Author Archives: Ann & Ben (co-authors)

Our vacation pretty much ends in the morning, with our departure from Roswell. We watched the stars for a bit, along the back fence of the cute little campground in Roswell. Red Barn RV Resort. We highly recommend, if you’re ever through Roswell and want a peaceful setting.

It’s always a bit sad at the end of a great trip, but it’s always a blessing to have been able to see these sights with each other and with family. As much as we’ve complained about the bumpy roads and the heat, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring the National Parks and the Southwest part of the country.

We’ll still have plenty of fun together on the rest of the journey home, but this is the beginning of the transition to family time in Arkansas for the 4th of July.

So, we’re pretty much making a boring, straight line drive between Roswell, NM and Fayetteville, AR. The no frills trail, so to speak.

We’ll be doing the one night stays as we’re TRUCKIN’ through Amarillo, to Oklahoma City (KOA), then on to Arkansas. Fayetteville first, to visit our daughter and play the part of handyman, for anything around her house that needs attention. Then we’ll be on to Hot Springs Village for the 4th of July festivities.

Before we left Roswell, however, we saw this in the little office while we were picking up ice and water (all on the honor system, so neat). Cute way to help lost socks reunite with their partners.

Our boring “on the road days,” have been mostly uneventful, thus far, which is great! We’re still gritting our teeth on rough highways, but most of our roads today weren’t terrible. And traffic was very light and very spread out, so we could often cruise along in the passing lane, with far fewer potholes and patches that roughly shake the truck and the airstream.

We crossed into Texas (again) and into the central time zone. We are now only an hour off from eastern time, which our little brains generally run on, so the math is getting easier every time we get closer.

It’ll still screw us up for a few days. It’s like slow motion jet lag honestly. It’s a good thing Ben is (mostly) retired, otherwise he would be missing calls left and right! (Well, and we wouldn’t be on this trip, so there’s that too lol).

But we made it to Amarillo where we started seeing lots of neat old Americana stuff going on. Lots of flags, old trucks, little motels, diners, and lots of businesses both big and small that were established in the towns. I’m always amazed how fast Ben can swivel his head for an old truck sitting out in a field or behind a barn.

And boy oh boy, were we in beef country.

We even went through a town named Bovina.

Since we’ve entered into Texas today, everything we’ve seen has very much been cow land. And I’ll be honest, even seeing those cows crammed into pens, standing in their own poo, our mouths are still watering for a good steak. 🥩 I guess we’re not going vegetarian or vegan any time soon.

There were miles and miles of infrastructure supporting the cow business and lots and lots of cows. The poop piles, alone, on each of the transfer areas were ginormous. Lots of trucks, gates, dust and COWS.

The wind was our friend today and blowing away from us, thank goodness. We counted our blessings every time we passed the stock yards and we were spared the nose hammering, sinus scouring, brain melting smell of so many high volume poo and pee-ers in one place. Otherwise, we would have had to trade the truck in after passing through. You’d never get that smell out.

We got near the campground area in Amarillo and while we were filling up the truck, Ben decided to be spontaneous and weigh this whole rig on a Cat Scale, for the first time. We came in much more svelte than Ben anticipated. 18,960 lbs. However, the truck weighs more than he expected and the trailer weighs less. He explained to me that we’re in good shape, as lower trailer weight mostly just means that we are not pushing the tires as hard as we thought, which Ben says is good. Wait a minute! Does that mean I could have brought all the extra, very important things that he made me leave behind in Hot Springs Village at the beginning of the trip? Was Airstream Fat Camp a waste of time? Ugh 😩

So, if you want to weigh the old family truckster for some reason, just pull up on the scale, to the yellow line, push the call button and when they squawk at you through the box, you just tell them you’re weighing your car. They’ll say, ok, they’ll pause, and then they say “good to go.” You go inside, to the trucker side of the convenience store and you tell them your car number. It was like $5. They give you a little print out. Like the one above.

Finally, before we head to the campground, we stopped in at a local store and Ben got a new hat.

It’s Ben first cowboy hat that’s not made of straw, so we’ll see how it breaks in over the next few days.

We already got confused by the time change on the first night on central time. Hot tub closed at 9 and we remembered at 9. Sigh.

Wrapped up for the evening, we got a quick picture of the moon rising over the airstream, then the winds started picking up and inside we went…

The next day was ALL interstate 40 again and it was extremely windy the whole day. We moseyed along, about 10 under the speed limit and we made it into Oklahoma City at the ole KOA.

It is a shocking 74 degrees here! It’s sweater weather! When did fall get to Oklahoma? It was 105 in Amarillo yesterday!

Either way, we will enjoy the cooler temps while we can get them. It is not even summer yet after all! (Maybe by the time this posts, it will be summer. We wrote this on June 18)

We are also slowly dwindling down our supplies, as we only have a handful of nights left in the camper before we move everything into the Hot Springs Village house for a few weeks for the 4th of July. Tonight is grilled cheese sandwiches! Yay!

After dinner, we took a short evening walk, which is pretty much standard work for us in the early evening, usually to find the dumpster, find the hot tub if there is one, and pet any dogs that are walking by with their owners. We are really missing the dogs now.

Instead of dogs tonight, we found…

and…

So, that was fun! Did not realize this place had a petting zoo thing!

That was about it for the evening! Calling it a night. Who knows, you might just hear from us again. Especially if we get up to anymore adventuring!

Happy 250th July 4th celebration everyone! 🇺🇸

Out of nowhere, we had a bit of a rude awakening at 12:30 am. A big thunderstorm front was headed right for us, moving SE at 7 miles per hour.

We could feel the winds picking up quickly and rain started pelting the airstream aggressively, pinging and spattering across the front windows of the tailer, right above our heads.

A quick glance at the weather confirmed that a storm front was quickly approaching.

We listened to the wind howl and felt the trailer shaking for about an hour, while the rain sluiced down the exterior of the truck and trailer. We had no leaks, no hail despite a few cells being in the area, and after the wind slowed down a bit, we were able to get back to a fitful sleep. 

We were fine, and that is life on the road, particularly as we re-enter the great plains and its notoriously unpredictable and fast moving weather. There is definitely a certain feeling of helplessness when we’re in this situation, but we were fairly well blocked in by the big rigs around us and the truck was blocking the wind directly in front of us. Luckily, the Airstream itself is pretty aerodynamic, so we likely had a more restful night than our boxy neighbors with the big tall class A’s and fifth wheels on either side of us. We just watched the weather for tornados and kept our shoes on in bed for a night. We can nap in Roswell later today perhaps to catch up on the winks we missed last night.

On the positive side? We got a free airstream wash and exfoliation last night! This thing is absolutely filthy.

Most campgrounds have a fairly strict policy of no RV washing and no maintenance, which we understand, so while we have snuck in a few illegal bird baths here and there to get the most heinous of bug guts off the front of the trailer, so we don’t attract vultures and other carrion eating fauna while camped, we have not been able to give the camper a full top to bottom bath since early May. The truck is no problem since we can cruise through any DIY car wash in most of the towns we visit, but the camper is kinda gross. 

There is also no real point in cleaning everything up since each travel day just coats it in a fresh layer of bugs and road tar. We can detail it when we get back to Florida, so for now, we will take our natural car wash as a blessing and move on!

Today was the last day at Carlsbad so we packed up and headed on our short, 100 mile drive up to finally visit Roswell, NM!

Although we’ve tried to make it to Roswell on two other ocassions, it didn’t work out the first two times. This will be our first visit to the alien themed little city in the middle of nowhere. We are curious to see what we will see, as the maps shows a fairly small town footprint, a few grocery stores and gas stations for refueling and restocking, and at least 20 alien stuff shops. Can’t wait to check it out later today!

It was a quick drive and no issues, other than holy moly is it super duper rural. We were surprised by a few things.

There was an absolute ton of infrastructure stuff going on and a lot of oil and gas extraction businesses sure looked like they were going wide open. So, the roads and side roads were very busy. Everywhere on that stretch.

This area looks like it has boomed and busted many times over the last 150 years+ Lots of history just openly decaying or decayed right in the middle of town. Wild. Must be going through another boom.

We were also very surprised to see so much nut agriculture here. From southern California, southern Arizona, and now southern New Mexico., all along this corridor are dense, dark green, well-established , well-maintained, and very healthy appearing groves. Pecans, pistachios, pinons (pine nuts), almonds. These groves are everywhere and they are actually something they should be very proud of. It cannot be easy to maintain in the climate. The grounds were almost always immaculate, making it far easier to harvest with their tarp machines and tree shakers, which are very funny machines to watch when they work. It was very neat to pass through these areas when they lined the highway.

We were also surprised that the roads still sucked for the most part. Actually, on that subject, we were not surprised at all.

Long suffering sighs aside, it was a short easy drive and we rolled into Roswell at about noon.

We finally got to check in at the Red Barn RV Park!

We have booked this place three times now, and when plans changed on our previous trips, we had to cancel. It was great to finally see this place. The owner, Lee, is a very nice lady that bought this 1930’s home and barn twenty years ago, and she turned the barn into the clubhouse and check in counter, and built the campground. It is very quiet and secure, yet only a few miles from downtown Roswell. If you are passing through, this place is great!

We got everything set up on the camper, made sure the AC was working, and we headed off to finally see downtown Roswell!

It was far busier than we expected. The body of the town was just a handful of streets wide before the neighborhoods began, and my goodness, the traffic was actually pretty heavy with tourists, commuters, truckers, motorcyclists, you name it. It was a “push the button at the crosswalk” kind of town, and then stand back from the curb in case someone comes careening around the corner too wide. Even when our little walk dude came up on the signal, we still crossed the road with our heads on a swivel. Where in the world did all of these people come from?

We parked IMMEDIATELY to get our bearings and we decided to just check out the first alien tourist shop we had happened to see. The shop was surprisingly organized, well lit, fully committed to the theme, and the shopkeeper couldn’t care less what we were doing as long as we weren’t stealing. So we picked out our little alien sticker to commemorate the visit, settled up with the bored cashier, and headed out of there. We checked out a few more alien junk shops and an art place and then decided, yep, that’s enough Roswell.

We were honestly a bit jarred by the rapid increase in traffic and people. We have not really been around people too much over the last week or so. We were so startled in fact, that Mr Camera guy, Ben, only took one picture downtown.

Having satisfied our window shopping and knick knack hunting, we grabbed groceries to last us a few days, filled up the truck (diesel down to $4.499 here) and headed back toward the campground. (Look at all the alien crap even at Walmart?)

On the way, Ben said, “I thought I saw a sign back by the campground that indicated a place selling tallow and candles and stuff. Maybe you want to go there?”

HECK YES! We are definitely going there. Ben is getting better and better trained each and every year. 😉

We whipped the truck around and headed back to Roswell to check out Farm and Ranch Candle Company. Ohmygosh it was such an incredibly neat store. The kind of stuff that if Ann was to open a store, she would have the same fresh healthy stuff. Fresh farm chicken eggs by the half dozen and dozen, quail eggs, tallow in various applications, americana/patriotic home decor, build your own candles, etc. And the owner was there making candles. If they sold fudge, I think Ann would have moved here.

Well, maybe we’ll just visit a bit more frequently.

Neat store and the best part was Ben got to pet the ferocious guard dog that occupied the best sunny spot by the front door.

We were able to find a few items that we couldn’t live without, and we once again, headed back to the campground. As we pulled away from our spot, Ann noticed the very fortunate placement of the power line in front of Bullocks Jewelry.

Low key night tonight as we are turning in early to catch up on missed sleep from last night. Headed to Amarillo in the morning!

This is our last official National Park to be visited, on this journey. Sigh. It’s been such a hot 🥵, yet awesome adventure.

Carlsbad Caverns makes number 12 for number of national parks, on this trip.

Hot Springs

Petrified Forest

Zion

Bryce Canyon

Capital Reef

Canyonlands

Arches

Joshua Tree

Saguaro

White Sands

Guadalupe Mountains

Carlsdbad Caverns

Of all the parks we’ve visited on this trip, six of the national parks, as well as all of the state parks were new checkmarks on our bucket list. I think we’ve visited 21 national parks now, so it’ll get more difficult from here because the parks left to visit are as far away, as possible, from Florida. Interestingly enough, we haven’t even hit any of the three national parks in Florida yet. We figure at some point we’ll be too old to drive cross country and we can save those three parks for when we’re less mobile.

We’re so blessed to be able to do this together and to be able to involve our kids on this year’s adventure. Such a neat experience! We’re even more blessed to have adult children that actually like hanging out with us. lol

The Caverns of Carlsbad is a seriously big cave system. We weren’t prepared for how big this cave is and even the best photos don’t do it justice.

We also found out that caves are quite hard to photograph. The NPS folks did a tremendous job with lighting to show off cool cave features, but the rest of the light just gets swallowed up in the dark.

It’s a 700 foot drop from the surface to the level of the Big Room, as they appropriately call the big room. It is a 1.25 mile hike down three sets of steep switchbacks just to get to the bottom, and then it is another loopy and lumpy 1.5 miles of guide rail lined path down below. Thankfully, the exit is via elevator, so you ascend 75 floors in just a few minutes!

We were prepared with warmer clothes and water. It’s 56 degrees in the cave year round. (Would have been nice to have one of these at Havasu. Maybe they should look around a bit? Maybe they have one. They’re usually buried.)

We were completely surprised by the fully functioning bathroom facilities at the bottom of the cave. Just knowing the option is available greatly relieves the old GI tract. What I can’t get over is who had the insane idea to install plumbed toilets 700+ ft below the surface? Something truly awful and smelly must have happened along the darkened cave trail in order for the National Park Service to spend that kind of money on fully functioning bathrooms. This is our very first visit to this national park, so whatever happened, it can’t be blamed on us.

We took a ton of pictures with the low light capability of the iPhone and we still deleted 95% of them. I mean, its pretty cool to check out all of the stalagmites and the stalactites (its easy to tell the difference if you look at the way that they are), but without seeing them in person, all of the pics just look like weird pictures of shiny rock things in poor light. So, we will spare you those.

We still had fun wandering around down there. As we walked through, it was really hard to imagine the first hand experience of all of the crazy folks that first discovered this place (at least, in the modern era) and the even crazier folks that built the internal infrastructure so it could be navigated by novice spelunkers, like us. They did a great job building a continually sloping floor with almost no steps and all of the steel handrails on both sides that looped and turned and indented and went up and down slopes in one long continuous rail. They also later installed power and elevators and very well-placed lighting to show off neat features.

We kept picturing what it would have been like to walk in the absolute pitch black dark, when they first discovered the caves.

Thankfully, the lights never went out, but it would have been kinda cool.

We took the elevator back up to the top and boogied on out of there.

