We found a so-so spot in the Bighorn Canyon campground. A day later we improved locations, this time securing a high site near the river, close enough to hear its music after dark.
Salida is Kat’s kind of town. Downtown is an old but well-kept, a mix of cafes, galleries, offices, shops and bars. The river runs right through old downtown, and the City of Salida operates two shady, manicured parks right there on the river.
Read MoreLong-time reader and longer-time Mooringsport Elementary classmate Nan has for months been casting lures toward Kat and Jackson to visit her and husband Ken’s mountain palace outside Cuchara, Colorado. Part of the allure of the RV life is No Plans and No Deadlines. To visit Nanner & Co., along with a couple of other Mooringsport […]
Read MoreLast night I caught of whiff of some of it, or of a tough competitor. A couple of early twenties women in a tent not far from our site were the source. Street pot has a distinct odor that’s quite acrid. (Yo, we worked in the French Quarter for years!) But this scent was smooth and well-rounded, with no overtones of harshness.
Read MoreBut for the winters, we could very happily live in Colorado. As they say in Dallas, Houston, and Lubbock: “It’s the Texas Riviera”.
Read MoreKat’s buddy Barbara A. from Glacier, Airstream, and soon to be Amazon, turned us on to Creede, an old Colorado mining town rife with local color. Juneteenth, the day the slaves were freed in Texas (June 19, 1865), merits celebration. Kat and I also worked in Texas – if on more voluntary terms – so […]
Read MoreWe unwittingly chose a challenging day to cross the pass. There was a lot of wind, gusting to 50 mph, but more troublesome was a huge bicycle event strung out along our entire 100 mile path on Hwy 160.
Read MoreKat and Jackson are on record as appreciating your work, especially when you two rode out unarmed to meet that posse of AK-47 toting target shooters just below us, and suppressed their fire.
…any town where enough people appreciate Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, and yes, Phillip Glass — is a place I would love to live.
Read More“You think you blocked enough *!@#%^! driveway with that *!@#%^! trailer”? I am a chicken at heart, but his words blew up my adrenaline: “I don’t think I heard you right.” He repeated his sentence word for word, which might mean he wasn’t drunk, but his words steamed me even more.
Read MoreOne can camp near Moab and see both Arches and Canyonlands NP’s from the same base of operations. We did just that, and I found Canyonlands quite interesting. For one thing, you see most of it from above, just like in Grand Canyon. The park lacks shuttles, but one third of it is highly accessible […]
Read MoreMeanwhile, Arches is crazily scenic despite its lack of a canyon. There’s no river. The park is just the product of millions of years of differential rates of rock erosion. Check out Kat’s pictures: I won’t waste 10,000 words trying to describe those ten pix.
Read MoreKat and I may have suffered National Park burnout. Maybe it’s just too much sandstone, but that’s what Utah has. Still, the Park Service does something different here: Capitol Reef doubles as a salute to pioneer Mormon settlers, and many of those old buildings, preserved so well, are open to the public. So are their vast groves of fruit trees – peaches, apples, pears, apricots, and mulberries. You are allowed to pick a bag of fruit for personal use, but only if the crop is ready. Nothing was ripe, so we ate no fruit.
Read MoreIvie’s Creek, northwest of Salina, UT, on Hwy 50 has it all. There’s a lovely old mountain checkered with firs, Ponderosa pines, and aspens to the west. There is a broad plain down in the valley along with Scipio Lake to the northeast. Nights are dark enough to please every amateur astronomer and most pros. The spring-fed creek is clear enough to suit a brewer, cold enough to take your breath away, and shallow enough that non-swimmers can safely wade in it. Its music rivals The Vienna Philharmonic’s….
Read MoreFollowing the ranger’s advice we found the first of two dirt roads of interest, and turned into it pulling the big ‘Stream. Fifty yards in we spied a white Casita trailer with a white van as its tow vehicle. Could this be RV Sue and the Canine Crew? That’s when we saw a little dog with perky ears, white with black spots, starting to bark. That would be Spike.
Read MoreBryce is one of our smaller National Parks, but the shuttle system is excellent and there’s plenty to do and see. We will leave Monday after a five day stay at Bryce’s North Campground ($7.50 per night with your America the Beautiful pass). We took in the views from all the major overlooks, made […]
Read MoreScience is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
Read MoreZion is right up there with Yellowstone, Glacier, and Grand Canyon. Check it out while you’re still a kid.
