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Boondocking In Buena Vista, CO
We spent the workweek before Memorial Day boondocking in a meadow in the San Isabel National Forest. Our spot was on Forest Road 274 between the Arkansas River towns of Salida and Buena Vista. This was an ideal spot because the road was in great condition (in terms of Forest Service Roads), we had an open sky for solar and Starlink, and we were minutes away from hiking trails and cute towns. And until the views that we have at our current spot, these were some of the best views we’ve ever had from a campsite. We could see two snow-capped 14ers, Mount Princeton on one side and Mount Antero…
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Great Sand Dunes National Park
We’re planning to be in Colorado for at least a month this year and other than the week of Memorial Day, we don’t have reservations because we wanted to do some boondocking and first come first serve camping. Our first stop was San Luis State Wildlife Area near Great Sand Dunes National Park. The San Luis Valley is a large rural valley with elevations starting at 7500ft in south-central Colorado. The Sangre de Cristo Range is to the east and the San Juan Mountains are to the west. With a Colorado State Parks pass, this first come first serve campground is free and has electric hookups and a dump station!…
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Taos & The Enchanted Circle, NM
Less than 24 hours after returning to Albuquerque from Maui, we had all clean laundry and a restocked fridge and were heading north to get a first come-first served campsite at the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument for the week. This National Monument has several small campgrounds inside the river gorge and also up on the rim. There is absolutely zero cell service at any of them, so our stay was only possible with Starlink! We snagged a water/electric site at Rio Bravo inside the gorge to be close to the town of Taos. Though the beauty of Taos doesn’t really come through in my photos, we loved it.…
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A Little Bit Of Albuquerque, NM
We were parked at High Desert RV Park in Albuquerque for a month starting the second week of April. We needed to be near an airport and plan to spend the summer in the Rockies, so Albuquerque suited our needs perfectly. Albuquerque is a big city but somehow doesn’t feel too crowded. The Sandia Mountains are just east, Spanish for watermelon because of the color they turn at sunset. The Rio Grande runs through the middle, with miles of multi-use trails that we didn’t get to take advantage of this time around. We did make sure to visit historic Old Town which is a lot like Santa Fe, except that…
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Aloha, Maui!!
Sometime in January, we got an offer to stay at the Maui Marriott Ocean Club for 1/3 of the regular rate if we sat through a sales pitch for their vacation club. We’ve done this before and think it’s definitely worth it! Besides, we don’t say no to a trip to Hawaii. It’s one of our favorite places in the world! This was our third visit, but the first to Maui, and hopefully not the last. I was trying to figure out how to extend the trip and realized we should sleep in a campervan for a couple of nights, which easily sold Michael on the idea. He is up…
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Carlsbad Caverns NP & Guadalupe Mountains NP
Our next planned stop for the first week of April was going to be boondocking in southeast New Mexico, right between Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. But, a couple of days beforehand we saw that temperatures were going to be ~10 degrees higher than we expected. Being in the desert in the high 80s didn’t sound fun so we scrambled to find an alternative spot. We ended up at Brantley Lake State Park. I hope we aren’t getting weak at boondocking. Brantley Lake was our first New Mexico State Park and we loved it. We had water and electric hookups for $14/day and the desert was blooming. It…
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Austin & San Antonio, TX
Michael’s sister told us about the Texas bluebonnets years ago and we timed our visit to Austin to see them! We stayed at McKinney Falls State Park, just 15 minutes from downtown Austin. The campsites were large and had water/electric hookups. We were at McKinney Falls the second half of March and over those two weeks watched the bluebonnets bloom to peak, followed by the appearance of Indian paintbrush. These fields were inside the state park, so we got to see them on our daily walks. In addition to all the wildflowers, there were also trails around the falls. We noticed right away that Austin seemed like a very nice…
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New Orleans, LA
We couldn’t imagine driving past New Orleans without stopping. We had visited before for our friend’s wedding and wanted to experience it again. There are two state parks within easy commuting distance of the French Quarter, Bayou Segnette and St. Bernard. We chose St. Bernard because, although a little farther away, we were able to reserve a full hookup site. Even though we were only 30 minutes from the French Quarter, the area felt pretty remote. We didn’t find much to do during the week. We went to New Orleans twice during our week-long stay. While looking for a place to listen to some of the city’s live music, I…
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Grayton Beach State Park, FL
Our last stop in Florida was a relaxing 2 weeks at Grayton Beach State Park, located on the panhandle’s Emerald Coast. The park’s campground is a 1/2 mile walk to the beach and has full hookups earning it a spot in our top 5, though there are at least a dozen campgrounds in our top 5. The park had a really nice nature walk featuring dunes, forest canopy, and Western Lake, a rare ecosystem known as a coastal dune lake. Of course, the popular spot is the beach! This stretch of coastline is known for its white sugar sand and greenish-blue water. I found the beach hard to photograph because…
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Kayaking Florida’s Springs
Florida has hundreds of freshwater springs, mainly located in the north/central part of the state, which are beautiful places for paddling, swimming, and wildlife viewing. Our 2 week stop near the town of Crystal River, about an hour north of Tampa, was to kayak a couple of these spring-fed rivers. Preferably with manatees! We stayed at Tillis Hill Campground in the Withlacoochee State Forest, where all sites had water/electric hookups and were very spacious. Manatees are large, gentle, and curious marine mammals that congregate near Florida’s springs during winter months (Nov-Mar), where they depend on the relatively warm 72-degree water for survival. The Crystal River Wildlife Refuge, formed to protect…
