Despite COVID we hit the road June 11, 2020. We felt that we would be able to travel safely in our motor home. In fact, that proved to work well. We left Edinburg, TX headed north for Missouri. The first thing we noticed is that there was very little traffic of any kind. We drove through San Antonio on I-435 and I-35 at the posted speed limit during "rush hour." This continued as we drove through Austin and Waco. We stopped for the night at a Walmart in Georgetown, Texas. A brief visit t
We've been on a discovery tour for the last month. We left familiar territory at Coulee City, Washington. Traveling south we decided to stop in Yakima. The decision was more about taking a breather than exploring. We had arranged to have our mail delivered there and we decided to stay a week just to catch our breath and wait for a service appointment. So we played golf at one of the most beautiful golf courses we have ever seen. Apple Tree Golf Resort is a resort housing development in an apple
With this entry, we are clearly outside the realm of motor home experience but the remainder of our trip started with almost three months in the motor home so I'll finish off the last three weeks just to give the story an ending. We've flown to Sydney after turning in the campervan at Britz in Perth.
When we checked into our hotel they gave us some information about a festival starting in Sydney on Friday night, the night we arrived. It is a two-week festival of lights, sound and ideas. The
We are in rally mode. We do this every two or three years. It is a fun thing to watch the coaches gather, a small city literally pops up almost overnight. Thousands of people bring their houses, whether full timers or just camping for the week, they have almost all the comforts of home. And, at the end of the week we will all scatter to the four points of the compass and the city will just disappear - poof!
Our rally attendance began last week. We were one of the last arrivals at the M
Anyone who visits the Pacific Northwest will see ample evidence of the logging industry in this part of the country. As you drive the roads you will see hills and mountains that have been give hair cuts. Sometimes a whole hill or mountain is devoid of trees. In other locations you see patches removed from the rest of the forest. You are sharing the road with trucks loaded with logs and the empty trucks folded up for their return to the forest. The Olympic Peninsula which has been our primary obj
We’ve been touring Australia for almost three months now. Along the way we’ve collected some souvenirs for ourselves and for our friends and family. When we started this trip our bags were packed to the limit. We investigated shipping the souvenirs and some of the clothing we would not need on the cruise back to the US. Every query ended up with prices that were extreme for even a small package. Then in a discussion with a park ranger at Monkey Mia we found out about something different. S
We are in day three of our 11-day trip with our two 8-year-old grandsons. We had a great day at the Evansville, Indiana Zoo on Wednesday. Both boys are really into animals and ran from one exhibit to the next. If there was something to climb on or slide down, so much the better! The Evansville Zoo is a small zoo but the animals are close to the viewer, unlike some larger zoos. They have one tiger, other zoos have more. We were less than six feet from the tiger as he paced his enclosure! The boys
I’ve had several commenters ask questions so I’ll take a little time to answer one of them here. This was written in February and I’m posting it now that our trip has ended.
Regarding the nature of the night sky here in New Zealand. First let me say that you don’t have to go far outside the large cities to experience some of the best dark skies you can imagine. The population is spread thin outside the major cities. One in three people live in Auckland and 85% of New Zealanders live in citi
The campground at Mount Gambier was in a difficult location to find and when we did, it wasn’t the best place to stay. They let us choose our own site which was their way of not having to listen to us complain about the assigned site. We found no level sites and settled for one that was nearly level. It was at the bottom of a slope and back away from the road for some distance. This became a concern when I heard it start raining during the night. As the night went on, the rain continued in
We visited the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, MO this week. The memorial was built immediately following the World War. It was known as The World War at the time because there wasn't a second one and everyone hoped there would never be another one. Of course today we know that wasn't the case. There has been a second world war and a succession of other wars of smaller scale, revolutions, regional wars, proxy wars between world powers, a never ending sequence of violence between
Carnarvon is only about 100 kilometers from Monkey Mia as the Crow flies. We aren’t Crows and we can’t fly in our campervan so we have to drive south for 200 kilometers and then northwest for another 155 kilometers. We made a late start down the road after shopping for groceries and filling with diesel. We took advantage of the discount offered by the grocery store which is pretty standard in Australia. Woolworths, Cole’s and some IGA stores offer a 4 cent per liter discount on fuel at their
By Tuesday we had accomplished all our first priority activities for our stay in Sydney. The forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday was a chance of rain but the rain never materialized. We left the hotel and took a city bus downtown to Circular Key, the heart of the transportation hub in Sydney. The bus route terminates near the ferry terminal and the commuter train station. We went to the ferry terminal and located the Manly Fast Ferry, a ferry service for people traveling to and from destinati
Our second day of touring Chirstchurch we chose to take a tour sponsored by the Canterbury Museum. Titled the Rebuild Tour, this bus trip through downtown Christchurch showed us much of the destruction of two earthquakes, September 4, 2010 Magnitude 7.1 and six months later on February 22, 2011 at Magnitude 6.3, which literally wrecked the city of Christchurch. The theme of the trip was the effort to rebuild the city with building codes that would help the city withstand further earthquakes.
