Roaming the world in search of new adventures, experiences and friends
Roaming the world in search of new adventures, experiences and friends
June 22, 2017 marked one year since Cheryl and I pulled out of the RV park in Aubrey and began the adventure of a lifetime. It's hard to decide exactly which date to call our "nomadiversary". Was it when we moved into our rig (June 5), when we closed on the…
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https://youtu.be/ibuYWwo9JU0 Riding the Alaska Railroad's historic Hurricane Turn Train is an authentic Alaskan experience quite unlike anything else in the state. Departing from Talkeetna, about 130 miles south of the entrance to Denali National Park, the Hurricane Turn leaves modernity behind as it travels 57 miles northward through the backcountry…
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https://youtu.be/DIkat2azOXs Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve is one of the crown jewels of America's national park system: six million acres of virtually untamed land, bisected by one 92-mile-long ribbon of road that passes through low-elevation taiga forest to high alpine tundra. Two-thirds of this area, added by the Alaska National Interest…
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https://youtu.be/K23VX4SDIkg The first "big excursion" of our 2017 Alaska trip was a guided journey by boat, on foot and by canoe to the Davidson Glacier, a few miles south of Haines. Cheryl found this tour online, and as soon as we read the description along with all the 5-star reviews on…
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Skagway, once a Klondike gold-rush boomtown, today thrives mainly on tourism. We'd been here twice before on Alaskan cruises, so we'd done many of the day excursions in the area. After spending all day yesterday exploring the downtown Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park on three ranger-led tours, we were…
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In the almost two months since we left the Los Angeles area, we’ve been on a steady march up the West Coast. The longest we’ve stayed in any one place during that time was one week, and many of our stays have been only two or three nights. We knew that we needed to be near Seattle for a flight back to Dallas for a few days in early May; we chose that location so that after we returned, we’d be ready to cross the Canadian border for our summer trip to Alaska.
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We stumbled upon what initially looked to be an unassuming art gallery in Old Town Bandon-by-the-Sea on the southern Oregon coast. Once inside, however, we realized that it was actually much more than that. Huge sculptures filled the space, and when we looked at them closely, we realized that each of them was made from thousands of pieces of trash!
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This past Monday, we continued our exploration of California’s redwood coast (and checked another national park off our list!) at Redwood National and State Parks. John Steinbeck called the redwoods “ambassadors from another time”, and he was right.
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One of our “must-sees” in northern California was the tallest living things on earth are the Coast Redwoods, sequoia sempervirens. Sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, groves of these stately trees covered much of the northern hemisphere. The ice age and subsequent changes in climate and topography eliminated most of these giants,
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With heavy rain in the forecast for the next several days, I decided to spend the afternoon exploring nearby Patrick’s Point State Park, a densely tree- and meadow-covered headland that juts into the Pacific Ocean. The entrance to the park is just a few hundred yards down the road from Azalea Glen, so I walked there from our house.
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