Returned to our home state, Minnesota, mid-April.  So much to do – dentist’s appointments, doctor’s appointments, family and friends to see.  Our first priority was to see our granddaughter, Cate.  She is so much fun but was a little afraid of grandma.  I think I was so excited to see her that I frightened her.  Then it was wedding dress shopping with daughter Amanda.  It is one of the best days a mom can spend with a daughter.   It was a fabulous day because I got to spend the day with both of my girls and Amanda found a stunning dress to wear for her November wedding.  Our five weeks at Dakotah Meadows was filled with a lot of catching up with friends and family.  Joe and I were lucky…

We didn’t quite make it out of Arizona without stopping one more time.  We decided to stop at Holbrook, AZ for a night so we could visit The Petrified Forest National Park.  It was very much worth the stop.  The National Park was a 28 mile drive with many stops and small hikes to see some areas of ancient forests that are now petrified wood lying in the desert.   We didn’t allow ourselves enough time to do enough exploring.  We didn’t enter the park until 4:30 and the ranger told us that we had to be out the other side by 6:00 when the gates closed.  So we decided this is a place we want to stop again and do some hiking.  Before we left the park we were able…

Remember how I said snow was being predicted in the high country in AZ?  Well did we get the snow but I’ll come back to that later. We moved from Lake Havasu City to the town of Williams, 67 miles south of the Grand Canyon.  This northern Arizona town sits at 7,000 ft elevation and Route 66 runs through its main street.  We found a nice RV park, Grand Canyon Railway RV Park that was a few blocks off main street and stayed put for one week.    The Grand Canyon Railway runs out of Williams.  This is a train that runs every day of the year except Christmas from Williams to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  We decided this was the way we were going to make our…

We heard about this Ghost Town close to the CA/ Arizona border and decided to take the 240 mile trip back to Western Arizona to see it.  On the way we stayed two nights in the “Cowboy” town of Wickenburg.  Usually we do a little research before we start off to find our next possibly campsite but we had heard that the BLM land (Bureau of Land Management) in the desert was nice so we decided to check that out in Wickenburg.  On our way into town we stopped at an antique store and asked where the BLM land was.  After getting directions from a local and with the 5th wheel in tow off we went to find our next campsite.  Just a few miles out of Wickenburg we started…

We have truly found the best view at a campsite since we entered CA.   When we were at Pleasanton, a couple staying next to us told us they were heading to Ventura to Rincon Parkway, a strip of blacktop along Hwy 1 that the County of Ventura allows RVs to stay at for $27 a night.  So we went online to check it out.  By the description people gave that had stayed there it was exactly that – a strip of blacktop a few feet off of Hwy 1 between the ocean and a railroad tracks that carried Amtrak trains every few hours.  With no hook-ups at the sites we decided to look a little farther.  On the same section of Hwy 1 were two actual RV parks run by…

Seacliff State Park in Santa Cruz was our next stop.  Okay, here is one of my complaints about CA.  The state park system in CA is terrible.  It’s not that they don’t have nice state parks but they are so expensive for really nothing.  The sites are normally close together and short, not meant for RVs over 25 feet.  The least we paid was $35.00 a night and this was with no hook-ups. Seacliff, because it sat right on the beach, was $55.00 a night and there were no hook-ups plus we sat on black top with no space between us and our neighbor. Now it was our choice to stay here because we wanted the experience of staying right on the beach but $55 a night – really?  And…

The Gorge loop is a drive that you can take on both the Oregon and Washington side of the Columbia River with more than 150 points of interest. We stayed on the Oregon side mostly because we again picked a rainy, foggy day and we just ran out of time during the day.We had again been advised to park our 5th wheel and take just our truck through the Gorge which was very good advice.The road was nicely paved but very narrow and of course in was in the foothills of the mountains so we had a lot of climbing.The road took us through the rain forests of Oregon and we saw spectacular waterfalls.Multnomah Falls is the most spectacular with a 620-foot drop, the second highest year-round waterfall in the…