Our Travel Blog

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Driving Miss Donna - what does this mean? Whenever I want to go somewhere, if Don is home he will usually drive. He always says he is driving miss Donna! This blog is for our travels, usually with our truck and fifth wheel trailer, but sometimes in our other wheels. When we are not vacationing check in for updates, although less frequent, about our life at home and our wonderful family:)

Saturday, October 29, 2022

April Showers

Ha ha, not really.

The weather continues to be HOT! We moved back to Lake Havasu for another Craggy Wash visit, and as often happens we met up again with Ernie and Deb. We shared more food and drink and visiting! The mountain photo is Finger Butte, a popular mountain named for it's similarity to "the finger".

The heat was really getting to us and as much as we don't entirely enjoy campgrounds, we felt it was necessary for our sanity to escape from the +40 weather and run the air conditioning. There are a few places we like with services and one of those is the Big Bend of the Colorado State Park at Laughlin. Huge sites, full services and access to familiar places made this the right choice. The air conditioner never stopped! Thank goodness we made that stop. The heat can be exhausting. We spent our days sightseeing through the windshield and our evenings with a refreshing beverage and Netflix! One of our favorite stops was the Road Kill Café in Seligman - You Kill it We Grill It. LOL

April was destined to be a short month, as I had to fly back to Saskatoon twice. The first one was unplanned when we originally left, but the company CEO retired and I had to attend interviews.

After leaving Laughlin we searched for a new site in a cooler climate and settled in the Lovell Canyon Dispersed Camping area, west of Las Vegas. NEW LOCATION #5! You wouldn't believe how much cooler it was there. This was where Don stayed while I was jetting around. He can attest to the cooler temps by the frost observed and signs of SNOW! Meanwhile down the hill in Vegas it was still scalding hot.

When I returned to Vegas, Don had moved to Government Wash. This is definitely our favorite place to visit Las Vegas, Many many areas to chose for camping, and again, close to our favorite city! We spent a lot of time touring Henderson, found a new beer and eats place, saw the arena where the Silver Knights (AHL hockey) play, and walked the Railroad Tunnel Trail to Hoover Dam.

Sadly this busy spring time came to an end. Something different for us his year were all my trips back for work, but overall it has worked out all right. While I am on my final April trip to Saskatoon Don will be driving home on his own, and we will meet again in Alberta.

Stay tuned as we share our Alberta adventures with you!


Marching Along

Well if February seemed to fly past, March was faster.

It was a great month, lots of stops in favorite places, and discovering new ones.

And on top of that I flew to Saskatoon for in person meetings! This was FANSTASTIC to actually be with the Board in person and enjoy each other's company.

We moved to Telephone Cove for a week. This is "our place" by Laughlin and the beauty of being by the water never grows old. I'll throw in  a photo of my office view. And as always we took a trip or two to Las Vegas!

Don's sister Kathy had plans to visit us for a week so we needed to move close to Phoenix. On our way there we stayed a night near Wikeiup. It is horse country and lots of folks warned us away form boondocking there, but we found a more than suitable site to park in for a visit. NEW LOCATION #1 this trip!

Then on to the Phoenix area and another new location. Don found a boondocking site north of Peoria, a city bordering the north side of Phoenix. This is definitely a spot to return to. Not only were the views amazing, but being close to the city but seemingly far way appealed to both of us. And again, just like in Sedona, we were parked in a hot air balloon area. Oh but a quirky lovely part of this place was a five minute walk down a road was a burger and beer joint. Now that's convenience! NEW LOCATION #2

Eventually we had to pull up the jacks and move to the south east side of Phoenix, preparing for Kathy's visit, and close to Ron and Bev. And also for me to fly to Saskatoon...

So - on to NEW LOCATION #3!

Another win for Don - he found boondocking on Gold Canyon dispersed land. This is also a phenomenal find!

While we were here we had many visits with Ron and Bev, and toured Kathy around the area including Tortilla Flats, and spent a lovely day with their cousin Carol and husband Richard. They spend the winters in Casa Grande. Kathy has never visited this area so everything was new!

While I was away at meetings Don moved from there to a boondocking site on State Trust Land, south west of Tucson, on Pump Station Road. NEW LOCATION #4! What a great year for finding new places!

Although Kathy ended up staying with us longer than originally planned, eventually she had to go home, and before taking her back to Carol and Richard's we had a chance for a lovely visit with Susan and Doug in Coolridge and tour their new home.

With company and a trip to Saskatoon, and moving around so much, March was a whirlwind.


On the Road Again

Writing a blog can be the biggest commitment a person makes. For the most part over the years I have been motivated to write about our adventures, at least on a monthly basis. Sometimes weekly or daily! But the bottom line is you have to have some motivation and be in the right head space to write, or it becomes mundane reporting of your day, what you ate even. So as you noticed I have missed months of blogging. Someone asked my recently if it was due to not going anywhere new, the adventures stalled? Nope - I just simply couldn't put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

So to get my jig back I decided I am going to start with reviewing last springs vacation. I'll try to summarize in months and hopefully get through to the current:)

Most important to note is that this felt like the most precious gift, after the pandemic, which may have drained my writing enthusiasm, to be able to freely travel again with the fifth, and rediscover our own passion for travelling together in our own way.

For myself, until we crossed that Canada/US Border it didn't seem real until then. It was almost like the first time we went years ago with our very first camper - a  bumper pull 22 foot, 2 naïve RVers who were going to travel down the coast to San Francisco. A trip that took many attempts to actually get to San Fran, as we never dreamt we would fall in love with Oregon and stay too long, or just long enough, at every stop. We eventually did get to San Fran, many times!

Back to this year it was almost surreal after the pandemic to be able to resume this part of our life.

Anxious to fit lots of adventures in between my travels back and forth for work, we left home a bit earlier in January than normal. We will see how that goes. Here's a little summary of February from the road.

Our first nights were spent at a Home Depot in Helena then a road side stop by Overton. That brought us to the "good weather" and we could relax and determine where we would go.

We went directly to Yuma and where we were our last time here, Sidewinder Road. This is a great spot, so accessible to Yuma, just at the California border, and the Mexican border. We stayed here for a week. Not that long ago we would never had stayed anywhere that long, but we are finally learning to SLOW down!

Besides the daily tasks that happen no matter where you are - home or RV - we really just chilled out and did close to nothing. It was so windy on Sidewinder we decided to move to Fortuna Pond (still our favorite Yuma location) and did more nothing for 2 weeks. 

We were hoping to catch our boondocker friend Ivan while in the area, but he was MIA. However, we were lucky enough to find our friends Ernie and Deb, and get in some quality walking, sightseeing and sharing of refreshments!

And on top of that we met a couple of times with my "co-op friend" Judy and her husband, as well as some old acquaintances from the home area, Cindy and Terry Tuks.

So we didn't actually do nothing, just lots at a slower pace.

Have you ever visited Valley of the Names by Yuma? Pretty cool place where for years people have written their names and memories in rock.

I may have had one margarita too many once or twice in Algadones as well:)

We moved to Craggy Wash at Lake Havasu the end of the month. It was there that I had SO MANY meetings. I even rented a meeting room a couple of times, and used the library facilities as well. In some ways I was fortunate my work was still all online due to Covid, as it meant I didn't have to fly back to Saskatoon as often as usual.

I spent my 60th birthday in the sunshine with a beer, and the day after at our favorite restaurant the Blue Chair in Havasu.

One last place to share that we visited and had some fun at was the Dessert Bar near Parker. It's a vicious drive in but very worth it! Totally solar operated, seats 100's of people, and live music.