Read MoreZion has a daily program in which a live park ranger does a two hour narration about half a dozen stops on the shuttle line. We rode on such a tour today; it was highly informative. She answered several nagging questions, and clued us in on other aspects of park history that we would have […]
Read MoreZion is another popular National Park that operates a delightful shuttle service. The park is vaguely closed to private vehicles, yet you see them everywhere. But why drive when the bus covers everything you could want to see and passes every five to ten minutes? Yesterday we rode the whole route, bailing out at the Temple of the Sinawava to make the Riverside Walk. The paved trail is more like a wide sidewalk and it transforms a 2.2 mile march into a pleasant stroll, even for a guy with bad knees.
Read MoreZion National Park has two campgrounds suitable for RVs and travel trailers. Watchman accepts reservations and is booked up from last month to October; the other (South) is first-come, first-served. The Park Service website warns that reservations are advised, but I am too Mediterranean to plan that far ahead. Kat learned from FreeCampsites.net that […]
Read MoreAll I can think of is the lyrics to a Janis Joplin song called “Get It While You Can”. She was singing about something else, but the message is “See it while you can”. It’s beautiful, blue, and cool in early spring. The waterline is maybe 100 feet below us but there are still millions of sun-bleached mussel shells in the packed sand around our boondock site.
Read MoreIt’s time to move on to different things, if not necessarily bigger or better things. Bigger than the GCNP is hardly possible, and better is completely subjective. Nonetheless, we are on our way to Zion National Park by way of Lake Mead and a yet to be named diesel mechanic. But before we leave our […]
Read MoreThe best views from the South Rim of the Canyon lie east of the Village. Some of it can be seen from the Orange Route Shuttle. The last 25 miles requires you to drive your own vehicle out and back. But the scenery is so much better that if you have just one day, you […]
Read MoreThe Park Service operates free shuttles on a convenient schedule around Grand Canyon. We used the Blue Route our first day working our way around Grand Canyon Village, the most developed part of the park. Our second day of serious touring called for a ride on the Red Route, also known as Hermits Rest Road. […]
Read MoreGrand Canyon Village was built around the Bright Angel Inn and its more recent competition, plus the Kolb Brother’s Studio and Fred Harvey’s Outlook Studio (also more recent competition). The nearby rail station really opened up the park to tourism, and the Bright Angel Trail carved by earthquakes and early natives, was popularized by the Kolbs as a path to water for their film developing, and as a route to river running. The Kolbs learned river running the hard way: by trial and error. Like the Wright Brothers, they approached their new craft respectfully, knowing it was a fine way to get killed. (The Wrights limited their first few flights to an altitude of ten feet, knowing a fall from there might be survived.) The Kolbs learned every time out on the river, and continually built on their knowledge.
Read MoreIf anybody reads us hoping to encounter interesting literature without paying for a subscription to either The New Yorker or Mad Magazine, this post and nearly all of our others will disappoint you. This one is meant for the handful of frequent RV’ers in our audience, to each of whom we feel a duty to help on that rare occasion when we think we can. We owe so much to the RV blogs Watson’s Wander, Aluminarium, and Wheeling It: it feels good to be able to give something back.
Read MoreWorld War II was a horrifying ordeal for all who lived or died during those dark days. Yet, like successful chemo and radiation, it rid the world of a serious cancer. It also gave the English language a few new, colorful words. Consider “blibby”.
Read MoreYesterday we heard that today would be the day our shipment comes in. It’s noon, and no news is not good news.
Read MoreLong before 7:00 a.m. in our Sedona boondock site we awakened to this sound: “Fwooosh … Fwoooooosh!” That’s the unmistakable call of a hot air balloon’s burners, very close. And there it was, no more than a quarter of a mile away, struggling to gain altitude. Balloons go up very early around here because they’re […]
Read MoreBesides not having a street address, my other concern with boondocking is dirt roads. Your rig gets absolutely filthy and every dirt byway contains sections of road with enough washboard to loosen your fillings. If it rains exiting can become a real horrorshow.
Read More“Tuzigoot is the site of an ancient Native American apartment complex which was home to as many as 200 Sinagua people. It was excavated and partially rebuilt back in the 1930’s by two American archaeologists and a team of Apache laborers. It is believed to have been continuously used between 1,000 and 1,400 CE….”
Read More“There’s a lot of science going on that they don’t let us know about. Torsion Fields, for example. You never hear about that, but the Russians have done a lot of work in that area, and it’s fascinating stuff. The book I’m reading is called The Source Field Investigation by David Wilcock. Some people think Wilcock is the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce.”
Read MoreMaynard James Keenan (you metal-heads know him as the lead singer of T00L) lives somewhere around Jerome and owns a vineyard known as Merkin ( you know that word, it’s, it’s a Pubic Wig!)
Read More… she watched me load the dryer the same rapt way that Pink watches me eat. I selected the next to highest temperature, but she objected “Everybody uses hot. It’s faster.” “But I’ve found elastic lasts longer on a lower heat setting.” “May-be.”