It was still nearly three hours in total. Time well spent.

We got back to the camper and decided to take care of the little routine housekeeping stuff for the afternoon. Laundry, tidying up, gift shop stuff.

The White’s City Gift Shop and White’s City Laundromat were great! The Laundromat was cheap and effective. Cheapest laundry we have seen in a while. For those curious, it was $1.50 for the wash and $1.00 to dry. Places like Zion are $4 each.

While waiting for the clothes to finish drying, (it’s considered very good social behavior in the camping scene to get your stuff out of the washer or dryer quickly, after it’s finished the cycle), we decided to visit the White’s City Gift Shop and the attached White’s City Old Timey Museum Thing, and the White’s City Grocery Store for a bit.

It was all one building, so the commute between was manageable.

There was nothing in the gift shop that we decided we couldn’t live without, but we did spend some time in the museum place…

We were both successful at finding our long lost relatives.

We went back to the laundry room and collected our bloomers. We can’t remember who owns this particular pair of bloomers…

And finally, before we retire to the library for the evening (i.e. turning slightly sideways in the airstream to assume a more comfortable reading position), we took care of a little grooming that cannot be done solo without the right tools, which we did not have.

Eyebrow scissors come in handy in a pinch to get annoying nose hairs and mustache hairs out of the way.

Time to go wash off the scissors and call it a day!

Headed to visit more long lost relatives in Roswell, NM tomorrow!

Our standard work on travel day involves pulling up the route to make sure we’re headed in the right direction. This morning, as Ben was looking at the route, he exclaimed “Holy macaroni, there’s a whole other National Park I’ve never heard of, right on the way to Carlsbad!”

And that’s how we found ourselves at Guadalupe Mountains National Park!

Which is in Texas.

Prior to checking the route, we didn’t realize we would need to leave New Mexico, hop into Texas so that we could get back into New Mexico to our final destination of Carlsbad, New Mexico. 🤠 Surely you can understand our confusion. That southern border of New Mexico just snuggles right into the armpit of Texas lol

Either way, we left mountain time this morning in Las Cruces, entered central time for a bit, and then crossed back into mountain time when we crossed BACK into New Mexico just west of Carlsbad.

We were very happy to have had the opportunity to visit Guadalupe! Not only does Guadalupe mark the tenth national park we’ve visited on this trip, but it’s beautiful and instantly makes us want to come back!

We were on Highway 62, a two lane highway, for most of our drive to Carlsbad, today. That highway makes a dead straight beeline right for Guadalupe Mountains NP. So, for at least 50 miles, we were able to watch the mountains grow larger and larger! As we finally came around the corner, the highest point in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, standing at 8,751 feet, was standing there looking huge and imposing and raw and stern. As we passed by, it felt like we needed to be on our best behavior.

We spent a half hour or so at the visitor center and we took a short walk to see some historic sights. Of most interest was the fact that there were no roads going into the park.

When the park system first got cranked up back in 1919, they decided that they wanted to make the parks accessible, but only at a bare minimum in terms of roads. We want parks, not parkways.

Then, the 1920’s and 1930’s saw the explosion of both automobiles (estimated 23 million cars on the road by the 30’s) and the highway system thanks to New Deal funding and CCC and WPA after 1933. Not only were the highways built to move Americans around the country, but many massively challenging roads and tunnels and buildings and campgrounds were built in our national parks and we are still using them today!

In the 60’s and 70’s, it started becoming a traffic problem for the parks. So, they decided to stop, for the most part, punching roads through new national parks unless it is very well justified. Which is fantastic from a conservation standpoint. If you want to see Guadalupe, and you should, you can only see it by horseback or by hiking. That’s it.

Had Guadalupe become a national park in the 1920’s or 1930’s, there’s no doubt that there would be a road going right up to Guadalupe Peak constructed by the CCC. And it would be an awesome drive. And it would be crowded. Heck, I would have gone up there in the truck. And that is the problem that the NPS decided to solve back in the 70’s.

We made plans to come back and camp here and try a hike or two on another trip. We were wholly unprepared today to even step foot here. This is a serious hiking place. No water, not many other hikers and the trails aren’t messing around. Even the “moderate” hikes look challenging.

Future return plans made, we got back on the highway and were on our way east again. As we passed by the mountain range, we could see that the weather was moving in. There was an entire waterfall of clouds just pouring over the top of the mountains from the west to the east. Like a slow motion tidal wave swallowing the mountains from the top down in a thick layer of grey and white clouds.

It was very cool looking.  We tried to get some shots while driving by but it just wouldn’t come out. We hope we never forget how cool that looked.

Clouds behind us, we crossed back into New Mexico and were right on top of our destination for today, Carlsbad Caverns! Technically, Whites City.

Apparently, there was a dude named Charlie White, who came to the area in the 1920’s and saw an opportunity. He purchased all of the land adjacent to the Carlsbad National Park entrance and without a whole lot of capital, he built “White’s Cavern Camp” to serve as a rest for travelers visiting the caverns. It did very well and it grew quickly with the park’s popularity.

The closest city to the park entrance is Carlsbad NM itself, about 20 miles away. So old Charlie really had a lock on the local economy.

There are plenty of things to do here now.

You can stay at White’s City Cavern Inn, or the White’s City RV Park (like us), you can go to the White’s City Gift shop or get fuel at White’s City Fuel, or even do your laundry at White’s City Laundromat. Hungry? Have you tried White’s Cactus Cafe? Or a burrito from White’s Gift Shop? No, not that one, the other White’s City Gift Shop in the Bat Cave..

They have built quite an enterprise here. And they are maximizing their space. Our RV spot is delicately perched right next to the main drag going into Carlsbad, so we when leave to go to the park in the morning, all we have to do is turn the wheel to the left and go, we are already right on the road.

Tonight is grilling some steaks and getting ready for an underground exploration in the morning!

White Sands National Park! Another new National Park sticker for our collection.

We learned quite a bit about the area and the park AFTER our visit that would have been good to know up front…

First of all, White Sands National Park, established in 2019 (Its just a baby!) sits within or adjacent to White Sands Missile Range.

The park is 275 square miles.

The missile range is 3,200 square miles.

This area is quite actively used by the military, so we were able to see fighter jets occasionally both here and when we were back in Tucson. It’s pretty neat seeing those scream by far overhead.

It’s about an hour drive from Las Cruces to White Sands National Park, and the whole time we were driving up there, we were thinking, are there going to be missiles shooting by overhead? Do we pull over if that happens? What if one of the tests goes wrong? Should we post a “last known location” photo for the kids?

The most important fact that we learned was that when they ARE doing tests, they shut down the park (obviously, duh), as well as the entire road that goes to the park, through the dunes. Shut downs last about 2-3 hours. They apparently do this 2-3 times per week?

Oh, and if you find any strange looking metal or debris in the park, it is best to just leave it alone and let the rangers know about it. No need to get radioactivated.

Blissfully unaware of the possible missile activity (Ben was always watching, hoping to catch sight of one ripping by overhead), we were in National Park exploration mode!

At White Sands, this starts with the visitor center, where we learned that the area is a huge deposit of gypsum sand, which is very white and it reflects almost all of the heat that is burning down on top of it. SO, while the sun is scorching and there is no shade anywhere, the sand remains relatively cool to the touch. You can even walk your dog without fear of paws being burned.

And, we learned that you can go sledding on the sand!

Sledding is one of those activities that is closely associated with snow, so I figured my sledding days are long behind me as are my days of seeing snow in person.

Incorrect.

Ben shuffled us to the back of the visitor center to the gift shop part, where we proceeded to sign our life away, completed multiple waivers and watched several training videos featuring a slate of gender and culturally diverse actors about how to properly dunesled, and with fancy upgraded sleds in hand, a block of wax tucked in our pockets, we headed out into the hinterlands of the dunes.

Pretty much from one side of the mountain valley to the other, as far as the eye could see, stretched rolling dunes of pure white sand. It was blindingly white and reflective, but as the brochure said, the sand was warm, but certainly far from hot.

With our fancy rented dune boards in hand, we trudged up the steep dunes, feet and sometimes hands scrabbling for purchase in the shifting and sliding sand, and made it all the way to the top with only second degree sunstrokes.

Having pre-waxed the boards at the bottom of the hill, we cautiously got in position, made sure no-one was looking, and we gracelessly slid down the steep face of the dunes!

What a blast!

After about four or five runs, we were breathing pretty hard and we decided we had packed enough sand in our various crevices to last a lifetime, so we retired the sleds to the back of the truck and continued our exploration from the front seats.

We made our way back to the visitor center, returned our sleds and our partially used block of wax, and headed back down the lonely highway towards Las Cruces.

Since this is also an active missile range, the facilities were sparse and spartan on the way back. Thankfully, we were not “in trouble” on this trip.

It would have been interesting scenery for potty-ing in, but we passed.

We were treated to a visit by a local kite fox that stopped to check us out for a disturbingly long time, and then an amazing sunset that was chasing the storm clouds through the area.

Headed off to Carlsbad, NM in the morning for our last National Park visit of the trip, Carlsbad Caverns!

Finally! I can finally tattle on Ben because HE had an “incident.” I’m not too concerned though because the “incident” didn’t last more than an hour. An incident that lasts an hour or less is a very minor, possibly category 2 (at most), incident, in my experience. A category 1-2 incident is mostly an inconvenience and not really worthy of reporting, especially if it had happened to me. But this is Ben, so just a couple of sidebars before we get to the meat of the potato… “the incident.”

First we have to recap the beginning of the day because I don’t want the whole beautiful day together to be JUST be about the incident.

We traveled all the way from Tucson to Las Cruces through the blast furnace of southern Arizona, and southern New Mexico, along good old I-10.

The highway in Arizona absolutely sucked, and we spent the first 200 miles of our journey today either gripping the steering wheel tight, or in my case gripping that “oh sh*t” handle by the passenger door. All while trying to ride the far far far side of the tracked out slow lane, while also contending with potholes, road debris, and cars and trucks broken down on the side of the road, mostly with tire issues. Waze was very helpful today (not sponsored).

We hit the New Mexico state line, and the road was like butter for 20-30 miles before showing a bit more wear after that, but still far better than Arizona.

Ben’s tiny bladder (Hey!) gave us an incredible opportunity to stop for “awesome gifts.” I’m always about awesome gifts and shopping. Ben hates shopping for anything that isn’t on Facebook Marketplace, isn’t in Lowe’s or at an auto parts store, but his bladder was screaming so badly that he was willing to let me look for 45 seconds. Plus we got this epic shot of our rig next to a real, yet fake teepee.

Ugh! Disappointment. The gifts were not awesome, despite the sign’s insistence to the awesomeness.

They had a bunch of “Handwoven in Mexico” signs on stuff that had “Made in Nepal” tags on it. It’s been a while since I took a geography class, but I don’t recall Nepal being anywhere near Mexico. They also had about $100,000 worth of dry, dusty fireworks in the back of the store by the bathroom, which is terrifying. New Mexico is so dry, if my thighs had rubbed together and created a spark in that store, we would have all been dead.

Walking quickly backwards out of there, we hopped back on the road.

Only 172 miles to the big pistachio! And in the WRONG direction from our route, AGAIN. Sigh. I feel like we’ve been circling this huge nut for our entire journey. Such a tease. They sure cast a wide net with their advertising out here. 🙄

And also… the advertising out here couldn’t be more truthful…

Four hours later, we rolled into Las Cruces, which had super cool craggly mountains, which we didn’t expect.

Since we had spent the majority of the day hanging on for dear life, we were both pretty tired and therefore dinner out sounded pretty nice. Apparently, there was a great Mexican place close by and according to the campground brochure they gave us, upon check-in, it was rated Top Ten in the entire USA! Well, it would be criminal to leave town and the Southwest without trying a top 10 Mexican restaurant. What could possibly go wrong as we spend the next few days driving around the remote desert?

We followed the handy GPS to the restaurant. We ended up in a huge parking lot, which was surrounded by all different kinds of buildings that weren’t the restaurant we were trying to find. It took us nearly five minutes to realize that the place we were standing in was a giant parking lot, with every space designated ONLY for the restaurant we were trying to find. The restaurant, itself, was still a block away from the parking lot. Oh dear. Ben hates eating at loud, crowded restaurants, so judging by the size of the parking lot, we may end up at drive through fast food restaurant, instead.

It turned out to be a very popular place and it was HUGE, which made the parking lot make way more sense. Apparently, dinner time is a little later in the Southwest and we had zero issues getting a table for the senior citizen hour of 5 o’clock. Once we got inside and got our food, we realized why it was so popular. First, it had a great setting with a 150 year old building made of adobe and log and lots of red brick. It was very colorful inside and very well decorated.

And the food was excellent! We even took a picture. That kind of good.

Although, as we were finishing, it was quickly getting louder and louder, as the crowds gathered (the only bummer of the place). We enjoyed the meal and we listened intently to the loud conversation of the teenagers at the table behind us. It’s hard to listen to teenagers talk these days. Not all, but many of today’s teenagers sound … not smart, to say it politely. We’re officially “old” and we have the “old people card” to prove it, so we can say this without guilt now.

And then came “the incident.” As we reached the end of the meal, Ben paused. Stopped chewing. Took a drink of tea. Said nothing. I asked if he was ok.

He said, “I think I’m in trouble.” That’s usually MY code for I need to find a bathroom FAST, category 5 type bathroom troubles.

Based on the look Ben was giving me and the sweat on his brow, he seemed convinced that this was a category 5 disaster about to take place. However, he wasn’t moving like I would, if it was a category 5 debacle.

You can’t fool me when it comes to incidents involving the G.I. tract. I’ve dealt with these issues my whole life. It’s zero fun. I don’t wish G.I. issues on anyone, especially my husband. When you have category 5 type issues on a daily basis, you spend your days constantly scanning every new location for a viable potty. I do not recommend. It adds an unwanted degree of spice to life.

But at the moment, it’s Ben’s turn. I have complete empathy for what he’s going through, but I can’t drive this truck and trailer, so he needs to be better and pronto.

We both had scanned for the bathroom on the way in, and we knew it was way back at the entrance to the restaurant.

Ben signaled for the check and we settled up five agonizing minutes later, and beelined for the front of the restaurant. This is also how I knew it was more of a category 1 to 2 incident. A category 4-5 incident would have the waiter thinking Ben skipped out on the bill. The fact that Ben patiently waited for the bill and signed it himself, had me confident in his ability to avoid a total pants disaster.

We won’t get into excruciating detail here, but the crisis was averted.

With a false sense of hope, we decided to stop at Walmart, on the way back to the campground, to grab groceries for a few days. We made it four items into my list when Ben said “Nope. Can’t do it. See you in a bit.” and boogied off toward the front of the store.

