Our 8th year on the road was supposed to an aggressive attempt to see several National Parks that we hadn’t been to. We left northern NY before Labor Day with a plan to get to 10 parks, 8 of which were new to us. In September, we visited Indiana Dunes, Theodore Roosevelt, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain. At the 5th one, Mesa Verde in Colorado, Suzanne broke her ankle in a very inconvenient way. We packed up our gear, threw out our food, and flew back to Rochester for surgery on the 3rd of October. Three weeks later we returned to Albuquerque with a knee scooter, picked up our RV, and hit the road with a revised itinerary.
We traded several national parks in for week-long stays in a variety of Arizona and California venues. Ironically, before we retired, I envisioned “immersion in a series of cool places through extended stays”. For example, my favorite fantasy was parking ourselves of the front range of the Rockies and watching the sun rise and fall on the mountains every day. Then we’d park Route 1 on the California coast and do the same with the Pacific Ocean. Like most fantasies, they didn’t turn out to be too practical for a variety of reasons. Instead, we’ve had to “settle” for just moving every week to absorb as much of this magnificent country as we possibly can in the time that we have. So, our new schedule consisted of longer stays, more leisurely exploration, walks-vs-hikes, towns/villages, and more intense wine tasting. We ended up in mini-immersions at a number of places. Some were fabulous (Cachuma Lake, CA), some were … OK (Benson, AZ). In short, it turned out a bit like my fantasy – live in beautiful places, quickly.
In Arizona, we spent week long stays in several rural places we hadn’t previously been. They were all nice places and the weather was great. However, living amongst “our (aged) people” was enlightening – hence, we’re currently trying to stop our aging process. Our AZ time culminated in a month at our favorite RV resort in Yuma. For us, this is the perfect place to survive the worst weather month of the year, and this year it was also the perfect place for Suzanne to heal.
In late February we made our way to California starting in Escondido and then working our way up the state, culminating with a stop at Lake Tahoe. Return visits included Temecula, Paso Robles, and Jackson, but we managed to find new experiences at each place. No stop in Paso, Central CA, or Lodi would be complete without some serious wine tasting. The results of our tastings can be found at Paso Robles wrap-up 2024 and Central CA and Lodi wrap-up 2025. Our major new stops were Santa Barbara and Morgan Hill. Santa Barbara was primarily intended to be a wine tasting stop but turned out to be much more. It’s documented in a separate post.
Morgan Hill is a medium sized city just south of San Jose that we chose for its proximity to Coe State Park and the San Jose Airport. As it turned out, Coe was not very accessible given its remoteness and altitude. It was windy, snowing, and nearly devoid of people – not quite the place for two late-60’s people to be hiking in. However, the Morgan Hill area is exceptionally cool and we had a beautiful campsite. We tasted wine in the Central Valley, walked a lot of Coyote Creek, visited Santa Cruz, and explored Morgan Hill itself.
It’s unfortunate that we didn’t make it to Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks, but we did have a great time in California. We still really dislike the traffic, the cost of living/visiting, the sprawl of the cities, and the homelessness. However, it is an amazing place. It has everything nature has to offer including incredible beauty and climate. Once you get out of the big population centers there are places, people, and wonders that just blow your mind. Our 2025 voyage through CA only reinforced those opinions.
After great visit to Lake Tahoe and subsequent visits to Great Basin National Park and Cathedral Gorge, we started the journey back to New York. For the first time we took I-70 through the Rockies with our RV. This was a source of “some apprehension” for one of us due to the threat of snow any time between late September and late-May. To be fair, it’s not advisable to drive a 25 ton vehicle that’s towing a car on 8% grades in snow. And on cue, there was a snow storm in the mountains that closed down I-70 a week before we came though. Fortunately, the weather cleared up, the roads dried out, and we skirted through the mountains before the next storm hit. Our final stop of our 2024-2025 travel season was to see Riverdance in Chicago and checked a box on Suzanne’s Bucket list.
