Category: Travel
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Day 547 – Eugene, Oregon – Native homeland of the PNW hippy.
I first visited Eugene (pronounced /yoo-JEEN/) in 1997 while driving around the country, I’ve told that story before in my post about the Oregon Country Fair. But the short version is that we happened to be driving through Eugene on the Friday of the fair, which I had never heard of, and followed a…
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Day 546 – West Coast Road Trip – Southern Oregon Coast
Driving Highway 101 up the southern Oregon coast. 201 miles From Klamath, CA to Florence, OR. For the third part of our west coast road trip we continued north along 101 along the southern Oregon coast. It’s similar to the northern California coast but with even more spectacular haystacks and rugged PNW shoreline. We…
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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…
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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…
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Day 529 – A Desert Casino on the edge of Nevada.
Stuck at a tiny casino in the middle of nowhere a few yards from the Nevada border on the edge of Death Valley. High wind warnings flash on my phone. We can track the destruction along the entire path back to Palm Springs. The tattooed bartender working his regular 12 hour shift from 6pm…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…