As I said in my last post, we hit 2 national parks in northern California and 2 in southern California. A visit to Pinnacles National Park was last minute when we noticed that it was “not too far out of our way” on our drive from San Jose to Fresno in between events. We cut…
California has SO many national parks, and even though we’ve been to many, we have not visited all of them. For this summer’s road trip, we made a point to hit Redwoods, Lassen Volcanic, Pinnacle AND Channel Islands National Parks (in that order, but spread across 2 weeks). I’ll spare you the overload and break…
Mt. St. Helens in southern Washington erupted on May 18, 1980. Thirty-seven years and one day later, we climbed that darn volcano! For your history lesson of the day, I will share our newfound knowledge that it all started with a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, which disrupted the volcano with the biggest landslide in recorded history.…
I am so backlogged on blog posts about our epic adventures and tour fun. Bear with me! If all goes accordingly, you may be bombarded with posts this week. We are currently in the Pacific Northwest, making our way south from Washington. We are now rolling in the Superfeet converted Sprinter van (SuperVan). It is…
We are going to squeeze in microadventures throughout our summer speaking tour and it started last weekend when we explored Saguaro National Park in Arizona. In all our years living in Phoenix, we never ventured down to Tucson to explore Saguaro NP for some reason. We drove north to the Grand Canyon a million times, but south?…
Besides Justin’s mom, who visited in December, we’ve had 3 other brave souls venture into the boonies this past week to spend time with us. First were our kindred spirits: Paul and Kristen. We call them our kindred spirits for many reasons, but mainly because they are just as keen about sleeping in the dirt…
This week on August 25, 2016, the National Parks Service turned 100!! Visiting National Parks is something J and I have done … a lot. We’ve been to 37 of the 59 parks (yes, we are keeping track) and dozens of the monuments. And as America celebrates this centennial anniversary of the day President Woodrow…
I know the Denali and Alaska blog posts piqued a lot of interest here in May and June, but while Justin was off climbing mountains, I was not just sitting on my butt in Colorado. And while this is a belated post, I still wanted to share. Today we celebrate ‘Murica and I sure do…
Justin badly needed some recovery time following his 23-day Denali expedition. So we went camping and hiking. Yep, apparently more outdoor exposure cures severely sunburnt lips and frost nipped fingers. We spent 3 nights in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, which is the largest national park in America. To give it some scale, it equals six…
The spring weather in New Mexico has been more like fall into winter, derailing a lot of our weekend backpacking agendas. Every weekend, we’ve had grandiose plans to head into the mountains at higher elevations for J’s Denali training. But, when it is snowing and accumulating at 8,000 feet where we live, we know better…
Bandalier National Monument is not the only National Park Service property near us. In October 2015, the NPS purchased the bordering Valles Caldera, establishing it as a national preserve. This piece of real estate has a crazy history. Imagine the scene. Mountains. Valleys. HUGE crater. This very distinct bowl among the other land forms is…
J & I are on a quest to hit all the national parks, but often times, we overlook the monuments. So we were elated when we realized Bandelier National Monument was just about an hour from our doorstep and last weekend, we made the trip to explore. Bandelier is most known for its prehistoric ruins…
J & I went for round 2 of winter camping 101 by hitting up Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado this week. I should clarify that J is very much into this winter camping thing, while I am still easing in and convincing myself that I like it. To be safe, we car camped at Moraine…
We made the most of our 5 days in Sydney, taking all modes of transportation to get around (including walking of course!) and seeing a variety of sights and tourist attractions. We rented an AirBnB in Darlinghurst, which was walking distance from the downtown. It was a tiny studio apartment, but much, much better than…
We spent the weekend in Te Anau, gateway to Fiordland National Park and Milford Sound. We stayed right on the lake, which is gorgeous in itself. Te Anau Lake is the second largest lake in NZ and the largest freshwater body of water in the Southern Hemisphere. Our main activity in Te Anau was to…
A second priority in our post-TA exploring was Mt. Cook National Park and we ended up spending 2 days/3 nights there over the Easter weekend. More than one third of the park has permanent snow & glacial ice and is surrounded by 22 mountains over 9,000 feet, including Mt. Cook, the tallest peak in NZ…
Stewart Island (Rakiura) is New Zealand’s “third” largest island. Most of the island is protected as Rakiura National Park. It boasts unspoiled wilderness, as well as cranked up birdsong … But the biggest reason people come to the island is for kiwi spotting. Stewart Island is NZ’s last major, stable population of wild kiwi. Kiwis,…
Hello from Mountain House Hostel in Arthur’s Pass National Park! It’s been a long time (10 days) since an update because Internet service (or any service for that matter) in these parts was hard to come by! Usually we have at least a cell signal here and there, but we had nada for the last…
Hello from Whanganui! We left Taumarunui last Saturday and have come 322K, or 207 miles, to kilometer 1370 on the trail. It has been a long time without service, so I apologize for the information and picture overload. We’ve had a VERY interesting 9 days on the trail. This is definitely our favorite section so far.…
After 11 nights–some very cold and snowy nights I might add–of sleeping in a tent, we are wrapping up our mini (1850 miles) road trip with a few overdue showers and electricity (other than our solar power device). It’s good practice for the next 4 months, I suppose. Our return trip from the Grand Canyon…