This type of incident, especially on the heels of the incident less than 15 minutes ago, gave me flashbacks to a time where I got myself trapped in a Cancun Walmart for almost two hours back in 2009. We had decided to go off campus from our resort and do some shopping when suddenly, I was hit with CATEGORY 99 trouble. By the time I left that Cancun Walmart, I was dripping with sweat, felt like I had run a marathon and was humiliated because they had to send in a full-time floor mopper because the awful plumbing kept overflowing in my stall. It wasn’t like I could get up and move to another stall. Stall 3 was my new home until I could leave. That is my Mercado Walmarto story and we use that experience as the high water mark of horrible things I have endured in the GI department.

So, while concerned and empathetic towards Ben, deep inside, I was so glad that we BOTH now have a Mercado Walmarto story!

We made it back to the camper and all is well and stable, for now.

Barring any changes, we are planning to visit White Sands National Park in the morning, as early as we can get going.

I’ll be sure to bring extra “going in the wild gear” with me now that Ben has joined the club!

The plan today was to suit up after Ben’s board call and head over to Saguaro National Park (which we learned is pronounced SAGUARO in case you were curious), and see what there was to see!

So as we prepared to set off for the day, we planned for direct sun, high altitude, intense heat, and no shade.

We call these our big dumb hats and they are big and dumb, but one of us would burst into flame without it out here.

Although Ben can’t see it, I know he can tell that without his sun hat, those chicken feathers on the top of his head (note that I didn’t say bald spot) don’t do anything to stop the intensity of the sun roasting his scalp. Five minutes and it’s overdone. So the big dumb hat gets deployed frequently.

Off we went!

First stop, visitors center!

Immediately upon entrance, we were face to face with several large displays covering the various flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert (The Sonoran Desert being a US desert which I had never heard of before today. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention that day in science or social studies, I guess. Ben doesn’t remember it either.)

Thanks to the display, we quickly learned that there are lots of snakes in the desert, ok, that’s enough of that display…moving on.

We hit the gift shop, looking for that sticker for the National Park merit badge and for any other cool stuff. Bought some postcards too which are fun to find, write and easy to send!

On the way out, we noticed that there was an informational presentation that lasted 15 minutes and was about to start. Heck yeah, we could use some information!

We quietly entered the surprisingly large theater area, which was arranged like a movie theatre with three rows of semi-comfortable interlocking chairs arranged in front of a heavy set of curtains. There was nobody there, so we picked the best seats, saved them with our gear and then wandered around as we still had a few minutes before the scheduled start time.

We sat back down in our seats and waited for the top of the hour, wondering why no one else was coming in.

We were so excited.

At about one minute after, the back door to the theater room opened briefly and this cute little old park ranger (at least in his early 80’s), poked his head in and looked around the room. He jumped a little when he saw us. He didn’t say a word, just slowly turned around and left. About 15 seconds later, the lights dimmed and the movie started. He sure seemed surprised to see people waiting for the big show! 😅

We learned a lot, but mostly we learned that we had been pronouncing Saguaro wrong our whole lives. Again, it is pronounced “Saguaro” with the emphasis on the cactus.

Now we can say “Saguaro” with no issues. You hear the difference now? Good. 😝

We had been warned via several strategically placed 8.5×11 sheets of paper that the screen was broken and that they would be projecting it onto the curtains. We thought that would be fine. And we were right. It was fine.

We were enthralled.

It honestly was an informative little presentation, primarily about what the area meant to the people who have lived here for generations and generations, which was interesting to learn.

Just when we thought the show was over, BOOM, the projector shut off, the curtains quickly opened wide to reveal a direct view of the desert through huge floor to ceiling windows. It was impressive! Talk about showmanship!

Invigorated to explore this area of beauty, we quickly grabbed our stuff, shot out of our chairs like a rocket, and charged out of the visitor station (pausing to use the restroom, of course), and ran right smack into the heat of the day. Holy moly. Good thing one of us has our big dumb hat! And a truck to cool off in!

Back in the quickly cooling truck, we started out into the park.

This place is stuffed with saguaros and pencil cactus and cholla cactus, and some other stuff that the film mentioned but we had not exactly memorized all the way. But, the point is, there are a lot of prickly, neat plants that apparently love being very dry and hot and sunny most of the time.

Now that we had learned about the park, it was finally time to explore and find some incredible cacti!

Boy, would I love to say it was Ben who was acting dumb today, but it wasn’t, for once. 😂 I was acting like the cactus was hurting me and it actually bit me on the booty, mere seconds after the picture below was taken. Turns out I messed with the wrong cactus! It’s a cholo cactus, or jumping cactus. They don’t actually jump, but it only takes the barest of touches and a piece will detach from the plant and attach to whatever brushed it (judging by Ann’s yelp, they hurt). It didn’t really hurt that badly, but I managed to get Ben to closely inspect my rear end in the middle of the desert, so it was worth it. 😉

Above is the cactus piece Ben quickly pulled out of my right butt cheek with his ever present pocket knife. It’s nice being married to a prepared man! So the lesson here today, kids, is stay away from the cacti. Got it. Message received.

We’ll make sure to add a cactus puncture wound kit to our first aid kit for our future desert adventures and pray we don’t need it.

Another fun fact? These saguaros can live up to almost 200 years old. They are very very slow growing. It takes about ten years for the saguaro to grow its first inch. It does the straight up the middle thing for the first 50 to 75 years, when it finally starts sprouting an arm or two.

We had fun imagining how hard the poor saguaro had to strain for all of those years, pushing and straining and grunting just to grow a tiny bit each year, subsisting on rare rainfall and ample sunshine, year after year after year before finally being able to throw a couple buds out.

In fact, we made a short film about the experience.

You can watch it below. It might play whether you want it to or not, actually.

These saguaros are pretty entertaining!

That is pretty much how the majority of our tour went, and this was shot before we actually left the visitor center. I hope they don’t have cameras out there, because we were laughing hysterically as we wandered around the saguaros surrounding the parking area.

However, we did eventually make it into the park itself.

This was our favorite…

Having seen as many cacti as we could handle, we headed back to the camper to plan the afternoon, hit the grocery store to stock up before our drive tomorrow, and basically take care of little stuff for the afternoon.

Grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, a night spent quietly listening to music outside in the rapidly cooling 97 degree evening, and we were done.

Off to Las Cruces, NM tomorrow and White Sands National Park!

Yes, it’s always a little warmer on the car screen vs reality, but in this case, even Ben’s watch was showing 104 degrees.

The point is, we need to get out of here, and soon. We can take the heat, but we’re used to a Gulf breeze and enough moisture in the air to coat our nasal passages. Seeing a breeze or wind in the SW is scary because it involves dirt and dust flying everywhere. As dry as it’s been, we’ve already spent valuable retirement money on three vats of body lotion and we’re still dry and flaky.

Onward! So today we drove from Sedona down I-17 through Phoenix and onto I-10, which took us to our next destination, Tucson, AZ. Turns out this place isn’t much different from everywhere else in the SW. Everything is toasted like the bread you forget was in the toaster and it was turned all the way up. (What’s that smell? oh shoot!).

We stopped taking pictures of the dirt devils because it became like spotting seagulls in Florida. Little dirt tornadoes were EVERYWHERE.

Additionally, the road bumpies, along our journey, blew one of our kitchen drawers apart and also shook loose the cap to the tube that holds our sewer connection hose.

We’re falling apart over here!

Thankfully, we have an extra stinky slinky and we have the tools to fix the drawer. Tomorrow, we will see if we can find another cap for the slinky tube, or failing that, we will rig something up to keep the tube in place while we are traveling.

Repairs completed (ish) and dinner made (chicken breast, Brussels sprouts and gem potatoes, yum!) we are going to go check out the pool and hot tub before calling it a night.

The best part about our campground in Tucson is that they had a handful of spots that have a huge solar panel canopy overhead, so we will be somewhat protected from cooking in the sun while we’re Saguaro 🌵 hunting tomorrow.

As a bonus, we have our own personal kumquat tree! Wait, google says those are red grapefruit. Gross! Never mind and bluck (Ben forgets that I love grapefruit, so NOT gross or bluck! YUM 😋).

Since we’re only in the Tucson area for one full day, we’re heading over to Saguaro National Park as early as we can in the morning. We know we have to beat the worst of the heat or we’ll die. And every sign in every National Park in the SW has been very explicit about not wanting us to die. ☠️

Our objective is to find as many obscene gesture looking cacti or phallic shaped fellas, or really, just any cool cacti that we can find, learn a few things about them, grab our sticker, and then get reloaded on groceries before we head further east along the US / Mexican border, for the next four or five days.

Seriously, we walk at least 4-5 miles a day back home…oh, that’s with one foot of elevation change, at sea level, with Charlie the labradoodle to pull us along? You’re saying that 6.6 miles with 550 feet of elevation change is tough on middle-aged Florida flatlanders? You’re correct!

So, while we originally had planned to hike the Boynton Canyon hike today, it was shaping up to be another scorcher and frankly, we were pretty beat from the hike the day before and we were still fighting the lingering effects of the masochistic massage a few days prior.

Excuses? Maybe. But pain is pain, so we are making this a lower key day.

We decided to drive back into the Red Rock State Park and visit the hummingbird garden and take a few short hikes.

We hung out in the hummingbird garden for a bit. Those little guys are BUSY!

We decided to try out the trails, so we cinched up our camelback water backpacks, tightened our hiking shoelaces, and pretty much just went back to the truck. It was so dang hot out there, there was zero shade and suddenly we were hiking UP a slippery red dust trail. It was not a long debate when Ann said, my hips can’t do this. Ben had already spun on his heel and was headed back the way we came before Ann even got the sentence out. That’s alignment baby. Marriage goals.

It was really hot out there…

We did see a couple of neat plants on the way back, mostly cacti. Here is one for you…

Anyway, that’s a wrap on Sedona.

We would certainly come back to check out the area a little further and to get in some of the hikes we missed, but next time, we will target slightly cooler weather.

And we will definitely skip the massage.

The morning of the hike is upon us.

We woke up, and gently, with one eye open, tested neck movement and back pain. Still tender, but passable.

Game on. Let’s do this hike!

We grabbed a protein shake for the road (this is absolutely not a Pancake Day type of morning) and headed out toward the trail head, about 22 miles away.

It was a gorgeous drive up 89A to get to the Call of the Canyon Picnic area, which is the site of the trailhead for the West Fork Trail.

We were warned that the trail was very popular and that the trailhead parking area would be quite busy, so we said a little prayer and went in anyway. We were greeted at the ticket booth by a nice lady and her guard chiweenie.

The little ticket lady hurried out of her little booth and moved a cone blocking one of four spots up by her booth and motioned us to tuck our big rig in there (just the truck and not connected to the Airstream because there never would have been room). It worked out perfectly!

We gathered up our gear, hit the bathroom at the trailhead and plunged into the woods!

It ended up being a marvelous hike!

The trail was mostly sandy with a lot of rocks and some roots, but it was clear and easy to follow. There were about a dozen creek crossings, and each had an array of mostly stable stones or logs that enabled a dry crossing.

The canyon walls rose up high on both sides of the narrowing valley, which itself was filled with towering pines, lots of hardwoods, and thick ferns and snake grass covering the valley floor wherever it could grow between the tumbled up boulders and rocks that had fallen at some point in the past. As we made our way further into the canyon, the walls slowly got closer and closer together.

It made for a mostly shady, cool walk through a beautiful natural area. While there were plenty of other hikers that day, it really didn’t feel crowded. Everyone was just enjoying nature at their own pace.

We also passed quite a few people happily hiking with their dogs (which made us really miss our pups 😢). You could tell by the huge wagging tails that they knew they were headed for some water play time. We eventually came across the part of the creek where all the big dogs were having a ton of fun playing in the wider, deeper parts of the creek. The very creek that had cut this canyon between these rock faces over the last millions of years.

We worked our way in to the end of the hike, about 3.3 miles in, and then turned around and began working our way back out. All in, the hike took us about three and a half hours as we were not pushing hard. Rather, we took our time and enjoyed the hike (this is code for Ann’s hips were absolutely SCREAMING by the time we got all the way into the canyon, so the 3.3 miles back out were pretty SLOW 🐢).

With hips creaking, knees popping, water bottles empty, and souls overjoyed with the opportunity to experience this hike with such great weather and with each other, we loaded up the truck, moved out of the way, replaced the cone that had protected the spot, thanked the ticket-taker and her faithful guard dog (who was napping in the sun), and headed back toward the campground!

Annnnnnnnd, no one in our little group had any bathroom emergencies on the trail! Yay us!

I mean, Ben peed four times to my zero, but Ben says pees don’t make it on the official blog trail map. Only forest floor “number two” incidents. That’s not really fair because the map of Ben’s pee breaks would be way more impressive than my little old maps. 🙄

Actually, I’m pretty proud to say that there have been zero national (or state) park trail number twos by anyone in our party on this trip. Lots of close calls, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, so we are calling this a victory!

Ben has just informed me that we have four national parks left to visit on this trip, so I guess there is still time.

Harumph!

We made it back to the camper and had a bit of a surprise.

It had been a bit chilly in the camper that morning. The A/C finally had a chance to keep up after baking in the sun all day. Since it was slightly cool, we had decided to briefly shut the system off while we had our coffee and did our morning prep stuff. Just before we left, Ben turned the AC on again so it could resume its day-long fight to keep the airstream cool.

Or so he thought.

Instead of turning on the AC, he had accidentally turned on the heat. The thermostat just cycles through four settings:

Off

Heat

Cool

Fan

In that order.

Since he had turned it “off” in the morning, the next button push did turn the system back on, but in heat mode. So, instead of the A/C working to cool things down, the airstream instead said, “oh, they want it hot? OK, I’ll just keep the fans blowing and let it get nice and toasty inside their little aluminum tube.”

And it did get nice and toasty.

We expected it to be a little warm when we got back, but it was reading over 103 degrees inside the airstream.

We opened the doors and turned on the roof fans (and also turned the AC on, CORRECTLY this time!) and we were able to get the airstream cooled down before dinner.

Lesson learned, we checked around inside to see if we had any new issues since we left. The only thing that we damaged was the butter, which we had left near a window inside the hot airstream. It had gotten hot enough to melt all of the butter in our little tupperware.

How hard can it be to find a couple of lobsters and a few dozen crab legs in the middle of the desert? I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

After yesterday’s brutal massage experience, we decided a very appropriate level of activity for the day would be to hit the local Farmer’s Markets and drive around a while to see what’s shaking in Sedona.

Mission plan in hand, we set out at the crack of 9:30 to see what we could see.

