Our 2022-2023 road trip has probably been the best of our 6 years on the road. We more or less circled the continental US, saw eleven National Parks, seven wine regions, basked for a month in the Arizona sun, and met up with the Herefords and the Bakers. There were a couple of minor setbacks, but we’ve been incredibly fortunate to be able to do this.
BOREDOM ALERT – There is a lot of “what we did on our vacation”
DO NOT OPERATE MACHINERY WHILE READING
This post is a summary of our activities from mid-October 2022 to mid-March 2023. Hopefully the pictures tell the story, but there are some comments below to add some context. In chronological order:
Napa. Counter-intuitively, this was more of a nature stop than a wine stop. We stayed in a county nature campground about a mile south of downtown Napa that was awesome. We did a fair bit of hiking and saw a lot of the surrounding area. Napa is still crowded and expensive, but the surrounding area is just beautiful. Having said this, we did do some wine tasting in both Napa and Sonoma and joined a couple of clubs (see wrap-up).
Sonoma. We stayed in Petaluma, south of the Sonoma Valley and commuted to taste wine. This was a primarily a catch up and chill week.
Jackson/Lodi. This was our first trip to the area and we stayed at a great casino campground in an old mining town that has turned into a tourist destination. Jackson and the surrounding mountain towns are uber cool with unique shops, bars, and restaurants. We did a few hikes and toured an old gold mine. However, our primary reason to be there was to visit the Lodi wine region. It dramatically exceeded my expectations in every way. Not only were the Zinfandels excellent but many other major varietals were outstanding as well (see wrap-up). The prices are a fraction of the equivalent Sonoma and Paso Robles wines. The Lodi downtown area is quite nice as well. It is likely we will return here in the next few years.
Connecticut/Rochester. We left New York in our RV before Labor Day and consequently decided to fly back to Connecticut to see our kids and grands for Thanksgiving and Christmas. So we parked our rig in Sacramento, CA and flew to CT in mid-November. Given we were going to be in the CT for a month, we volunteered to do some longer-term jobs including some construction. As luck would have it, both of us caught some sort of respiratory virus that turned into nasty cases of pneumonia. Our side trip to Rochester was strictly convalescence at the (Saint) Herefords. We were pretty useless for the entire month of December and didn’t fully recover until late January. Nonetheless, it was great to see everyone.
Paso Robles. After retrieving our RV in Sacramento, we stocked up on food and hit the road to Paso on New Years Eve about 12 hours ahead of the first California “atmospheric river”. The next day the State closed the major north-south roads that we had traveled. After arriving in Paso, still whipped from pneumonia, we did a bit of wine tasting but not much else (see wrap-up). The place is still beautiful, the wine is still great, and it’s still one of our favorite places to spend time.
Temecula. This was a new place for us. It’s located about halfway between LA and San Diego and is in hilly-to-mountainous terrain. The place is a beautiful upscale California town with a really nice downtown area. There is an emerging wine region on the edge of the city that is “not-quite-ready-for-primetime”, but still fun. As we were leaving, the Pacific rain storms came in again and the Salinas River overflowed, closing many of the roads we were on a day earlier.
Yuma. We stayed at the same resort we’ve stayed at for last 5 years and it was just about perfect. The highlight of our stay was a visit by Susie and Dean Hereford. We treated them to the Yuma “greatest hits” and as usual, we had a great time. We then moved on to Ramona, CA with the Herefords to hike Anza-Borrego State Park, visit the San Diego Safari Park, and do some wine tasting in Escondido before starting our journey back east. Once again, we left 24 hours ahead of a paralyzing snow storm in northern Arizona that shut down I-40 for more than a day.
Hot Springs NP/Nashville/Mammoth Cave NP. This travel segment consisted of “stops of convenience”. We have wanted to see both National Parks for some time and our schedule and route finally worked out to do it. Hot Springs is not an ordinary NP. It consists of the area around the city center and focuses on the 47 hot springs in the ground. Most are capped and piped to bathhouses and city drinking water faucets. The park is quite small and there are only a few hiking trails. Nashville was our home base to see Mammoth Caves and a “must-do” for the live music whenever we come near it. Mammoth Caves is the longest cave in the world. It is awesome and well worth seeing. However, I have to admit a bit of “cave fatigue” after seeing the Carlsbad Caverns, Wind Cave, and Luray Caverns.
Chattanooga. We stayed in Trenton, GA which is about 10 miles south of Chattanooga so we could have easy access to Cloudland Canyon State Park. The park is not huge but has excellent hiking trails and spectacular views of the Canyon and several waterfalls. We did a day trip up to Savage Gulf State Park in Tennessee. This park is also in the mountains and has outstanding hiking trails. We only scratched the surface of both parks and may make a future stop there to do a more thorough job of it. The bonus of the stop was Rock City on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga. This is a huge area of enormous and unusual rock formations that have been turned into what may be the largest rock garden in the world. It also has a large cave area that has been outfitted with fairytale characters and dioramas.
