For our first long trip in our brand new RV, we visited many of the National Parks and Monuments in several western states. The trip lasted 26 days, covering 3,300 miles in 8 states. We visited the National Parks/Monuments of Great Basin, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Dinosaur, Arches, Canyonlands, Natural Bridges, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, and Grand Canyon.
I kept a journal during the trip, and have adapted it to the content you’ll find here. We’ve selected about 450 of our photos (a subset of the 1,300 we took) to include in online ‘albums’ for sharing. That is still a lot of photos to post on one page, so we have divided them into four sections.
The photos will load as you scroll down this page, and sometimes it takes a few seconds for a photo to appear.
Day 1, Tuesday, 09/08/15
After several months of route planning by Chris, and far less time doing menu planning and food prep on my part, we finally took off for our first long trip in our RV. We left home a bit before 11:00 and stopped for a quick lunch near Victorville, in the shade of a tree in an empty lot next to a closed restaurant. Then we hit the road heading for Las Vegas to visit Terri (the long-time caregiver for my father). We arrived at her house a bit after 5:00. Had a nice visit (and met her daughter Debbie), but needed to move on and get to our spot for the night, hopefully before dark.
Sara (that’s our name for our GPS) led us on a wild goose chase looking for our RV resort. Chris had selected it via P.O.I.s in the GPS, but we ultimately had to type in the address ourselves. It was dark by the time we got there, but Chris did great job backing into our spot. As it was getting late, we decided to heat up a can of refried beans and call it dinner. (I was slowed down a bit in opening the can, because we somehow missed packing the can opener, and had to use an old-style opener instead, you know, bottle opener at one end and a sharp point at the other end good for opening cans of liquid, but not so great for a can of refried beans). After a long, hot day, and a frustrating evening trying to find our resort, we headed over to the pool for a soak to cool down. We had the pool to ourselves and it was marvelous!!! (LVM, Las Vegas Motorcoach RV Resort, $61/night)
Day 2, Wednesday, 09/09/15
Ate a quick, early lunch, checked out at 12:00, and headed over to the nearby Target (to pick up a few missing items, such as a can opener and cereal bowls, another storage bin, a digital thermometer), then on to Costco for gas. Then it was a long, long drive to our next camp spot. On this day, Barley came out of hiding in the late afternoon. He sat with me for a while in the dinette, then headed up front, jumped up on the dashboard, and eventually sat on Chris’ lap while he was driving!!! Cooper came out briefly too, but not for long. I theorized that the long, straight, smooth road contributed to their willingness to venture out on this day.
Chris had hoped to stay at Kernshaw-Ryan State Park (a nice park with an Oasis kind of feel), but they had no electricity, and due to the hot weather we were pretty sure we would need to run our air conditioning (perhaps throughout the night), and didn’t like the thought of listening to the generator for hours on end. So we moved on to Cathedral Gorge State Park. Not much to look at by day, but we were pleasantly surprised at night. The most stars either of us has ever seen! The Milky Way was practically blinding! (Cathedral Gorge State Park $27/night)
Day 3, Thursday, 09/10/15
We got away a bit before 11:00, soon stopped for a quick lunch under a shade tree at a rest area in the middle of nowhere, then pressed on toward Great Basin National Park. Chris’ first and second choices for a campground there (Lower and Upper Lehman Creek, respectively) were completely full. There was an astronomy festival going on that weekend, so the main camp sites were full and the regularly scheduled cave tours sold out. But luckily, there were still (theoretically) 4 spots available at the more remote Baker Creek, and they had added two more cave tours to the regular schedule. We snapped up two spots for the 10:00 tour (an hour that suited us better anyway). And we bought an annual pass for the national park system here, a side benefit being we only had to pay for one of the tour tickets.
The ranger also told us we could ride our bikes back to the Visitor Center in the morning for the Lehman Cave tour. But after driving three miles up the very dusty gravel road to find a campsite, we decided pretty quickly there was no way we would want to ride our bikes back to the tour in the morning. So we decided that in the morning, we would simply drive the coach back to the visitor center for the tour, and then hit the road from there. But before hitting the sack, we laid a yoga mat and beach towel on the picnic table, and laid there looking up at the night sky. Just as the night before, it was absolutely spectacular! (Baker Creek $12/night)