First stop, the Farmer’s Market in downtown Sedona!

We saw some really neat booths and we bought everything we needed for a great dinner! Locally raised beef for burgers, fresh asparagus, fresh brussel sprouts and a citrusy beeswax candle to cover the smell of brussel sprouts in the Airstream (wait…why is my phone correcting brussel sprouts? Wait, it’s actually Brussels sprouts? Like, formal and capitalized? How did this vegetable get knighted to the point where it is capitalized? Oh, it is named because it is “the sprout from Brussels.” I did not know that! I guess a person can still learn a thing or two after fifty plus years on this planet).

Now, neat etymology facts aside, I know some of our readers are already making the puke emoji face as soon as we said Brussels sprouts. Hear me out. When you cook vegetables in enough olive oil, sea salt, a little pepper and oven roast them to a perfect crispiness, they are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike french fries. But, they are still pretty good!

I mean, look at that beautiful preparation. Ready for the oven!

This, by the way, is a part of how you offset Pancake Day. With Brussels Sprouts Day. It’s like nature’s version of eating a pipe cleaner. Our bowels appreciate Brussels sprouts day, even if we don’t appreciate it much 😉

Hunting and gathering complete, we stored everything away for later, and we set out to explore the area a bit via our truck.

First stop, a random turn off 89A towards the Red Rock State Park.

On the way into the state park area, we found the last rest area available to the public. Porta-potties only, but as they say, any port in a storm.

Inside, there was a note on the wall that Ann couldn’t resist snapping a picture of.

Imagine this poor, unfortunate person’s inbox. We didn’t get a reply, but we can only assume that this person is just inundated with pics. 🙈 Gross. Kids, this is another learning opportunity. Don’t send pics of anything to strangers! 🛑

Gastrointestinal stability issues under control, we drove deeper into the park area.

As we drove around the corner on some really windy and twisty roads through the canyons, we came upon this structure, perched high upon a cliff. Definitely a unique residence, if that’s truly what it is.

A little googling when we got back to the campground, and we found that this is a house built by a dude that decided he wanted a house on top of this cliff and so he just figured out how to build it. There was a whole WSJ article on this house and everything. He can either hike up to the top, or take the 45 degree tramcar up. End of accessibility options. That’s it. He lives here with his wife and toddler son. Pretty cool views from what we could tell. We honked and completely invaded their privacy by taking several dozen pics, but we were not invited in, so this is as close as we got.

Moving on, we meandered around the area and checked out the other sights to see.

Meandering complete, and with our backs and necks still pretty tender from the assault massage the day prior, we headed back to the camper to pop a couple advil and call it a day.

Dinner was fantastic, as usual, and we sat outside in the rapidly cooling, early evening temperatures and watched the sun set to our west.

We are planning to attempt a real hike tomorrow! We are thinking of hitting the 6.6 mile West Fork Trail or the 6 mile Boynton Mountain Trail. Let’s see how we feel in the morning!

After an action packed twelve days with the kids and with family, we decided to take a few more days of downtime to catch up on stuff and ease into our time in Sedona.

We decided to treat ourselves to a massage and even booked it before we arrived! We won’t share the establishment name here, but we think we may have been a touch hasty in our booking. More on that in a moment.

Since we did not have a lot planned for our first day, other than grocery shopping (about 1.5 miles away, extremely convenient!) and checking out the Sedona Uptown area, we decided to have Pancake Day!

Why is Pancake Day capitalized, you ask?

When we are off the road and at home base in Florida, Pancake Day is usually a Sunday thing, once or twice a month (ok fine, every weekend), where we make Ann’s famous pancakes for breakfast, and then we usually skip lunch and have a light dinner.

Pancake Day is typically not a major physical project day for us. It is an ass-ton of carbs hitting us first thing in the morning, and we spend the rest of the day trying to burn it off while feeling pretty sluggish. Mind you, we still get a lot done, we just have to do it with a wad of pancake in our tummies and guilt working their way through our system.

And we regret nothing! We very much look forward to Pancake Day. It’s about the only big carb cheat we do with food anymore, so we are doing it while we can!

Since we are on a road trip, Pancake Day has had to be flexible.

If we are driving that day? Noooooo waaaaaaaay can Pancake Day be on a driving day. It would be a serious drag on our attention and reaction time. When those carbs wear off, there is usually a nap involved. Not ideal while driving.

If we are planning to hike that day? Nope. Not going to burp bacon and pancakes all the way down a trail with bears around. We would be delicious. Plus, it would feel like hiking with lead legs, while we’re processing the carbs.

So, there have not been any Pancake Days on this trip so far!

That changes today, our first full day in Sedona. The first of six days, actually, so we are not feeling pressured at all!

Our plan for the day was simple:

• Sleep In
• Pancake Day
• Walmart
• Check out the Sedona Uptown Area (Kind of the heart of the city)
• Massage (90 minutes baby)
• Low key afternoon

How did we do, you ask?

Sleep In: Yep! As late as we could anyway. Medicine alarms go off at 6:45 so anything after that is considered sleeping in.

Pancake Day: Oh yes. It was a good Pancake Day. They all are.

Walmart: So convenient. Easy in and an out and Dude! They had the cane sugar Coke in the America 250 bottles! Heck yeah, we bought them out (four whole six-packs)

Check out Sedona uptown: We did indeed get a chance to go and check out the Sedona uptown area. It was only about 20 miles from our campground, so we hopped into the F250 and headed up the road. It was pretty crowded and very tourist trap-ish for the most part, so everything was very jammed together, but we were able to find a place to cram that big ass truck into a parking spot, and go check out a couple of neat galleries and art stuff, we found our Sedona swag for the airstream and for friends, so we were all set!

Time to head to the massage!

Massage:

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We did not do great with the massage

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We were very much looking forward to the massages! 90 minutes, couples massage, feet and back.

It started out fine.

It was a dark room. We were led there by two little old ladies that didn’t speak much English. It was very quiet other than the priiiiiiing praaaaaaaang proooooooooonnnnng music that was playing in the background.

Oh, and the commercial restaurant dishwasher running its cycle.

A few minutes earlier, when we had arrived at the massage place address, we quickly saw it, nestled snugly amongst a number of other businesses in a crowded strip mall with limited parking lots of tourists driving about, and a weird McDonalds with the weird blue arches sharing a parking lot. So, out of an act of self-preservation, we made a beeline for the place just to get out of the traffic. We never really paid attention to what was operating on ether side of the massage place’s door.

It turns out that the massage place was pressed tight up against the back of the fairly busy Mexican restaurant, and our little room of peace and solitude and mindfulness was structurally part of the Hobart dishwasher operating at full capacity exactly one 1/2 inch sheet of drywall away from our heads. Since we both worked in a high volume kitchen when we first started dating, way back when we were 17, we knew exactly what a Hobart sounds like, we know how those dish trays are loaded to the brim, and we know what the dish trays sound like when they are being loaded and unloaded. And it is not a particularly delicate task. Nor is it peaceful, solitude-y, or mindful. But, the massage folks must have noticed this neighborly noise nuisance at some point, so they had the priiiinnnnng praaaaaaaannnng prooonnnnnnnng turned up pretty loud, and as a result, we mostly ignored the dishwashing going on.

The massage itself started pretty much as we expected it to. The massage ladies stuck our feet in a footbath to get them dogs soaking, did weird random stuff to the head and scalp and face to burn some time while the stinky feet are soaking. They moved to the shoulders and neck a bit (ok ow, that was a little harder than I expected, but let’s see how it progresses) and then back to the face and then the arms. They did the standard arm stuff and all the one rep stretches to bend the wrist around little and then here comes the individual finger pulling (on no, don’t pull that one too hard! 😉)

Hand gestures are made instructing us to roll over, at least that’s how the gestures were interpreted. We heard the subtle dripping, shuffling, scuffling and crinkling that comes from moving the footbath and setting up the massage table end.

Here is where things got interesting.

Once we were comfortable on our stomachs with our heads nestled into the little face hole lined with a toilet paper seat cover, they started working on us for real. From a position of much higher leverage apparently.

It escalated so quickly, we could barely breath, let alone raise a hand to say, “grrrrppp, a little lighter please?”

These women had incredible hand strength and elbow strength and knee strength and heel strength. They knew exactly where to apply the most pressure to just smash the trapped tension to pieces. In our minds, as we later discussed, we figured we knew we had a lot of stuff built up, so maybe it’s going to hurt a bit more than usual. So, neither of us ever said, “hey, dial it down a little back there, man-hands!”

So it is 100% our fault that we walked out of there, significantly tenderized, feeling like it was pretty good massage, but also mostly pretty bad, and that we might be sore for a few days.

As to the low key afternoon part of our agenda, the decision was made for us by two sadistic, and shockingly strong, little old massage ladies. Low key it was.

Later that evening, as we discussed the plans for the next day, we decided that it would be a drive around day, no hikes. Too sore!

But, it was still a good Pancake Day!

No trip through northern Arizona is complete without a stop in Williams, AZ and specifically, at the world’s foremost museum featuring dinosaur poo, the Poozeum!

Williams is one of the last towns located on historic route 66 to be bypassed by I-40. Much like Radiator Springs from Cars, Williams retains its americana feel and route 66 charm, with lots of neat little gas stations, greasy spoon restaurants (YUM!), cute little “doors on the outside” motels and shops that are all pretty well preserved.

There seemed to be some extra visitors when we hit the downtown area and we started to get nervous that the PooZeum might be at max capacity. As we started seeing all the signs for an upcoming event, we were relieved to see they were preparing for a big classic car show, which was to take place over the next two days. It was a little busier than it was last year and the road sides were blocked off, the parking lots were full of trailers and classic cars, all lined up, getting gussied up and ready for the show.

We found a place to semi-legally park the airstream a little ways down from our favorite museum. Of course we walked about three blocks away from the truck and we hear a faint car alarm in the distance. About that same time, Ben’s phone alerts us that it’s our truck alarm going off. Worried that the senior citizen thugs of Williams were breaking and entering our truck, we strolled back to the truck and trailer. After our share of bumpy roads, our rear camera monitor gave up and jumped from the inside of the windshield onto the console, most likely with all kinds of theatrics that we weren’t there to witness, which the truck mistook for a human moving around in a locked, hot truck. Camera secured, we locked the truck again and headed back up towards Pooville.

The owner and proprietor, George Frandsen, had a few new pieces of poo to show us. Pieces (har) he had picked up (harhar) since the last time we had visited a year prior. I’ll spare you the pictures, but I can assure you, it was pretty neat new antique poop. If you are ever in the area, we highly recommend visiting the Poozeum. Tell George that Ben and Ann said hi, and he will reply, “Who?”

We supported the museum with a few gift purchases, all poop related of course, and we got back on the road to head to new territory for us, Sedona, AZ.

It was only about 90 minutes from Williams to our little campground on the Rio Verde in Cottonwood, AZ, so of course, we picked the best road we could find…

It may have been sticky and tarry, but it was mostly pretty smooth, until it wasn’t. Somewhere between Lake Havasu and Cottonwood, not only did everything get shaken out of our cabinets and off the shelves onto the floor, but our bathroom countertop tried to exit the trailer as well.

Thankfully, we are pretty handy, we have a bunch of tools with us, and there is a home depot about a mile away, so a little glue, a few cabinet screws, and only a few cuss words later, and we had the bathroom back together lickity split.

We had reserved a great little campsite all the way in the back of the little campground, with the river behind us and the hills adjacent.

Really quiet and mostly dark back here in the evening.

We are scheduled to be in Sedona for six nights, so we will end this update for now. More to come as we get out and explore this unique area!

Apparently, there is tree that grows almost exclusively in the Mojave desert. It likes lots of heat, low humidity, and waving its arms in mock alarm.

I introduce you to…

The Joshua Tree!

Welcome to Joshua Tree National Park!

Let’s start with some helpful advice…

Ordinarily, we do not like being told what to do, but in this case, we feel like maybe we should listen.

We explored the area for a bit, being careful not to die.

Then, in a stunningly risky move, we decided to have a picnic lunch right underneath certain death! That rock could have come down any minute, so we ate our lunch, listened for shifting pebbles indicating a mini-landslide, and then headed back out to do some more exploring!

Lots of rocks and Joshua trees up here but absolutely zero shade of any kind!

Ann even did a little climbing to get up on this rock for a pic!

Joshua Tree fully explored and no deaths recorded, we considered the park conquered and we headed back to the campground for another nap and to get ready for a gourmet, camper made dinner! Chicken Tikka Masala and wilted pistachio spinach salad, all expertly prepared by Deb!

There is not a whole lot of room in an airstream, but we made it work for four people to prepare and to have a great meal together!

After an incredible meal, some great fireside conversation, and of course, another late evening soak in the mineral springs, that was a wrap on the Joshua Tree / Palm Springs area!

The next morning, Phil and Deb headed north, back to the bay area, and we were starting the beginning of our long journey back east, having made it as far west as we were going to be on this trip. We’ve made it about 2500 miles west of our little farm in Florida, as the crow flies. (Well, not exactly as the crow flies, more like as the crow takes highway 10 and 75. Crazy to think that we were basically only two highways and one right turn away from Florida).

However, we still have a long way to go and a lot of national and state parks to visit.

Next stop, Lake Havasu!

With the kids sitting in the airport and having an end-of-the-trip, airport cocktail before parting ways and heading back to their homes, we were on the road again.

Leaving sin city behind us was pretty easy. Didn’t even think about going down to the casinos and trying our luck. Ann doesn’t like the new digital, thousand ways to win (lose) crap. She prefers the old school one arm bandit, 3 or 5 line machine, with real coins. You lose either way, but the old clinkclinkclink of quarters hitting the tray has such a deeply satisfying and rewarding sound to it. That sound sure lured in a lot of career gambling addicts as a gateway drug.

Ahem, Getting back on track…

So, our destination today is the Joshua Tree / Palm Springs, CA area.

We are planning to spend a couple days with our cousins who are camping professionals and who happen to live in California! We will be meeting Phil and Deb at our next campground.

We were both pretty quiet as we headed out solo from Las Vegas. It was a sad realization but in our rearview camera, there was no longer a brown and white 26 foot camper following us like a puppy, not far off our bumper at any given time.

We were just about to comment on it, and maybe even one of us got out a word or two, when the road, once again, got our full attention for the duration of the drive.

We have several theories about why they might make these roads intentionally barfy. One… maybe the endgame is to keep people away. Two… maybe the temperature swings are just so extreme, that the road is going to buckle either way, so might as well make it jacked up from day one. Three… there’s not much out here so maybe they’re trying to keep drivers awake. Either way, this was the BEST of the road conditions we were about to face today…

😳 ?!?! Hold on to your bladder, bowels and strap a pillow to your head! 🫣

And we INTENTIONALLY chose this road because I-15 supposedly had an 11 mile stretch of gravel. That is an awful big and busy piece of interstate to have that long of a stretch of gravel, so we figured we were doing ourselves a favor by avoiding I-15.

