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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…
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Jasper National Park
Weeks 4 and 5 of our Canadian Rockies road trip were spent at Jasper National Park. We felt like we’d won the campground lottery getting a 2 week reservation in a full hookup site at the recently renovated Whistlers Campground in Jasper. A lot of trees in this area have been wiped out by pine beetles, but the openness of the campground gave us mountain views and a great Starlink signal. The campground was a 5-minute drive from the cute mountain town also named Jasper. And there were seemingly endless beautiful sites close by that we could visit in the afternoons after work. Jasper NP is huge and we ventured…
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Icefields Parkway
We spent our third week in the Canadian Rockies on the Icefields Parkway, the very scenic 144 miles of Alberta Highway 93 that links Lake Louise in Banff National Park to Jasper National Park. It’s known as one of the most stunning drives in the world, lined with mountain peaks, glaciers, and glacier-fed lakes and rivers. We’ve wanted to visit this area for a long time and it is just jaw-droppingly beautiful. We stayed at Silverhorn Creek campground. There were no hookups, no water source, no dump station, and no cell service. But our solar panels and Dishy worked great with the open sky. And we had views of glaciers!!…
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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.…
