After checking and rechecking the weather and being a little paranoid about ice and slippery roads,  we left Santa Fe and headed to Colorado.  We landed in Alamosa, the nearest town to Great Sand Dunes National Park.  We were rewarded with sunny skies and reasonably warm temps to explore the dunes, the park, and the surrounding area.  Our campsite was nothing special, but entirely surrounded by beautiful snow-capped mountains.  It…

At the end of March, we stayed in Bosque, New Mexico about 40 miles south of Albuquerque for a few days followed by Santa Fe for almost a week.  Our time was largely spent hiking in National Monuments and visiting American Indian ruins. Many of the ruins are at least 700 years old and are the last vestiges of native peoples who occupied the land for thousands of years.  In…

We have passed by Petrified Forest National Park several times while traveling through Arizona on I-40, but haven’t taken the time to see it.  When we cancelled our mid-March stop in Durango (due to weather), we decided to stop at “Petrified” instead.  This was a good move as the park is much more than some petrified wood chunks.  It is also  about the Painted Desert, extinct creature excavations, as well…

The Monument Valley Tribal Park a huge area that straddles Utah and Arizona that contains some of the most scenic rock formations in the world.  It is the product of 50 million years of erosion and lies entirely in the Navajo Nation Reservation territory.  Normally, you can take Navajo tours in and around the entire valley with a Navajo guide, however in mid-March the Park was still shut down by…

While Sedona and Lake Mead are “repeats” of stops in the past, there are some places that are so beautiful that they cannot be resisted.  I could happily visit Sedona every year and never tire of its awesome views in every direction.  It is such a extraordinary combination of spectacular scenery, fantastic hiking, smallish-town charm, good restaurants and bars, unique artistic shops and who could forget the ever present “vortex”…

Lake Havasu is a reservoir created in 1930’s when the Parker Dam was built on the Colorado River. Lake Havasu City was essentially founded in the late 50’s by a real estate developer hoping to capitalize on the lake by building a recreation community.  Over the past 50 years, and despite being in the middle of nowhere, the town has become a water sports and retirement center.  It has a…

After our month-long stay in Yuma Arizona, Bill and I were ready to move on and see some new sights.  While the weather in Yuma was pretty spectacular and the amenities of our RV resort were wonderful, we were definitely itching to get back on the road.  We headed to Ramona, California, a smallish town nestled in the hills and mountains about an hour east of San Diego.  We scheduled…

For the third consecutive year, we spent a month in Yuma starting in mid-January.  The weather was nearly perfect, especially considering what the majority of the country went through.  The campgrounds, stores, and hiking trails were not nearly as crowded as in years past.  People were generally good about masking and social distancing. However, it just wasn’t all that exciting and that was okay.  It was the best we could…

As part of our “Winter 2021 Isolation Tour” we decided to stop at several National Monuments (NMs) on our way to a month-long stay in Yuma, AZ.  There are 129 NMs in the US and they span a wide variety of venues ranging from mini-National Parks to historic buildings to ruins. We’ve previously been to a dozen or so and find them to be the “short stories” of the National…