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Memphis & Nashville, TN
I’ve gotten a little behind on documenting our travels. In real-time, we’ve been at home in NC since the weekend before Thanksgiving and have been spending time with family and taking care of all our annual appointments. Last month, we spent the first couple of weeks of November continuing our eastbound I-40 journey through Tennessee. Our first stop was Memphis, where our friends Mark and Diana live. We stayed at Tom Sawyer RV Park, actually located across the Mississippi River in West Memphis, AR, but was an easy 15-minute drive to downtown Memphis. While we prefer public campgrounds, this was a great private one. It was reasonably priced, had large…
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Hot Springs National Park
Hot Springs, 50 miles southwest of Little Rock, AR, was our 15th and final National Park visit of 2022! We stayed at the park’s campground, Gulpha Gorge, in a lovely creekside site with full hookups. I think we would return to this park just to stay in one of these campsites again. We had beautiful fall weather during the first week of November, except for the hour we spent in a tornado shelter on Friday night. From American Indians to visitors during its 19th and 20th-century heyday (including baseball players for spring training), people have believed in the therapeutic power of the water in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Rain and snowmelt…
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Heading East: Palo Duro Canyon, TX & Oklahoma City, OK
After digging out of our muddy Santa Fe boondocking spot 2 days late, we had a 325-mile drive to our next destination in the Texas Panhandle. Perfectly doable for a one-day weekend drive but way too far to attempt during the week. We stopped for a night/work day at Blaze in Saddle RV park in Tucumcari, NM, a Route 66 town that still appears to be a popular one-night stopover for cross-country travelers. We finally got to Palo Duro Canyon State Park on Wednesday evening, stopping at Cadillac Ranch along the way. We ended up being glad that our week-long reservation at Palo Duro Canyon State Park was cut short.…
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Enchanted By Santa Fe, NM
Santa Fe is the place we’ve been most excited to visit in the “Land of Enchantment” state. I was probably primed to love Santa Fe by my Grandma. It was one of her favorite places and she even decided to become Catholic while visiting one of the churches as a young adult. Now that we’ve visited several of them, I wish I could ask her more about it. We spent the second week of October boondocking in the Santa Fe National Forest, a mere 15 minutes from downtown. This free spot seemed almost too good to be true. Santa Fe is such a beautiful, historic, and multicultural city. Its Pueblo…
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Finding Fall In Southwest Colorado
Visiting Mesa Verde National Park, located in the southwest corner of Colorado, was a last-minute idea. I’d been researching our 2023 route, which may include a late spring visit to Colorado, and realized the ranger-led tours of the cliff dwellings would not yet be open for the season. We found a great boondocking spot on Forest Rd 316 in the San Juan National Forest, halfway between Mesa Verde NP and Durango. It was the first week of October and the little oak trees around us were turning colors and we could see snowy peaks out in the distance. Unfortunately, it rained almost the entire week, which kept us stuck inside…
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Three Moab Parks
We spent the last week of September in Moab, a small town/big playground in southeastern Utah. It was still too hot for comfortable hiking and dry camping and I think October would have been better. The BLM lands around Moab have developed campgrounds (but without hookups) and are not free. We stayed at Ken’s Lake because it was the only one I could make a reservation at in advance and knew that Moab is popular and crowded. It’s popular for good reason. There are two National Parks – Arches and Canyonlands. But I think most visitors are there for the world-famous mountain biking and jeep trails. Arches National Park We…
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Capitol Reef National Park
Capitol Reef is located in the red rock country of south-central Utah. We think its remoteness, rather than lack of beauty, is what makes it one of the least visited of Utah’s 5 National Parks. Several people have told us it’s their favorite in Utah (we struggle with ranking them but think it’s our second, behind Zion). We scored a fantastic free boondocking spot on Beas Lewis Flat Road 10 miles west of the park’s entrance. We visited the 3rd week of September and had perfect weather temperature-wise, but were a bit too early because of a persistent monsoon season. Some roads were closed from a storm the weekend before…
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Lakefront Camping In Northern Utah
Michael gives me very little input regarding our destinations so when he requested a return to southern Utah to visit the 3 “Mighty Five” National Parks that we missed in 2021, that’s where we are headed! It was a 500-mile trek from Jackson, WY. On our way south we stopped at a couple of northern Utah State Parks, where we had two of the best campsites we’ve ever had! Our first stop was Bear Lake State Park, honestly because it had full hookups. We arrived on Labor Day when the campground changed to be first come first serve and we scored an incredible lakefront site. Bear Lake is a huge…
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Grand Teton National Park
Grand Teton is just south of Yellowstone so obviously, we headed there next. It was pretty much a “love at first sight” kind of experience. The Tetons are one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world, with jagged peaks and no foothills to obstruct the view from the Jackson Hole Valley. Add in the meandering Snake River and you have Ansel Adams material… Our campground, Gros Ventre (pronounced grow vont), was at the southern end of the park, just 15 miles from the town of Jackson, WY. If you asked us what was most memorable about our week here, we’d both say moose! We’ve been on the lookout for…
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Yellowstone Staycation
We started planning our 10-day Yellowstone vacation over a year ago so that we could get reservations to stay inside the park. Michael took time off work and we were calling it our Yellowstone vacation until he said “Wait, isn’t this our Yellowstone staycation since we live here?” There are 12 campgrounds, but a 30 ft travel trailer pushes the size limit of how many campsites actually fit us, so planning ahead was key. Originally, we were splitting our time between 3 campgrounds, Mammoth (north entrance), Madison (west entrance), and Fishing Bridge (east entrance). Sadly, Yellowstone suffered major flood damage in the northern loop earlier this year and those entrances…