Heh.

Notsomuch.

The Fausto’s burritos we ate for dinner last night don’t stand a chance against these roads. Eeeeerp!

It wasn’t more than 80 or 100 miles of the burp machine road above before we turned on to our next highway.

Don’t remember which one it was, but this time, it was 43 miles of fresh chip and tar interspersed with very very rough patches and no lines painted in either direction. It was so desolate out there that we weren’t sure if we were even on the right highway.

We even pulled over once to grab something out of the camper and Ben, being a typical guy, just took a wiz right in the middle of the road. I kid you not, it evaporated in 30 seconds! Nobody coming for miles and miles in either direction. Nothing to see for miles and miles anywhere around other than the set of railroad tracks, with an occasional train, next to the road.

Ok, finally, after what seemed like DAYS, we are off the chip and tar road and on to another little two lane highway, this time it is paved! Hooray!

Wait a minute, what is going on up ahead?

What in the blue blazes is going on here? This does not look good at all.

There were an awful lot of signs in a very small space, but the gist of all of the signs was this “Just doing a little bridge work. We’ll just go ahead and take the whole bridge out for a while, y’all just go around, ok?”

Uhhhhh, ok?

I think this happened three or four times on this stretch of highway.

At this point, we just wanted to get to the campground and assess the damage in the airstream.

Our last stretch of road heading into the Palm Springs area was not too shabby, so we were able to finally enjoy the sce…ummm, enjoy the vie…well, enjoy each other’s company and admire the future tumbleweeds and dirt devils of Southern California.

Due to our poor choice of roads (which were NOT listed on the 2026 list of worst roads. Clearly, that list is NOT dependable 😒), we snuck into town through the back door, per se. We passed through well established, rural, desolate communities, just plodding along and doing their thing in the desert. We kept wondering how far some of these residents had to drive to get to their mailboxes, as we didn’t see any houses in sight.

We made it into the KOA at Joshua Tree / Palm Springs and we were delighted with the very midcentury feel of the place and of our campsite!

We also found out pretty darn quickly that this is THE HOT SEASON here and the PARK IS EMPTY and it is VERY EASY TO UNDERSTAND WHY IT IS EMPTY.

It is quite hot here.

The heat is of an intensity that I do not think we have quite experienced before. Florida can get quite warm, typically upper 80’s and lower 90’s in the summer, but it’s a very WET heat compared to here. This place is LITERALLY an open air sauna!

The heat has a way of being intensely direct and unrelenting, with zero cloud cover to interrupt the sunlight scorching every surface and soaking into already heat saturated pavers and asphalt and one particular Airstream.

So, we felt ourselves rushing to get setup and scurrying around to get everything done so we could get inside the heat soaked airstream and keep cooking, but without the direct sunlight. It was wonderful to get out of the direct heat!

Additionally, we now had all the time we needed to work on all of the stuff that had been shaken out of the cupboards, rattled off of the walls, or broken off of its mounts on the long rough bumpy journey down here.

Of most concern was that the main power distribution panel had broken loose of its screws holding it in place. That was a bit alarming, but thankfully, we have the tools and parts we need to fix a lot of stuff, and Ben is pretty handy… plus he has youtube in his pocket, so he can look up anything that looks serious.

This was just a matter of reattaching it to the supports and it did not require too many quick dashes out to the truck to get parts or tools.

Airstream reassembled, air conditioning at full blast, awnings deployed to provide some sun cover, we settled in to the evening.

We were meeting Ben’s cousins in the morning, so we decided to do our laundry (we have to do this usually about once every five days or so) and while we were doing laundry, we were somewhat excited to check out the pool.

Holy guacamole…

The pool area was such a hidden gem!

Mineral springs fed each of the three separate hot tubs, as well as the big swimming pool.

And, did I mention that due to the heat, the camping season is pretty much over here? Yep! There were maybe 15 campers here out of about 250 spots.

So, we had the place almost all to ourselves, and it was such a relaxing setup!

Ann finally got to get some hot tub therapy going again, which really helps her immensely. And Ben got to cool down from the very oven-ish heat.

The next day, we truly enjoyed the opportunity to hang out with Ben’s cousins (Second cousins? Third cousins? Once bitten, twice shy? Twice baked? I can never get this right, so we will just stick with cousins). Deb and Phil drove down from the bay area in their camper and they hosted us for our two days of exploring the area!

It was also Ann’s birthday, so Phil and Deb thoughtfully picked up and gifted her a beautiful, genuine imitation plastic rhinestone tiara, fitting for Ann’s station! So thoughtful and fun!

She is officially a passenger queen now, so we set off.

The tram was a great way to spend some time exploring the area and also getting out of the heat on the desert floor.

This tram takes passengers from the Coachella Valley floor at 2,600 feet of elevation and about 100 degrees F all the way to the top of Mount San Jacinto at 8,516 feet, where the temps were much cooler at about 65 degrees.

Once up top, there were trails to hike and lots of expansive views of the valley below.

We also saw a bunch of dudes and dudettes with MONSTER backpacks and we could not figure out what they were doing. Turns out, these were crashpads and these folks were taking them up to do some safe bouldering, so the pads were there for when things didn’t work out so great with the climbing aspect. Were told that they work extremely well for the falling part, as long as you hit the target. 😳

It was kinda weird sitting up there and looking down at the San Andreas Fault.

On our side of the fault, the Pacific plate is slowly shifting northward at about 2″ per year, which is actually pretty significant if you think about it. That’s also about the same rate that fingernails grow. So, tension continues to build.

Our plan was to avoid an earthquake, so we had a quick picnic lunch and then shimmied back down via tram. We headed back to the camper to escape the afternoon heat with a nap before we joined Phil and Deb for a home (well, camper) cooked meal of burgers in the California desert evening twilight under the stars. Then we all hit the mineral springs tubs for a couple of hours before calling it a night!

Oh, we had a funny reminder from home. Our pool guy, Scott, who incidentally is the fastest pool dude east of the Mississippi, hits our pool in Florida on Monday’s typically. You have to keep an eye on the ring cameras, because he is in and out in about four minutes. Very efficient. No bleeping around.

We have a camera on the pool so we can keep an eye on the water level from afar. We can’t do anything about it, but we can watch it.

Ring apparently added AI to their software, so the camera will interpret what is happening on screen and convey that to whoever is monitoring the cameras.

So, we got an alert that was just a little bit cryptic…

We should really get our own cobweb stick if we want to maintain a cobweb free pool area.

We are off to bed and we are exploring Joshua Tree National Park tomorrow!

Well, the last of the National Park visits is behind us on this trip…

We took only pictures, and left only footprints. We didn’t even leave a trail doodie this time!

We made it to our massive campground in Vegas, where we were absolutely surrounded by RV’s of every make and style, from tiny tin cans holding ten people with enough cooking equipment to feed ten families, to the Ultimate Behemoth mega Class A campers with fifteen slides, a fold down dance floor, and a separate trailer full of ATV’s and bikes.

However, after ten days in the desert and on rocky outcroppings, the kids (and us) were primarily interested in the pool and hot tub at the resort!

And of course…

The long discussed…

Promised land of Mexican food…

Fausto’s!!!

And their world famous salsa bar, with spicy carrots yum!

We dug into the burritos with reckless abandon! Maya was in her element! Those burritos, let me tell you, there was no conversation for a few minutes there. Those were fantastic burritos! Well worth the hype and the wait! (Not sponsored by Fausto’s, but we are open to discussion)

Not that we should quickly transition from burritos to rv sewer connections, but, actually, that’s not a bad way to change the subject!

Chris and Maya also got their turn at doing the hookups, including wrangling the dreaded stinky slinky to and from its den in the bumper, so all three have now earned their RV merit badges!

The Leveling Badge

The Electric Badge

The Water Hook Up Badge

The PoopChute Badge

And, someday, after years of practice, maybe they will get the coveted:

The We Did All Of The Above Without An Argument Badge

That’s a tough one to earn…

We settled in for a quiet of evening of feverish camper cleaning and packing, and in the morning, we returned the camper to its owners, and dropped everyone off at the airport.

Ann and I headed out of town, on to our Palm Springs, CA to meet up with Phil and Deb Webster and to explore the Joshua Tree National Park area as well as Palm Springs!

As we drove away, we both realized that it is going to be a lot quieter around here after such an incredible ten days spent with our adult kids.

We are so very blessed to have a great relationship within our little family.

We are also so very blessed and thankful that we were able to pull together this trip and that the kids were able to make it, that they were able to be mostly fully present in the moment, experiencing time together as a family and time in our beautiful country and in it’s national and state parks.

The weather was fantastic!

The food preparation was delicious, and appreciated, and well-enjoyed.

The rental rv, the airstream, and the truck all performed without issue, other than drinking $2300 worth of fuel over 1331 miles between the two drivers.

The driving was safe, if not harrowing at times anyway (I have never seen so many dust devils in my whole life, we even drove right through a few!)

The campsites were clean and mostly quiet and had nice pools and showers (which came in very handy for Hannah and Chris and Maya, as three people sharing a bathroom in an RV is very very cramped).

Smore’s were very frequently on the menu and they were exquisitely prepared, perfectly toasted, and stickilylyly consumed.

Every meal and every hike and every night around the campfire and every truck or bike ride was peppered with laughter, and conversation, and “us-ies” (and some selfies) and community, and family, and awe for the surroundings and scenery, and reverence for those special areas that just felt bigger, and with just the joy that comes from being able to do something like this with people that you love.

So, yes, it will be a little quieter in the camper at night, but we have a lot to write about now! And so many great pictures!

We left Moab behind and began our drive through the pretty sparsely populated SE corner of Utah. First stop, Monument Valley! You feel sooooo out in the middle of nowhere that you feel like you can get away with doing all kinds of stupid crap in the middle of a highway road. 🤣 There really aren’t too many people around to make fun of us, so why not?

At first, we acted like adults and took a responsible picture in a small portion of the road.

Since there were only about two cars that could be seen 10 miles in either direction, we got a little goofy and Chris had to reenact THE SCENE… “from that day on, if I was going somewhere, I was run-ning.” – Chris Mather (and Forrest Gump). Despite Chris needing a haircut, he wasn’t quite scraggly enough to pull off an exact replica of the scene.

Hannah became the newest, most popular human sundial in remote Utah.

Talk about desolate. Our prayer is always for no mechanical issues in this part of the drive. No cell signal for hours and definitely no AAA help out here.

Check out this weird old elevator!

Ann remembered this from our last time through the area. She couldn’t get a pic fast enough last time but had the camera ready this time and still almost didn’t get it!

Turns out, it is NOT a house with a really deep and spacious, but quite inconveniently arranged basement. It is just a grain elevator with augers and stuff housed up above.

Still kinda neat though. You could make one tower the mega outhouse.🤢 Never mind. Bad idea lol

It was a calm, easy day through the mountains and valleys. It still kinda feels like we are driving around on the surface of Mars out here.

We made it to Page, AZ without issue and with plenty of daylight left to setup camp and check out the little campground!

The kids decided to surprise Ann for her birthday by asking her to make lemon bars and then presenting them back to her while singing Happy Birthday as off key as we possibly could! Mather family tradition. Ann loved it (I DID truly love it! I don’t typically get to celebrate my birthday with the kids anymore, which made it so much more special 😍).

The next morning, it was off to the Upper Antelope Canyon to tour the slot canyons!

Plus, there was a pressed penny machine there as well! Score!

The tour operators have this stuff down to a science. They sequence when tour groups can be lead through the canyons, and they do a fantastic job of stoping very frequently for great photos! Our guide even had a few extra minutes, so he took us through a little slot canyon off to the side while we waited for the groups ahead of us to make their way through.

We start every hike with a “Last Known Location” photo. Probably won’t do anyone any good since I take my phone with me, but it’s a good reason to get everyone to pause for a photo before plunging in.

Brace yourselves, I don’t have a lot of comments for these upcoming photos, and there are quite a few pics. We love going through these canyons!

Hannah, Tomb Raider

Sand was continually and gently cascading down from the top of the canyon 100 feet above us to the floor below. This man in our tour group, who was from Holland, was getting an eye-full of sand, but I bet he got a spectacular photo!

When it rains in the area, it often causes floods to rush through these narrow canyons. Water can quickly reach 30+ feet in depth in these canyons, so whenever it is raining anywhere around here, the canyons need to be kept clear.

When the floods do wash through, the water moves very quickly and very turbulently through these canyons. The water swirls and creates whirlpools in its rush to get downhill, which causes the swirls in the sandstone walls. So, what you are seeing here is the effect of water and wind whipping through these canyons over God knows how long, at least three weeks. 😅 Maybe more.

Below is what the tour guide called the Dragon’s eye.

I call it the $50 tip photo because that’s what it got him.

Our guide, Ricky, showed us a stock photo of a dragon eye on his phone and then asked for my phone, fiddled with my photo settings a little, took this photo, placed my phone next to his of the dragon eye and bam, I was absolutely floored.

We made it through the slot canyons and back to the camper, where it was still pretty hot and windy.

We decided to go check out a few of the local attractions, so off we went to Horseshoe Bend State Park!

This one is a bit of a sad story…the last time we came though Page, in 2023, right after Ben retired from Parker, we brought our mini dachshund, Pepper on our road trip because she would have been lost without Ann.

We took Pepper with us on this short hike down to Horseshoe Bend. She bark bark bark bark barked at every single person all the way down to this very rock, where we lovingly placed her on the rock in a semi time out. We took her photo and then got her back on solid ground so she could keep barking.

Pepper sadly passed away in March of 2025, so we could not bring her with us on this trip, but we said hi to the spot where she observed the rest of the park and where she continued hating everyone in it.

This was another high altitude park, and we were, once again, internally saying “get away from the edge. Get away from the edge. Ugh!”

Our last hiking stop on our whirlwind trip was to a neat little sand cave positioned conveniently behind the shell station, right in Page (not only a gas station but they have fresh jerky too!). A quick “last known location” us-ie, a quick hike up the shifting sands to the cave, and that was the last of the group hikes on this trip!

Back to the campground once again, where Chris and Maya quickly scrambled up the hill behind the campground and then texted the rest of the gang to say, look up! There they were at the top! I still hadn’t taken my boots off!

We are having a wonderful steak dinner for Ann’s birthday tonight, with steaks cooked by none other than the best steak cooker in our family, Ann herself! Back to Vegas in the morning! It’s so hard to believe that our days with Hannah, Chris and Maya are almost done!

