National Parks10 min read2018
Dateline June 3, 2018: Utah - A Beautiful State
Our attitude about RV problems, is "forget it!" Tomorrow, as they say, is another day! We left Sedona and headed n...
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Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.
Showing 6 of 236 posts
National Parks
United States5 min read2013
Dateline July 21, 2013, The Redwood Forest and Yosemite
The introduction pictures say it all. These parks are some of God's greatest accomplishments. Out of Crescent City and down through the Redwoods. The BenBow Inn for a night, with a great chance meeting at the bar with a Southern California golf pro and a kindergarten teacher, who handed us a list of courses and restaurants. The Redwood Forest itself, where a slice of wood on display tells you how many hundreds of years it takes to grow ten feet in diameter, and the Roadtrek was too tall for the famous drive-through tree (John walked it for us). Cache Creek for golf and a stop at the tribal casino, where Janice discovered the California-specific roulette they run, and pocketed a $25 gas card. Then Yosemite, the west entrance with its two leaning rocks, Lower Falls, the Wawona Tunnel View, and Saturday morning at Glacier Point, looking straight down into the valley we had driven through the day before. Then back on the road for Monterey.
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United States6 min read2013
Dateline July 4, 2013, Yellowstone National Park
Out of Cody on the morning of the 4th, the short drive west into Yellowstone. Through Shoshone National Forest, in past Yellowstone Lake with its hot pools steaming along the shore, an elk in the trees. Two days of southern loop and northern loop with everything Yellowstone is famous for: Old Faithful erupting (Artemisia Geyser around the corner, easily as beautiful), a grizzly on the road, a 5:00 AM Janice drive up to Hayden Valley with John still asleep in the back, a bison herd that brought their late-season babies right past the rig within touching distance, Tower Falls, a pair of black bears crossing the road, and a Saturday morning so quiet that you could see a female elk just grazing alongside the lake. Then south to the Tetons.
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United States6 min read2012
Dateline July 25, 2012, Acadia National Park
From Campobello across the FDR Bridge into Maine, and on to Mount Desert Island for Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor. The island is the second largest on the US east coast, with 26 mountains on it, including 1,530-foot Cadillac, the tallest along the Atlantic seaboard. Bar Harbor itself, a Gilded Age resort that once rivaled Newport, was largely lost to a fire in 1947 that smoldered underground through the winter, then was rebuilt. Plus a stop at the Desert Mountain Oceanarium for a hatchery tour with lobsterman David Mills, who explained how Maine's lobstermen voluntarily protect their own brood stock with size minimums, size maximums, and notched females, and why the catch has been growing year over year because of it. Then the history of Acadia itself, George Dorr's 43-year campaign, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s carriage roads, and the long story of how 47,000 acres got preserved.
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Canada8 min read2012
Dateline July 17, 2012, Trinity and Gros Morne National Park
Out of St. John's heading west on the Trans-Canada Highway. Brigus first, the birthplace of Captain Bob Bartlett, the great Newfoundland Arctic mariner shipwrecked at least twelve times, with the 1860 Tunnel that John Hoskins cut through solid rock by hand. Then Trinity, a working heritage community where the Rising Tide Theatre's New Founde Lande Pageant walks you through the village telling Newfoundland history in song and story. Atlantic salmon climbing the ladders at Grand Falls-Windsor. Then Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland's UNESCO geology, where 500-million-year-old ocean floor was thrust up into mountains, and a boat trip down Western Brook Pond, a freshwater fjord with pitcher plants in the bogs and Pissing Mare Falls plunging from the plateau above. Then the ferry back to Nova Scotia.
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Montana5 min read2011
Dateline July 24, 2011, Glacier National Park, Custer's Last Stand, Crazy Horse, and Mount Rushmore
From Calgary down to the Montana border, into Glacier National Park with its mountains that somehow still impress after Alaska, then east through Missoula (where the people are absurdly good to strangers), across to Little Bighorn for a version of Custer's Last Stand we hadn't heard before, and on into the Black Hills for the Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore. The first chapter of After Alaska.
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