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The land south belongs to the Navajo Nation. I’m happy to report that we never got stuck. However, we watched other people get stuck multiple times every day and that was equally entertaining and horrifying. During his explorations, John Wesley Powell named Glen Canyon for the now legendary glens, grottoes, and sandstone formations he saw carved into this…
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Lee’s Ferry & The Colorado River
We didn’t even realize how much we were missing the sight and sounds of water until we got to the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry at the end of March. Upstream from this point is Glen Canyon, the Glen Canyon Dam, and Lake Powell. Downstream is 277 river miles of the Grand Canyon. Lee’s Ferry is also where rafting trips that travel through the Grand Canyon are launched, and after watching groups leave all week, now we want to go! Our RVing adventure was supposed to check things off of our travel list, but instead, we keep adding to it. We stayed at Lee’s Ferry Campground for a week, at…
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Route 66 To The Grand Canyon
With Spring just about to spring, we decided to try our luck with good weather at the south rim of the Grand Canyon. At 7400ft, we knew it was a gamble, but the Grand Canyon is worth gambling on. From Joshua Tree to the spot we had picked out for boondocking was 6 1/2 “Google Maps” hours which was more than we like. Wanting to break up the trip with a laundry and grocery stop, we stayed at Fort Beale RV Park in Kingman, AZ for a week. The following Sunday, we packed up and continued on. From obsessively checking the weather, we were expecting 1-3 inches of snow on…
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A Desert Oasis
In between our two boondocking visits to Joshua Tree National Park, we spent a week at an RV park near Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley. Built upon a large aquifer in the Colorado Desert, the greater Palm Springs area is a man-made oasis of golf resorts and swimming pools. And of course, has several native California fan palm oases along the faults that crisscross the area. Most RV parks are located in the town of Desert Hot Springs and offer hot spring soaking pools. We stayed at the Sky Valley Resort which was about 90% retirement/vacation homes and 10% RV parking. The city of Palm Springs is known for…