We’re staying in Moab, so Arches is practically right next door!

So convenient!

Arches is also a relatively large park, and the main road goes about 21 miles back into the hills. So, to visit specific sites and features within Arches, it is basically a driving tour on the way to little turnouts and shorter hikes to see various… you guessed it, arches.

Woohoo! Time to see some arches, balancing rocks, and some cool rock formations!

No National Park visit is complete without a visit to the visitor center. There are always quality souvenirs to spend our money on at each park.

Arches is particularly interesting, so we spent quite a bit of time learning about how arches are formed and the age of the rock formations in the area. Plus a bunch of other info that we don’t really remember well, but it was interesting, nonetheless.

Maya has successfully trained us to look for pressed penny machines wherever we go. We were sorta successful at the Arches visitor center. While the machine was apparently out of order, they had a few pre-pressed pennies that you could buy. So, we did. But they also had a little hand drawn map for three pressed penny machines in Moab, which turned into a little scavenger hunt for Maya, Chris and Hannah later that afternoon!

Also, no visit to a national park is complete without hitting the potty before a hike! We know the ground by us looks like one of us didn’t make it all the way into the potty, but we promise we actually made it.

Just a few miles from the entrance, we found our way to the appropriately named double arch, a short hike off of the main road, but just an awesome geological feature! We got some great shots and Chris and Maya got in a pretty strenuous little climb where the back of the cave just drops off apparently. That’s what we were told and we saw no need to go see for ourselves!

If you zoom in, Chris and Maya are up there and it gives you a bit of perspective on how large this arch was!

That’s Chris and Maya adventuring in the background. Hannah up front!

Hannah totally outed herself on this visit lol. Never pass up an opportunity to use the potty (we should seriously make some bumper stickers or something).

Hannah, Chris and Maya hiked all the way out to delicate arch, a 3.2 mile hike with about 550 feet of elevation gain. We made it most of the way to almost halfway before somebody’s GI tract said “nope, uh-uh, it’s here or it’s back at the trailhead, no further.” Considering there were so many people on the trail and there was nowhere to hide due to the trail being ALL ROCK, the old people (🙄 us) in our group were forced to turn around.

So, we quickly mosied back to the trailhead and took care of business. Once business was taken care of and the situation was stabilized, we thought as long as we are back here waiting for kids to finish the hike, we can get in some stretching, calisthenics and… ok we took a nap.

The kids had fun up at Delicate though!

Now, for our favorite feature of the park…

If you followed our adventures in 2023, you knew this was coming.

Ben and I couldn’t help ourselves the last time we visited Arches and saw this rock formation.

It had not changed much since we last saw it 3 years ago. Aren’t you supposed to call a doctor if it lasts more than four hours?

I think this particular rock formation speaks for itself, so we shall move on…

Not only did we spend most of the day at Arches hiking and seeing arches (duh), it’s also a great place for star-gazing. After dinner and a swim at the RV park pool, we went back up into Arches around 10 pm (WAY past Ben’s bedtime!) to see what we could see. Our last stargazing visit to Arches was incredible. 🔭 Unfortunately, the moon was pretty bright and about 70% full, so it washed out a lot of the stars on this visit and the pics look more like daylight than nighttime. We still had a peaceful evening under the stars, watching satellites cruise by overhead.

That was it for Arches and Moab! Headed south through Monument Valley tomorrow and on to Page, AZ and the slot canyons! More rock 🪨 stories to come!

This was to be the first long-ish drive of the trip with the kids. The trek from Bryce National Park to Moab took us through very rugged and beautiful terrain, with lots of wind and dust devils to contend with along the way. It’s a good thing we were pulling a bathroom behind us because civilization was sparse on the drive!

It ended up being a very pretty drive through southeast Utah, with lots of narrow, quiet roads that meandered and snaked and climbed and descended through the hills and valleys on the way to our destination.

We attempted to stop and do a hike at Capitol Reef National Park, but there was unfortunately nowhere for us to park either RV other than on the side of the road where there were lots of “No Parking” signs. So we parked long enough for everyone to go potty and then took the scenic drive through the park instead and counted it as at least touched for now. Perhaps on the next journey through the area, we will drop the trailer somewhere else so we can park and explore this unique place.

The over-population of the USA can certainly be felt here lol

On the advice of our cousins John and Nancy Webster, we stopped in to visit the Goblin Valley State Park!

There are so many cool state parks that most folks just drive right by…

To be fair, we mostly drove by as well, BUT we did drive ALL the way in to the visitor center to use their bathrooms and buy some memorabilia, including a Maya favorite, a pressed penny!

Hannah and Maya rate the stop with a thumbs up.

With all the stops and the sights to see, we made it to Moab just in time for a pretty sunset and a clear night of star gazing from the campground. Hannah also snuck in some yoga in the starlight too.

We woke up at the crack of 9 and after a morning coffee, we set off to explore Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park. Admittedly, we only explored one small section of Canyonlands as it is a pretty darn big national park.

We mostly did the driving tour of Canyonlands, stopping at pullouts and scenic viewpoints for mini-hikes to check out the amazing views and vistas.

The heights, alone, make Ann’s bowels squinchy! (That’s no lie! Not only do my bowels turn squinchy, but my legs instantly turn to rubber the second I get within 3 ft from the edge of a cliff. It’s not a pretty look with shaky legs and both hands covering my bottom). 😩

I can fake looking relaxed with Hannah. Just don’t tell me how far I could fall. 🙈

Luckily, Ben was taking the pics and I was oblivious to what was going on above me with Chris and Maya. They had a MUCH greater fall to the canyon below.

Chris and Maya were the only two of our little troupe that had the guts to get close to the edge of anything that was up high.

The rest of us hung back and whispered, getbackgetbackgetbackgetback under our breaths because we knew telling Chris NOT to do something was the exact same as telling him to do that very thing. Granted, he has mellowed significantly since his more difficult years, but we finally have our youngest paid in full and off the payroll, so we were taking no chances!

Guess who found the bathrooms! It was Hannah who really had to number two this time. I was trying to make her feel better about it. 😉

We were able to get to Mesa Arch before the sun was too high overhead and before dehydration kicked in.

Our fearless couple!

Ugh! Again, Chris is fearless.

🫣

Round 2… yeah. This time it was me.

We got about halfway into a hike up to the observation point and someone’s tummy felt a little grumbly. The path looked like it went on forever and also went up forever, so we left the kids to finish the hike and we turned around to the trailhead to take care of business. Then we set up temporary camp and waited for the kids. We had our picnic lunch in our little impromptu campground and we played the alphabet game with the license plates of circling cars looking for parking spots. Just so everyone knows, Ben was a big cheater when Kansas and Kentucky license plates didn’t come magically rolling by in the next few seconds. Therefore, he decided North Dakota could count for a “k,” but wherever. 🙄 I explained the rules again to him and he decided my rules were way too strict, so he is no longer playing. But a great time was had by all!

Hannah was the first back from the hike and she joined us! I’ll just comment that SHE was willing to wait for a Kentucky or Kansas license plate. A true rule follower, like me. Ben had already moved through the alphabet five times by now, using any and all visible letters to complete the alphabet.

No fear at all. Barf. My feet hurt looking at this photo!

A quick side quest to Dead Horse Point State Park. According to legend, this area was used as a natural corral in the 1800’s for ranchers rounding up wild mustangs. Apparently, one time, the unselected horses were “accidentally” left to die of thirst, trapped in their corral with the Colorado River visible but unaccessible far below. So, not a good story, but the state park name sort of alludes to a terrible ending, which it was.

The great news is that the visitor center had a real deal pressed penny machine! Maya was happy!

That’s a wrap on Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park, off to Arches tomorrow!

After conquering the infamous Angels Landing (we of course did it in spirit only), it is only fitting that we tackle The Narrows!

We decided to rent the water socks / water boots / walking sticks for this journey. Although we looked like dorks and our shoes squelched and squished incessantly and loudly after the first time we stepped into the cool Virgin River water, it was absolutely worth it to rent the gear. Way better traction, the walking stick prevented at least four or five full faceplants into the river, and at the end of the long hike (and bike ride back down the valley to the campground) we could take off the wet gear and slip right into our own dry shoes and socks.

We set off up the canyon on the bikes again, wearing our dorky river socks and shoes, with five river sticks all strapped to Ben’s back. Worked pretty well as long as he remembered to get off the bike carefully, otherwise he got all tangled up.
For once, Mama wasn’t the pack mule!

Last known location pic and last dry pic before we all set off into the water!

Holy moly, the water seemed pretty nice, right up to the point when your lady bits first touch the water, or in the case of the guys, your giblets! Thankfully, there were only a few places where the water was this deep! Poor Chris!

It was really neat to hike between the tall, narrow canyon walls!

Honestly, it was a bit of a challenge, hiking directly in the river, watching exactly where you placed your feet, as each of the rocks were pretty slippery and in some places, the current was moving pretty quickly. The water was clear, and you could usually see roughly where you were putting your feet, but the rounded slippery rocks were really unstable, so it was slow work picking through the stronger parts of the river. For some of the older crowd, it was a rough day on the old hips. A lot of ups and downs with a lot of foot instability.

Since we were so focused on our footwork, it was important to make sure we looked up every few feet to just take in the awesome canyon walls, and the waterfalls streaming down the rock faces to the river, and even the dudes repelling from what looked like hundreds of feet above us down to the valley. Incredible place to hike!

But, if you are asking for suggestions for improvement, there were no places to go to the bathroom at all, unless you wanted to take a chance of floating something downstream into the crowd of fellow tourists.

Thankfully, we knew there was a restroom at the base of the hike, so I guess its a hold it as long as possible type of day!

After about a six mile hike roundtrip, we made it back to the bikes, with a quick stop at the potties.

With shoes squelching and spraying water, we hopped back on our bikes and rode down the canyon back to the campsite, wrapping up an awesome hike and an incredible visit to Zion!

Off to Bryce Canyon National Park in the morning!

Zion is an incredible National Park and one that we’ve now gone back to three times, because we love it so much. Zion is definitely one we wanted to share with our kids for their first big National Park/camping experience.

Due to cars not being allowed into the park, it makes for a serene, breathtaking bike path that leads to every single trailhead. You just have to watch for the occasional shuttle bus and make sure you pull over to let them pass. As we found out on our first visit to the park, the shuttle system is nice, but overcrowded and loaded with stinky people who’ve been out exploring all day, which is why we prefer the bike riding method.

Zion is well known for a couple of intense hikes and they’re both pretty popular. Angels Landing and the Narrows.

Angels Landing is a legendary 5.4 mile round trip hike which climbs 1,488 feet in elevation, up the grueling “Walter’s Wiggles” switchbacks to Scout Lookout. From there, it follows a dizzying, razor-thin sandstone ridge with sheer drop-offs of over 1,000 feet, utilizing bolted chains for support.

It has never even crossed our minds to climb this one. The switchbacks, sure, maybe, but the 1,000 foot drops on a narrow ledge? Nope. Pass. NFW. Not gonna happen. We are OUT. Some of us are specifically OUT because there’s no restroom anywhere around where you have to hang on to chains for dear life. Some of us don’t want our last picture on this earth to be one with poopy pants.

The Narrows is a, you guessed it, very narrow hike in the Virgin River in a slot canyon, with towering sandstone, 1,000 ft walls on both sides. This is more our speed, but we’re still praying we can keep up with the kids without wheezing too much. We’re truly Florida flat-landers now and not conditioned for elevations above five feet.

More on that hike later.

Both signature hikes are very popular and very busy, but Angels Landing requires a special permit to limit the number of people that attempt to climb each day.

We thankfully secured a permit for the first full day that the kids were here, so first order on the agenda for the first full day in Zion is hiking Angels Landing!

Them, not us.

Chris was hopeful that mom and dad would join them on the hike, so he requested a permit for five people, but when we politely declined, he told the checker of permits stationed at Scout Lookout that we pussed out. We’re completely okay with that reputation when it concerns Angels Landing.

We also had rented bikes for the kids for the two full days we were going to be in Zion. As we have said before, E-bikes are the only way to go! In fact, that was the main reason we bought some after last year’s trip. And we brought them with us, strapped to the back of the airstream. In fact, that may well be a big part of the weight problem. Hmmmm…

After a leisurely and wonderful breakfast, we all set off on our bikes, headed for the base camp for the kids’ hike. We had an absolutely beautiful ride into the canyon, and we wished the kids luck for their big hike! Nope, we are still not going along.

We took that very important “last known location” pic with the kids, pointed the way to the death path (we mean Angels Landing path) and then we cruised back down the valley and back to the camper so we could chill out and catch up on some blogging!

Along the way, we goofed off quite a bit and we even stopped and spent some time looking for gold nuggets in the Virgin River. There must be some here right? Need to find at least an ounce or two to pay for the fuel on this trip…

Six hours later(!!!) the kids came cruising back into camp and they had had a blast! Extremely strenuous hike and very scary heights traversing up the chains section. They got some great pics up at the top!

While they were gone, we made dinner which they wolfed down as soon as they arrived back.

We only had a little bit of downtime that day, before we hopped in the truck and drove back to Hurricane UT for our night time ATV tour. It was advertised as a dark sky starlight tour, and we did see some stars come out before we had to head back in, but the sunset is just too late this time of year for it to be fully dark, so we didn’t get to see a milky way night kind of starry night.

But…

It was still an absolute blast! We had two super duper side by side Polaris RZR’s with the full helmet and four point harnesses and we all got a chance to follow an experienced guide through the sand dunes close to Zion.

We spent about two hours ripping through the desert, watching out for cows that did not seem bewildered by these machines AT ALL. Just a normal day to them.

And we soon found out why.

After dark kicked in at around 9:30 pm, we started hearing the real machines coming out to play.

High revving engines echoed through the dunes. Flashes of blindingly bright lights splashed off the rock formations and dunes as powerful machines could be heard growling and careening through the high desert terrain everywhere around us.

Suddenly, four fast moving machines crested the horizon.

They came careening over the top of the closest dune with sand spinning off in circular plumes and spraying in all directions from furiously spinning wheels. The headlights, or rather, all of the lights, blazing against the darkening sky, threatening to set the whole valley alight with their brilliance. Each of the machines was blaring ground shaking music that could barely compete with the screaming engines as the massive suspensions kept all four wheels firmly planted on top of the shifting sand as they slid around the top of the dune

At the back of each machine were proudly mounted two incredibly long and lit up tail whips and an array of American or Military flags.

The first one came to a sliding stop at a 40 degree angle not too far from our little group of what I now knew were basically children’s toys. The music cut out for a moment, and a man’s voice shouted “You guys good?”