I am one month from my left knee replacement and life is returning to normal. Once off the powerful medication, I began driving when I returned to the rehab facility. I'm slow getting in and out of the car but once there, completely comfortable driving. Rehab is progressing from stretching and improving range of motion to building strength. The pain level in the knee is decreasing and I'm able to sleep better at night. My surgeon has me on extra strength Tylenol now. I thought I would see if I r
We left Yankton, South Dakota, on Saturday morning on our way to Denver, Colorado. We have made this trip in one day many times in the past. This trip would be different. It is Labor Day weekend and we don't have reservations in Denver until Labor Day itself. So we have all day Saturday and Sunday and part of Monday before we have a place to park in Denver.
We drove west on South Dakota Hwy. 50 until we reached US Hwy 18. This is a new route for us. I had set the GPS for Wounded Knee. We
Monday, May 12, we went out to swim with the whalesharks. We chose Ningaloo Whaleshark Swim as the company based on the information we could gather. We were picked up at our park at 7:15 and driven to the dock which is on the other side of the peninsula. There were 19 adults in the group plus three young children. We were transferred to the boat which was anchored offshore and then taken to a reef area. The snorkeling was partly a training exercise for the whaleshark swim which has to be ex
Departing the Geraldton area we noticed a dramatic change from our travels over the last month. We have returned from the Great Australian Outback. Suddenly we were seeing fields of crops and farms. There were still many areas with native plants growing but the sudden change from no farmland to abundant farmland was quite surprising. Along with this, we no longer saw signs for domestic animals, cows and sheep, roaming on the road. This was the end to open range country. Traffic was light o
Port Hedland was an overnight stop, we left in the morning intending to drive to Exmouth on the Exmouth Peninsula to the southwest of Port Hedland. The road route is over 700 kilometers which was a surprise to me. I had looked at the map and figured the distances at something over 400 kilometers. When I programmed the GPS in the morning I thought it must have a different route in mind. So Louise went to the map and confirmed that the distance was going to be over 700 kilometers. We have dri
Northeast of Uluru is an area known as Kings Canyon. The as the crow flies distance is about 120 kilometers but the road distance is more like 300 kilometers. It is a beautiful area of sandstone bluffs and canyons. There are several hikes of interest to us in this location so we spent Easter Sunday driving to this location. We arrived at the Kings Canyon Resort to find that all the powered sites were taken and the rate for unpowered sites were just a few dollars less than those with power.
In one week we have traveled from New York through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick and we are now just outside the city of Quebec. We have visited Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor. The weather was cloudy and threatening rain but we never got more than a light sprinkle. The view from Cadillac Mountain always amazes me. From Ellsworth to Calais we took a different route than in past trips and this rewarded us with new and interesting scenery.
In New Brunswick we stayed o
Arriving in Auckland, New Zealand, our first stop is of course to pass through customs. We filled out the arrival card answering questions about the contents of our luggage, etc. Then we face the agents and answer questions about our answers. It is all pretty routine.
Next, we need to find a way to get to the rental agency to pick up our campervan. We inquire at the airport information desk and are assured that a shuttle will arrive shortly to take us to the rental agency. Within about 15
Fairley is a small town which was the subject of an earlier post on the people and culture of New Zealand. We booked a tour of the Mt. John Observatory when we arrived at the TOP 10 Holiday Park on Sunday, February 23. The weather was mostly cloudy and it was sprinkling rain but I figured we needed to take the chance if we were going to have a chance to visit the observatory. They do day tours but I was most interested in the night tours. Two night tours were offered, one starting at 8:30 ab
Canberra is the national capital of Australia. It is located between Melbourne and Sydney which have a population of about 4 million people in each city. That is 8 million people in a nation of about 14 million. So most of the population of Australia is in these two cities and in the surrounding communities. Once we leave this area we’ll see very few large towns and as we head west, we’ll see fewer people. Canberra itself is not a huge city. The population of Canberra is just over 400,000.
Leaving Lake Argyle on Sunday, May 4 we made a stop for fuel at the first town we came to, Kununurra. It is a small town. We found a grocery store and picked up some of the fruits and vegetables we hadn’t been able to bring across the border. Once that was done we were driving almost all day long. We made another stop for fuel at Halls Creek and ate lunch at that stop then were back on the road until we arrived at our stop for the night in Fitzroy Crossing. This is the place where the road
Preparations for the trip took much of my time in the months leading up to our departure. We had passports but needed international driver’s licenses to be able to rent and drive cars and campervans. The international driver’s license is actually just a translation of the provisions of our US driver’s license into four languages and converting weight and vehicle restrictions into metric units so that someone in a foreign country can assess our driving qualifications and understand what our li
