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First Two Weeks In Canada
After loving the beautiful mountain scenery of Glacier National Park last summer, we were excited to visit the Canadian Rockies this year. Months before I had somehow managed to get 8 weeks of reservations in various campgrounds in 4 Canadian National Parks. It’s a chaotic lottery system, with up to 50K people on the website trying to make reservations for the entire season at the same time, so we felt very lucky with what we got. Our luck ran out in Montana when we noticed a heavily worn trailer tire and had to limp across the border on our spare. Besides that problem, the actual border crossing was a breeze.…
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Family Trip To Yellowstone & Grand Teton
The first week of July finally felt like summer! Michael had the week off work and my brother and his family came out to visit us and experience the magic of Yellowstone and the Tetons. This was part of an epic 3-week trip that my sis-in-law planned for them. Our niece graduated high school and our nephew graduated elementary school so this was the perfect time and I know a lot of memories were made! I completely forgot to get photos of our campsites but we spent 3 nights at Yellowstone Grizzly RV Park in West Yellowstone, Montana, and 3 nights at Fireside Resort in Jackson, WY, and were within…
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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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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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The Florida Keys, Dry Tortugas National Park, & Everglades National Park
For the last half of January, our home base was Larry and Penny Thompson Memorial Park in Homestead. For $500/month with full hookups, you can just live at this Miami-Dade County Park for the entire winter season, for which there is a 5+ year waitlist. Usually, there is a 14-day stay limit at public parks so this is odd. Also, parks this affordable are usually not very nice, but this one was very nice. Most of the people there were from Quebec. We only got in on a last-minute cancellation after realizing our planned dry camping spot inside Everglades NP was a terrible idea due to the need for A/C.…
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Fort Lauderdale, Miami, & Biscayne National Park
For the past two winters, we’ve explored the desert southwest. We love the grandeur and the wildness, but it was time to do something completely different. So I dragged Michael to southeast Florida, which was actually plan b after I wasn’t able to get any state park reservations in the Florida Keys. There was so much to do…south Florida has three national parks and plenty of city spaces to explore. It’s the most urban area we’ve ever experienced for this amount of time in our lives. We’ve felt crowded and a little claustrophobic. The traffic is way worse than imagined. But the weather has been way better. It’s hard to…
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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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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…