We said “yep!”

The dude shouted “Right on!” and the music fired back up, the accelerator hit the floor, and the ATV shot off like a rocket with his buddies not far behind.

It was pretty cool.

We headed back to Zion after an extremely long and exciting day, where we called it a night and hit the sack!

Tomorrow is the Narrows!

Oh my goodness, our tails are wagging!

We have been planning this trip for so long, it’s hard to believe that the kids show up today! They are flying to Vegas from Tulsa (Hannah) and from Tampa (Chris and Maya) and picking up a 26 foot RV rented from Outdoorsy. Totally sight unseen and we will not be there to help.

Can they successfully adult??? Of course they can! But that doesn’t stop Mom and Dad from being nervous about stuff going wrong. Thankfully, years of moving them around the country and throwing new situations at them constantly has made them pretty adaptable and resourceful, so we waited for their evening arrival and tracked their location.

The RV passed the initial driving test and the kids are all pretty comfy in it, so far.

We had an awesome dinner that Ann had prepared in advance of these weary travelers’ arrival. Chicken cobbler! Imagine a pan size chicken pot pie, YUUUUUUUUUUM!!! Oh and don’t forget the homemade brownies! Mama needs to make sure the kids are well fed for their adventures tomorrow.

After dinner, we were all still pretty excited about everyone being here, so we set out for a quick sunset hike at the Canyon Overlook Trail.

And, since the Hannah apple did not fall very far from the Mama tree, we did not pass up an opportunity to use the provided bathroom just before the trail head.

Mischief managed, we headed up the trail!

This is not an overly strenuous hike, but there are definitely a lot of steps. There is some strain and heavy breathing in this picture, mostly coming from Mama. Thankfully, it’s not a video or everyone would hear Mama braying like a mad donkey, but trying to act cool for the camera. Act COOL!

We made it up to the top of the trail and we were treated to an unbelievable view of the valley below. Just an amazing creation and we were delighted to be able to share the view with the kids last night.

Chris and Maya were entirely too comfortable being so close to the edge, so the rest of the canyon photo shoot was spent with Ann and Hannah and I as far away as we could be from the edge while still technically being at the overlook. We were happy with the gray area there. Not big heights people.

Maya laughs with her entire body and she happened to look over as Ann was taking a picture of me taking a picture of Hannah taking a picture of Chris taking a selfie of he and Maya. Her laugh echoed throughout the canyon and everyone present got a chuckle out of it.

Mission successful, we headed back down the trail, racing the fading daylight a bit. We had just enough light to hit the el bano one more time before driving back to the campground.

We had just enough time for campfire stories and more laughs, and of course, s’mores!

Tomorrow is Angels’ Landing and a nighttime ATV dark sky tour! Time to hit the sack and rest up for a challenging tomorrow (for the kids, at least).

We have arrived!

We planned to get to Zion one day before the kids land so we can get ready, and WE ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO NOT MOVING THE CAMPER FOR A FEW DAYS!

Look at that rig-a-saurus.

Golly, this area really is beautiful.

Got the camper and camp site all set up!

And that was about it! We called it an early night in anticipation of the kids arriving tomorrow!

At around 4 am, Ben, being an official old guy at 51, had to take a wiz. After taking care of business, he popped outside to grab some dark sky shots. Not disappointed.

This morning, we had most of the day to ourselves ahead of the kids evening arrival, and so we planned two exciting events.

The bike ride up the Canyon! The whole reason we bought e-bikes and strapped them to the back of the tube and carried them all the way out here. Totally worth it.

Riding the bikes up the Canyon is just a phenomenal experience! The only way to go!

And laundry. No pictures for that event. But it was almost as exciting.

The kids get here in about five minutes so I am wrapping this up for now!

Holy guacamole.

Okay, we are at the point in our lives where we need to face the hard truth…

500 miles in one day, especially on consistently bumpy roads with absolutely nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, exciting to look at is just too far to drive in a day for a pair of 50+ year old unconditioned butts (that’s 500 miles of hard roads for the one that has an “irritable” bowel. And we all know that my bowel isn’t just irritable, it’s down right cranky).

Thankfully, we were both able to stay awake and we kept our bowels tamed long enough to make it to Flagstaff, Arizona, with a brief stop at Petrified Forest National Park. We’re not breathing a sigh of relief yet though because we know we have to unhook and still do a grocery store run that will feed five people for four days in Zion .

We expected, because of the name of the park, to see petrified trees, specifically in a petrified forest arrangement (this is not what we saw within the first 10 miles of the park so I felt the ADHD reaction building inside of Ben). There was barely a tree to be seen, petrified or not. I guess we can count the specimens in the visitor center, but they were more “logs” than “trees.”

Perhaps we didn’t go far enough into the park. That’s on us (notice how Ben says “we” and “us” like it was my choice not to go further into the park? I will admit that this particular park has similar qualities to other parks we’ve done the ADHD tour on, so I could see this tour going that way without asking. I just go with the flow these days lol).

Honestly, the stop was planned with a pretty brief “ADHD” agenda: Pee break, get the National Parker sticker, and take off. We like to call that…

Sticker and Split

Collectible and Cruise

Momento and Move On

Collectible and Kick on out of there

Chotchky and Charge

Knicknack and Not Going Back.

You get the point.

But it is not every day you get to see a petrified forest, nor do you get to see a national park! So we were optimistic.

But here is what we did see…

It was a bit like a smaller Grand Canyon that was filled with the stuff that you might find inside a water heater.

I’m not pooping on the National Park, I’m just saying we did not give it the time it probably deserves.

But the bathroom? It was wonderful.

See how happy Ann is?

Plus, it was nice to stretch our legs for a little while after three long days on I-40 and Ann enjoyed talking to an elder, Hopi Native woman, who was making jewelry in the lobby of the Painted Desert Inn, which is on the grounds of the visitor center. It’s a good thing I’m a fast-ish reader because Ben, after 30 seconds, had picked out and was paying for our sticker and a few postcards, while I was still frantically reading so I could soak in the history.

After Petrified Forest NP, we hammered out the last 115 miles to Flagstaff where we quickly realized that very low humidity (6%), very low temps at 33 degrees overnight, and very high elevation (7,000 feet) combined to make for very very very dry skin and dehydration headaches. A couple of liquid IV’s and liberal application of chapstick to all exposed surfaces and we were good to go!

Not only did we survive the Walmart run to probably the most bizarrely arranged Walmart I’ve ever been to, but we stuffed our fridge and freezer so very full that we PRAY the kids all make their flights in a couple of days. If they don’t make it, Ben and I will have food for a month.

We also survived the chilly night and headed on out of there the next morning, bound for Zion National Park, where we’ll finally meet up with the kids to start our adventures.

See you tomorrow in Zion!

After an active few days in Hot Springs Village, it was time to begin our push toward Zion National Park, where we would be meeting the kids in a few days. But first, we had to get there!

There are approximately 1,400 miles of America between Arkansas and Utah.

Almost all of that is on one highway, good old I-40.

However, before we could reach I-40, we enjoyed one of our favorite twisty little roads that runs mostly north-south through Arkansas, highway 7. This road has long been one of our favorite roads while we are staying in HSV. It is a windy, twisty, well-paved road that leads us north from the village all the way up to I-40 (and beyond).

As an old, Arkansas biker once quipped, while we were chatting at a gas station probably 15 years ago, Arkansas can afford to make the roads smooth, they just can’t afford to make them straight. And we love the twisty roads.

Once we hit I-40, that was it for turns for the next three days, so we were going to soak ’em up!

Here is an artist’s rendering of I-40, which will be our home for the majority of the push west:

_______________________________________________________________________________

LOL! Not many turns.

In fact, here was our view for a good chunk of the day after we crossed into Oklahoma:

There were, however, plenty of tooth busting, cabinet jarring, butt-flattening bumps along the road (Please do better, Oklahoma!). We’ve submitted a good stretch of Oklahoma I-40 to the 2026 Worst Roads list, accompanied with a picture of all of our bathroom vanity items strewn on the floor of the bathroom. I did accidentally forget to tell Ben that his hairbrush and the base of the Airstream toilet have officially met now. The brush and the toilet seemed to be fast friends by the time I noticed the brush had escaped the cabinet. At least his toothbrush, the bag of flossers and his deodorant flew in the sink and they didn’t follow their friend, the brush.Nothing to be done about it but to plow ahead and possibly stop at a Walgreens or CVS and pickup a few spare toothbrushes and hair brushes, just in case .

On the positive side, we celebrated our 28th anniversary in beautiful Yukon, OK, just a few quiet steps off of I-40. We had a wonderful taco dinner and had the best company we could ask for, each other!

We are also enjoying the new(er) airstream.

Good layout, great bathroom, fantastic shower that we can actually stand all the way up in. What more could you ask for? It’s comfortable and most stuff works! We just don’t talk about all the stuff that doesn’t work or all the things we have no clue how to work. The newer Airstreams are nice, but if you get easily overwhelmed by electronics, good luck!

RV’s all are pretty much all made with the lightest, cheapest stuff you can buy and they get the absolute snot beat out of them on the road, so you need to be prepared to do some maintenance on long trips. So far, so good!

We stopped in Tucumcari, NM on the next night, which had a great roadside attraction advertisement right by our campground!

I mean, world’s largest pistachio?!?!?!? Holy Pistachio! YUM! Sign us up! This is EXACTLY the type of stuff we’ll go at least an extra 20 miles out of our way to see. We’re almost giddy!

We hurry on down the frontage road, excited to get checked into the KOA, get set up and go find this awesome attraction. As we check into this particular KOA, we happen to notice that there isn’t anything exciting to do at this campground, so “Plan Pistachio” is ON for this evening.

We get down to business and get all checked in at the desk and then we excitedly inquire about the world’s largest pistachio and in which direction we need to go.

It’s at this moment that we realize, due to the clerk’s lip twitch and eye spasm, that we aren’t going to like what she’s about to tell us. We’re completely deflated to learn that our giant nut is a FOUR HOUR drive to the south.

Who actually puts a full size billboard on a middle of nowhere frontage road for an attraction that’s like 250 miles away? UUUGGGHHHHH! That’s way more than 20 miles out of our way. Sigh. Do not sign us up!

We’ll have to find something else to entertain us in Tucumcari, for sure. Maybe we’ll see if there’s a world’s largest salt and pepper shaker collection or a world’s smallest parking spot or something nearby.

We already drove past Cadillac Ranch (Worlds dumbest bunch of Cadillacs parked on end) back in Amarillo, TX. We’ve already seen this attraction, so we left a rather large parking spot open for someone else who really wanted to see it.

Now we’re really on the hunt for the next largest, or smallest, or anything “est” attraction that’s actually along the route.

Our next stop, Flagstaff, AZ. It is a long, 500 mile haul from Tucumcari, but it’s worth it to get us one stop closer to Zion. Tomorrow, we hop back on I-40 for another 500 miles and hope to get to Flagstaff by dinnertime!

Today is the day.

I am finally going to get the extra weight off.

And this time, I’ll keep it off!

We spent a bit of time downsizing stuff from the airstream today.

Extra clothes (NOT extra at all, in my opinion. When we all freeze to death because we don’t have enough layers, Ben will FINALLY understand), doubled up cleaning supplies (he means enough cleaning supples for 60 days so I don’t have to buy Clorox wipes at Mom & Pop’s Grocery for $20 a container), extra books (8 books for a 2 month trip? Plus most are romances and fast reads. And if I might add, well worth Ben letting me read those romances. Ugh! Come on!), anything we could find that would shave a few pounds off (I won’t mention all the extra junk Ben brought. Spare tires, jacks, all these toolboxes, Yeti coolers, leveling blocks for the trailer, hoses, electrical cords, blah, blah, blah. All that heavy dirty stuff and Ben is complaining about the very useful things that I packed?). Between the pile, pictured below, plus all the items that Noni and Pop-Pop weren’t able to fit in their van when they left Florida in March, we shaved maybe 200 lbs. That should make a difference. I hope (Luckily, Ben doesn’t realize that a few things came back onboard).

We also shimmed up a few loose shelves, tightened down a few hatches, and even buttoned up a few other things. We should be road ready for the any surprise rough Oklahoma highways and whatever else comes at us as we head west.

While in HSV, we had a great time helping Noni and Poppop with getting their garden setup for the season. We will see how their tomatoes progress over the 4 weeks we are on the road before we get back ahead of the 4th of July.

Since we were so close to where our favorite daughter lives (she lives and works up in Fayetteville, AR), she decided to come down for a night to visit! She is joining us in Utah via Las Vegas and a rental camper in a few days.

Did you know you can send secret messages with a banana? Maybe it’s just our family that sends banana messages.

Well, now you know!

Fixed it…

We are off tomorrow for our big push to meet the kids in Zion National Park! We will be on I-40 for about 1,200 miles over the next few days. It will be a steady climb from about 1,100 feet above sea level in Hot Springs Village to about 7,000 feet in Flagstaff, where we will turn north for SW Utah.

Hope we have enough warm clothes!

Man, the good old U.S.A. is a HUGE freaking place. Unless someone has made the big “buns of steel,” cross country drive, it’s hard to truly understand how much open land we have in this big ole country and how brilliant and efficient our highway and interstate systems really are. There isn’t someplace we’ve wanted to go and haven’t been able to due to lack of roads. We’re definitely not saying that all our U.S.A. roads are good. We’ve absolutely found some truly rotten roads. So rotten, we think that maybe someone laid the road and then just forgot it was there after that. There’s no need to remind our friends about the couple of times we ended up on roads so crappy we thought we might die. If you’d like a list of those particular death roads, we haven’t exactly created the list yet, but you can read about those experiences in prior blogs. A few examples can be found by searching the old blogs for “ghost town” and “Shipwreck Rock.”

So, here’s what we have to look forward to over the next two days. Easy Peasy!

Despite knowing that we’ll just be staring out the windshield at boring interstate roads for the next two days, we’re still so excited to keep this roadtrip going. Time to hop in the truck and leave Madison, FL, head to Hattiesburg, MS and eventually on to Hot Springs Village, AR. On paper, (ok, that sounds old fashioned. On google maps) it looks like an easy cruise. Plus we’ve made this drive several times to see Ben’s folks, aka Noni and Pop-Pop. Just under 800 miles. One right turn. As long as traffic behaves and the weather holds, this should be a straightforward drive.

We always have to keep in mind that we’re driving a decent size truck and more importantly, we are pulling a 33 foot long, eight foot wide, pleasantly rotund, silver tube weighing in at 13,000+ lbs, with a tendency towards being pushed around a little when big trucks pass (LOL Ben is “weight” shaming the Airstream again. Ugh! He just can’t let these few extra pounds GO).

