The great American West, beautiful mountains, coast and deserts. Amazing national parks and huge sprawling open spaces ideal for exploration with a Caravan.
Coming back to Amsterdam felt weird. It felt like we had been on a long vacation and arrived back home. Meeting with friends and family was so familiar it felt we had never left. We stayed with Charissa’s mother, while it didn’t feel exactly like our old place, it felt homey enough. The flight was just enough stress on our bodies to allow the cold to rear its ugly...
We were lucky to arrive in Minnesota just as the really cold weather set in. -25 degrees Fahrenheit was the coldest we saw, and except for one day it mostly hovered around 0 degrees. We also both caught a cold along the route, so staying inside and being lazy was just fine. My mother must have thought we would get bored as she showed us various activities in the...
Continuing on forThe Ride Home – Part 1 The next day had us driving up to Cottonwood Falls and the Tallgrass Prairie reserve. We of course stopped for Kansas BBQ for lunch. Previously I had read the book PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon As one of my favorite authors he has written a few books on travelling in small town USA. In this one he explored Chase...
Our trip home had an early surprise, at 4:40 am we got an alert on our phone, a tornado warning in our area of phoenix. It was totally calm outside, but looking at the radar we could see a line of red coming our way. We went into the showers which seemed to be the safest place. It did get pretty windy but no tornado, we did chat with some Portlanders who proceeded to...
Coming from the coast we had a fun drive over the Sierra Nevada via the Angeles Crest highway. It was a fun curvy road, we saw lots of fast cars coming down the mountain, it seems a popular place for the Angeles rich to test out their toys. Each turnoff was full of burnout marks, clearly they can afford new tires. We did catch snow at the top, which was unexpected...
If you haven’t read it, check out the first half here Continuing south we stopped for at Hearst Castle for a tour. Randall Hearst was a businessman owning many of the papers in the early part of the 20th century, along with many other businesses. He used his riches to build many different houses, but his Castle in San Simeon was one of the most elaborate. He imported...
After our stop in Bodega bay we turned south along the coast. We did manage to find another seafood restaurant, Marshall store . The oysters I had here were much higher quality, but the star of our lunch was the smoked fish plate. Smoked oysters, mackerel and salmon were all exceptionally tasty, and the view over the foggy bay gave us a Pacific Northwest kind of feel...
Our trip criss-crossing California has brought across many of the places where the nations vegetables are grown. It’s clear that the industry relies on two things, irrigation and cheap labor, both of which are quite concerning. Driving through the valley’s it is clear it is dry here, everything that isn’t a field is brown, bare and dusty. Tractors and semis churn up...
We hit the Pacific first at Bodega Bay, we struggled in this little town to find a spot to park with the RV, but after stopping we found the couple restaurants not exactly what we were looking for, they had seafood, but that was not the star. So we resigned ourselves to eating sandwiches and headed out to Bodega Head for a view during our lunch. What we stumbled on...
We had some time to visit Napa Valley which was a nice changeup from the national park scene. We got a campsite just outside of the town of Napa, as options are few and far between. The campground was quite nice, and reachable by Uber, so we were able to explore town a bit. The tasting rooms in town seemed more like bars, where it seemed more normal to just get a...