Read MoreA big guy, who always carried himself like a tough guy, was trying to fix something with a quarter (a job that really needed a large screwdriver). This fellow called out to the room: “Has anybody got a fifty-cent piece?” With timing that Jay Leno would envy, Sonny called back, “You’re married to one!”
Read MoreWe’ve been Jonesin’ for green chile cheeseburgers since New Mexico, and we finally got them here in Wickenburg, AZ, at Screamers Drive-in. Unlike that chick whose review claimed they stopped in only because the place went by her boyfriend’s nickname, I’m going to give you the straight dope on Screamers: it’s named for classic muscle […]
Read MoreToday would be my favorite grandmother’s 117th birthday, or something like that. She often said “Bad news travels like wildfire; good news travels slow”. Some things you just don’t understand until you get old, and that proverb is one of them
Read MoreBubba doesn’t seem to be making a killing, but he’s a third generation full-timer. Sounds as nutty as full-time RV’ing, but both are more rational that buying 100 Lotto tickets a week as a way to save for retirement.
Read MoreWe left the Desert Diamond Casino, a perfectly good paved parking lot in Tucson, five days ago. Kat was bored and itching to indulge her vision of RV life in the American West. To Kat, that vision takes the form of boondocking. For those who are not fully conversant with full-time RV’er vocabulary, “boondocking” means […]
Read MoreThe Visitors Center is cool and very helpful. Kat got some back-of-an-envelope instructions on short driving tours that end in shorter hikes. There was a lot more corduroy dirt road than anybody wanted or had bargained for, but the scenery was as spectacular as a desert’s can be. We climbed up into a rock shelter and wished we’d brought lunch; the view was a shaded picnic table and very clear vistas. At the table with all that rock around us the temperature was 15 degrees cooler. We celebrated with the last of our water.
Read MoreWhen you were a kid trying to draw something involving the American West, you always drew a saguaro cactus with two arms on the paper in green Crayola
Read MoreI last had a dental cleaning a few weeks before the dawn of the Great Recession. When you’re done working full-time, $300 each for a cleaning and exam feels like too much. But that seems to be the going rate, unless ….
Read MoreKat insisted we visit a tiny southern Arizona town called Bisbee, and reader Nan endorsed her view. It is home to what once was a Phelps Dodge open pit copper mine, closed for the last forty or so years because the costs of refining low grade ore rule out any profit on the finished product. […]
Read MoreYou will see boulders big as a house, mostly already out of the side of the mountain, and while you know it’s been there forever, you get a sense that someday gravity’s pull will tire out the mountain’s grip and 50 tons of trouble will come tumbling down to crush everything in its path. We saw many cars drive by those big rocks, but we saw no one posing beneath one to create an image for his website.
Read More“Mexican food is the same everywhere.” Do you really believe that? New Mexico by and large prefers green chile sauces to red, and that gives the cuisine a whole different vibe. We experienced this 20 or so years ago when we stopped at a hole in the wall café in a tiny burg somewhere […]
Read MoreWe arrived in Las Cruces to do some basic RV’ing chores and enjoy something made with the famous Hatch green chile. We hooked up water and electric but there’s no electric. No battery power, either. Those are week-old batteries, Jim: can’t be nothin’ wrong with them.
Read MoreThe Classics Granny was spinning her favorite stuff. I was treated to Mozart’s Piano Concerto #10 for Two Pianos, followed by Von Weber’s Clarinet Quintet, then Mozart’s Piano Concerto #14
Read MoreWe drove through Terlingua, Texas, the International Chili Capital of the World, and met the vanguard of a cold wave at a Border Patrol checkpoint (only sniffer dogs and a citizenship question – they find southern accents reassuring) as we headed north to Marfa. We stopped in Alpine for diesel and provisions. I plead guilty […]
Read More36 miles north of Big Bend is the little town of Marathon. This was our second visit here – the first time was 18 years ago when we took a whirlwind tour of Texas colleges and universities. Stops included Nacogdoches, Beaumont, College Station, San Marcos, San Angelo, Lubbock, Austin, and Alpine. We stayed at the […]
Read MoreOur pal Caldwell, a frequent Facebooker, recently posted to Kat “We were in Big Bend last year, and nothing’s alive there, except tourists.” Aside from Facebook (I long ago decided that I would use it only if someone paid me to, and they haven’t) we know nothing of Big Bend. The internet helps, but […]
Read MoreWe’re in Big Bend National Park in south Texas up against the Mexican border. It’s our first night here and we’re a little worried about our electrical system. We had to buy new batteries in Alpine when we were in Marathon. They weren’t holding a charge very long or taking a charge while we rolled […]
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Life on the Blue Highways 