There is a lot to pay attention to, as it takes a lot longer to react to fast changing conditions or to traffic patterns or poorly marked exits. So, we’ve learned to work well together in the front seat of truck. Ben focuses, no blinking, white knuckled on the steering wheel, while Ann carefully watches the routes on both Waze and Google to make sure we don’t end up in a situation that includes sitting at a complete stop on the interstate for hours. That is zero fun and we’ll avoid that situation if it means taking the backroads for a bit to avoid whatever tragedy has occurred on our regularly scheduled route. Ann also has a very important role as “drive attendant,” delivering waters and adult style lunchables, one cracker at a time. That’s right! I’m no passenger princess and no naps for me, unless I’m truck-sick, which does happen on the really bad roads.

Since we have a 60 gallon fuel tank on our truck, it is never low fuel that causes us to stop at a gas station. (Yeah, that’s Ben referring to me having to stop about every hour because I have nervous tummy when we travel. Very nervous! I’m much happier, now that we carry a bathroom behind us!).

The point is that these days are looooong days. You can hammer along at 70 mph for hours non stop (GI tract willing, of course) and barely feel like you are getting there. Our little spot on the map doesn’t seem to move very quickly, and the little WAZE app countdown moves very slowly.

Ben’s grandfather always used to say “Don’t wish your life away”, and he was right.

So, rather than wishing we were “there” already, we instead focused on the neat little towns we blew through or by, enjoyed seeing primarily rural America life, southern crop progress, slowly growing junk collections in familiar small town yards (oh, that dude with nineteen rotted out school busses and six old station wagons got a new junk truck! Good for him! I bet his wife was pissed!), and we also enjoyed the green early summer scenery.

All while quietly side-eyeing the waze countdown and calling out milestones indicating that we were getting closer to the end of the daily drive.

We slowly drove out of the rain in the panhandle and made our main turn for the trip, headed N/NW up into MS. The dogs were thrilled to be out of the rain. Bailey doesn’t have very good hair days in the rain. YIKES! She’s our 14 year old, hot mess!

We (finally) arrived at Hattiesburg, MS, for our second night on the road and our last stop before reaching Hot Springs Village, AR and home turf.

Fun fact: Hattiesburg / Okatoma KOA is very first KOA at which we stayed back in 2023 when Ben retired and we took our first big trip. We just keep coming back.

Apparently, about 7-8 years ago, the current owner and operator bought what was generally considered a bit of a dumpy campground, and they turned it into a quiet, clean, well organized, well-maintained, and reasonably priced campground.

We really enjoy staying there when we pass through, and we recommend it to anyone!

Our larger dog, Charlie, hates it.

Apparently, Charlie is convinced that the tame and mostly docile local geese and ducks, are, in fact, attack geese and ducks. We have stayed at this campground probably close to a dozen times, and every time, the geese and ducks have been quite tame and harmless, but try explaining that to a dog with birding representing maybe 1% in his genetics. Thankfully, the balance of his genetic makeup is 99% wuss, so Charlie is mostly interested in staying the heck away from anything deemed scary. Or unknown. Or loud. Like, for instance, attack geese and ducks.

So, our evening and morning walks around the lake are usually at near record speed.

Uneventful evening and night spent recovering from a long day of not blinking, we broke camp in the morning and headed off toward Hot Springs Village to visit Noni and Pop-Pop for a few days and to fix anything that needed fixing either at their place or in the airstream.

Not only do we have Airstream Fat Camp coming up, we also traversed some of the nastiest roads around Jackson, MS. Potholes GALORE and wildly undulating road surfaces that really play havoc on a truck and trailer combo. While the truck is dropping down the swale in the concrete, the rear of the trailer rapidly is going up. And vice versa on the next swale. We watched the poor rear end of the trailer bobbing and dipping nearly two feet at times over the wild and poorly maintained concrete stretch of I-20. We were duped because this stretch of I-20 was NOT on the 2026 list of worst roads. Holy smokes, I’m nominating it now!

There is a ton of fastening, bungie-cording, shelf-shimming, and cabinet rebalancing that needs to happen while we are parked for a few days. We know it’s bad when the salt and pepper from the cabinet above the stove ends up at the rear of the Airstream, in the bathroom, at the base of the potty. Baaaaaarrrrrrffffff! Food stuff does not belong in the bathroom.

The being said, we drove the next 400 miles, still not blinking, on thankfully less bumpy roads, all the way to Hot Springs Village, AR. We parked the bug-covered, OVERWEIGHT, minor repair needing Airstream at the very clean little campground in the village, and headed to catch up with Ben’s folks.

We’ll be staying in HSV for a few days, cleaning out useless junk that doesn’t need to be with us, before loading up again (Don’t tell the Noni and Pop-pop, but they’re about to have a closet with a bunch of extra crap in it, until our return, next month). Then we’ll be saying goodbye to the dogs for a few weeks, and beginning our push towards SW Utah. We’ll be on I-40 for three solid days, so we’ll need to get the airstream stuff figured out and get some rest in anticipation of some long days on the road (Ugh, I just know during Airstream Fat Camp I’m going to lose my 5 extra coats, my flannel sheets, my extra comforter, my heated blanket and I WILL freeze to death in the mountains!).

Yay! The first day of the trip is finally here! We, of course, took the obligatory “us-ie” to commemorate the start of the trip!

Before we get too deep into the weeds on this trip and our journaling, we want to remind our 7 followers that this is a co-authored blog. Ben is the planner and takes copious notes and pictures during each day, which turns into the outline and the meat of our blog. Since Ann’s vision has been failing her for the past few years, all Ann does is add her two cents, and her humor, and Ben faithfully documents her GI escapades. It’ll be a fun little game for our followers to figure out who is doing the talking LOL.

We have almost a year of planning into this BIG 2026 Adventure and we’ve FINALLY been able to con our adult children into joining us for an exciting 10 days of our 60 day total journey. Besides planning which National Parks and sights to show the kids, Ben has truly outdone himself this year when it comes to digging deeper and investigating which roads we should NOT take on our journey. I’m happy to announce that this year’s journey will be 100% free of any cattle path, road, highway or interstate that is listed on the “2026 worst of the worst ranking paths/roads in the U.S.”

Not only are we choosing better roads, we’ve also been busy replacing all the dishes and everything else that was broken from all those horribly bumpy, absolutely terrible roads from last year’s journey. We even went so far as to replace the whole dang Airstream, completely by accident. The story of how we accidentally bought another Airstream is definitely worthy of it’s own blog, but we’ll cut it short and just say Ben “accidentally” found a screaming deal on a 2020 model of Airstream with a more spacious floorpan, which we love, but we could never justify buying brand new. The strange twist to this purchase was that the bargaining on the deal was finalized while Ben was rolling down the Tampa International Airport runway, taking off to Italy for a week of meetings. The last text I received as he was taking off was the following… “Bought a newer Airstream just now. I’ll tell you about it when I land. Love you!” UGH! Never give Ben too much time in airports to look for stuff to buy (huge eye roll by ME).

Our trip started a mere 30 hours after Chris walked off the Florida Polytechnic graduation stage (and off the payroll, but we haven’t shared that little bit of news with him quite yet). We now have exactly 9 days to boogie to Arkansas, where we’ll drop off both grand-dogs with the Noni and Pop-Pop and then head out to Zion National Park, where we’ll meet Hannah, Chris and Chris’ girlfriend, Maya, to begin our adventures on May 20th.

Now that the actual roadtrip begins, here’s the plan for today, DAY 1. Drive from the Englewood farm to Madison, FL. It’s an easy, shakedown kind of first day. It’s been a year since our last big trip, so we need to ease back into this gently, after all. Only a few turns to get us to Interstate 75 and then one more turn onto Interstate 10. Just a quick depiction below, so everyone understands the gravity of what we’ll be dealing with today. As the big lumbering truck and camper combo, our plan is to stick to the middle and right lanes and make our way gently up the state of Florida, into the panhandle.

Waze says it is about a 4-1/2 hr drive. 290 miles. Plenty of time to get there. 

So, we shut down the house, went through the list one more time, and at the bright and early crack of 10:30 am, we pulled out of the driveway. Right on time! No point in arriving at the RV park before we can check in, right?

We got all the way up to the highway, about 15 minutes from our farm on busy surface streets, and got going on 75N at exit 193. 

As soon as we hit 65 mph, the ass end of the of our shiny, newer Airstream began to gently sway (this is when I start to sweat because Ben didn’t see my side of the closet in the trailer. 😬 I don’t trust the weather in mountainous regions and so I prepare for the worst! Nothing wrong with bringing along 5-6 extra coats, just in case).

Trailer sway is a Capital B, Big Deal. Once it starts, it can quickly escalate to a Big Problem. Add in heavy wind buffeting from semi trucks or any kind of windy weather, and swaying takes a challenge and makes it downright dangerous. It means that the trailer is not balanced correctly or angled correctly.

So, we knew we had a problem that would require getting off the highway to address. So we slow rolled it at 64 mph to the next exit 195 (which was two miles north), turned around at the overpass, and took the interstate (at no more than 64 mph) back down to where we got on (exit 193).

Rather than drive all the way back to the farm, we go just off the highway to the side of the road and we (by “we,” we mean Ben), decided to take the hitch down a few inches, trying to tip the trailer forward a bit and shift the weight forward. While “we” were fixing the hitch, it seemed like a perfect time for us (me) to hit the bathroom. I mean, we’ve gone a total of 10 miles by this point and my tummy was rumbly. Never pass up an opportunity, right? 

Trailer adjusted, we jump back on I-75 to see if it worked.

65 mph. Nope. Still got a shimmy.  

Get off at exit 195. Again.

After consulting with our friend Daniel, who knows more stuff about more stuff than most people we know and after also checking the google, we decide we need to get a rough guess on how heavy the tongue is on the trailer. You want about 10-15% of the total trailer weight on the tongue, and you also want about 60% of the trailer weight to be in front of the axles. If there is too much, or not enough tongue weight, it can affect the steering of the truck. If there is too much weight behind the trailer axles, it can really amplify any swaying quickly. We need to know what we are dealing with here so we can address it correctly (and because all of the above is super nerdy info, you know Ben is heavily involved in this blog 🤓). (Hey now!)-Ben

Next stop, Daniel’s shop. Disconnect the trailer. Daniel used a forklift with a heavy duty engine scale to pick up the front of the airstream. Scale maxes out  at 1100 lbs so it’s probably 12-1400 lbs on the tongue. 

Which is A LOT.  With our weight roughly estimated, we go all the way back to the farm to put on the weight distribution hitch, which we owned, but is a bit of a pain in the butt to use. Honestly, if your trailer is loaded right, Ben’s thought is that you shouldn’t need a weight distribution hitch anyway (🤨hmmmm…”we” seems to be insinuating that “me” might have brought too much crap. “Me” is just waiting for “we” to say I need to take some stuff out of the trailer. UGH😒! Everything I packed has a purpose. With the kids coming on this trip, it’s all so important that I have no idea what I can take out!). 

So, next, we get the hitch on without doing the complicated weight shifting bars and we also moved a bunch of weight around to change the balance and shift the weight off the rear axle and out of the bed of the truck (Ben thinks I was shifting weight around, but I was really secretly going potty again. 🤪)

We decided to give the drive another try with the lower, longer hitch and new weight arrangement before dinking around with the bars that move the weight to the truck. It just such a hassle every time we hook up or disconnect the trailer.

We drive from the farm back to the highway where, once again, we get on at exit 193, and once again, there is a shimmy. 

We get off at exit 195, yet again, and find a big gas station. We grab the weight distribution bars. That’s the last thing we can think to do before just going back and dumping everything that added the weight to the trailer (here we go again with the too much “crap” talk). It had pulled fine earlier in the year on our Bradenton test run (again, this means it’s my fault). 

But we were carrying a lot more crap now (and there it is… “crap” and it’s 100% my fault 🤣). 

So, on with the bars. Let’s see how this works….never done this before but Ben read the text and understands the theory. Tab A into slot B, yep, ok, now pull this bar up to here. Ok, (hhhhrrrrrrrnnnnnnnggggggg )

hmm…

(hrraaaannnnnnnggeggeggggggg)

(breathing heavier than expected for something little old men and ladies do with their camper) one more try

(HRRHRRHEHHHHHHHHGSSSAAAAAANNNNNGFFGGGG!!!!!)

Ok there must be a tool for lifting this bar(light bulb goes off💡). Yep. And we know precisely where it is at that exact moment, and that place is not here with us. That tool, that we now very clearly understand what it is for, is back at the farm. 

So, we go all the way back to the farm. 

Open the garage.

There’s the tool. 

Let’s go see if this helps. 

hrrrrng. Click

Go to the other side. 

hrrnn. click. 

Ok, yep, that tool is pretty important to the hitch system. 

Really glad we didn’t grab it when we came back and got all of the other weight distribution stuff on the last run! 🙈

Trailer weight settled and distributed, off we go to the highway.

We get on at exit, you guessed it, 193. 

It is now 1:45 in the afternoon by the way. 

These shenanigans started when we originally left at 10:30. 

So, we were now almost 3 1/2 hours into this. We literally didn’t know what else to do if this doesn’t work. We’re already wondering if we need to delay our departure so that we can rid of anything that isn’t critical or just reload everything into the 2013 airstream. We know that the shorter, lighter Airstream loaded well and pulled just fine last year without a weight distribution hitch (Ben seriously has no clue about all the extra crap I packed into this thing. I mean this 2020 model has sooooo much extra storage and so many extra drawers. Is it not okay to fill those cabinets and drawers with junk food and games for the kids? Come on!).

The only thing that can be causing this much trouble is that the camper is a bit overweight, with too much stuff on board. When we get to Hot Springs Village, we are going to have to put this camper on a diet (I’m definitely busted!🤭).

Fingers crossed and lots of prayers as we get onto 75.

We hit 65. Not much going on back there. Creep it up to 70. Little itty bit of shimmy but not nearly as severe. It’s still lurking there a bit. Still wiggling slightly when we are passed by semis. But this is manageable.

So we cautiously continue past good old exit 195. We keep it steady and controlled at about 68-70 mph.

We took easy all the way up on I-75 and on to I-10. Thankfully, we made it to our first campground of the whole trip in Madison, FL.

We’ll take it super easy the rest of the way to Arkansas, over the next two days.

We are carrying way more stuff than we should be carrying. Didn’t really think of it until it happened. Oh well, we are good for now and we will deal with the weight issue when we get to Arkansas.

We shall title that chapter “Airstream Fat Camp”

For now, we are off the road and tucked in for the night. 

Tomorrow is a long day. Headed to Hattiesburg MS and the Hattiesburg / Okatoma KOA!