Category: Destinations
-
Day 540 – West Coast Road Trip – Northern California Redwoods
Driving Highway 101 north through The Avenue of the Giants and Redwood National Park. 153 miles From Leggett to Klamath, CA. After the first leg of our west coast road trip up highway 1 from San Francisco, we connected with highway 101 and continued north through the redwood forests of northern California for our…
-
Day 538 – West Coast Roadtrip – Northern California Coast
Driving Highway 1 from San Francisco to its northern terminus. 204 miles From Muir Beach to Leggett, CA. From Visalia we drove to Petaluma just north of San Francisco and camped at another KOA. Coming down towards the coast out of the arid west after months of dryness was like taking a deep breath…
-
Day 529 – Death Valley National Park
From Page, AZ, we drove back down through Las Vegas and up 95 to Amargosa Valley, turning left towards a Casino/Hotel/RV Park a few yards from the Nevada/California border. Home base for our visit to Death Valley for a few days. From there it was only a short drive to 190 at Death Valley…
-
Day 527 – Vermillion Cliffs, Horseshoe Bend (Page, AZ)
From Zion National Park we headed over the Kaibob plateau in a full snowstorm and into the Vermillion Cliffs Scenic Byway (89a) towards Page, AZ. Ominous banks of clouds loomed like celestial beasts grazing on the red dirt expanse. As we ascended the mesa, the landscape was charred black, miles of forest, as far…
-
Day 525 – Zion National Park – (Springdale, UT)
The area surrounding Zion National Park was originally inhabited around 8000 BCE by groups of the native Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloans, who were also responsible for the more famous cliff dwellings found throughout the four-corners region of southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. The first Europeans to migrate to the…
-
Day 524 – (Desert Roadtrip Part 1) – Driving the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats,…
-
Day 464 – The city of Joshua Tree, CA, and the high desert.
We stayed in the Joshua Tree area for two months, the first month in a house in Yucca Valley, the larger town to the west, and a month in a small house a couple of blocks from the heart of the city of Joshua Tree proper. The two towns were only about 10 minutes…
-
Day 464 – Joshua Tree National Park
Two hours east of San Bernardino through Cabazon (where the concrete dinosaurs in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure live), past Palm Springs and a series of steep climbs up into the Mojave desert you arrive in a magical landscape that’s as alien as any place you’re likely to find on the planet. I’d been here before…
-
Day 444 – Tucson, AZ – Discovering the ancient saguaro cactus.
Tucson sits about 60 miles north of the Mexico boarder in Arizona between California and New Mexico. This area has been populated by native people for over 12,000 years. The first European settlement happened in 1700 when the Spanish Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino founded the Mission San Xavier del Bac in 1700. The…
-
Day 411 – South Padre Island, TX – Gulf Coast Paradise
After several long spurts of driving and active sight seeing, we were ready for a brief repose. I had packed for a beach adventure a year and a half earlier and had been carrying it with me without ever making it to a beach. So when we were looking for a place to go…