We didn’t know it yet at the beginning of 2025, but this would be our last year of full-time RV living. (Read to the end to find out why!) Looking back at everything we did, though, we definitely didn’t slack off at all on our adventures!
January
New Year’s Day found us in Everglades National Park (our 57th of the 63 U.S. national parks) as we continued the 3 1/2-month tour around the Florida peninsula that we had begun in November with our friends Marilyn and Stan.
From the Everglades, we began the northbound leg of our journey, first visiting the white sand beaches of the Naples area, followed by a week in Cape Coral and Fort Myers.
Our next stop was the Tampa/St. Petersburg area, where we explored the white sand beaches, the Chihuly Collection at the Morean Arts Center in St. Pete, and had a hands-on encounter with…elephants. In Florida? Yep, and we have the photos and videos here:
Blog post: Elephant Caretaker Experience at Myakka Elephant Ranch
We spent a few days at Sumter Oaks RV Park in Bushnell (which is legally our residential address, but this was our first time staying there!) to visit with more RVing friends in that area and to spend a day at nearby Weeki Wachee Springs State Park.
February
At Silver Springs State Park, we kayaked on the Silver River among manatees, anhingas, and turtles and wondered at all the sights we could see in the crystal-clear spring water from one of the park’s famous glass-bottom boats:
Blog post: Silver Springs State Park, Florida
After that, we chilled out for a few days at Low-Key Hideaway RV Park, where we decided that every RV site should have an honest-to-goodness tiki bar next to it:
Blog post: Cedar Key, Florida
From Cedar Key, we continued northward up and around Florida’s Big Bend and into the state’s panhandle, relaxing on the white sand beaches of Port St. Joe, Panama City Beach and Topsail Hill State Preserve before our final stop in the Pensacola area, where we finally said goodbye to our wonderful traveling companions.
Three days of driving later, we arrived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for a couple of weeks of visiting family and taking care of our annual checkups with our doctors.
March
Ten days into March, we left DFW and turned our wheels westward for the three-day drive to Arizona. We spent a week working as volunteer staff in the information booth at the Escapees RV Club’s annual Escapade in Tucson, and then returned to our lot at the SKP Saguaro Co-op in Benson, Arizona. There, we reunited with our many friends who had spent the winter together at the Co-op.
April & May
We were grateful for some downtime in Benson after all our travels during the first three months of the year! But we remained busy as we prepared for our long-anticipated six-week independent living and learning program with Road Scholar in Florence, Italy. We left Tucson on April 24 and didn’t return to Arizona until June 8. We posted on our Facebook page and our blog almost every day during this incredible experience:
Blog post: Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip
June
After returning from Italy and spending a few days in Benson recovering from the crazy effects of crossing nine time zones (and sweating in the early summer heat of Arizona), we embarked on our summer RV trip. We spent a week in Clarkdale, Arizona, where we returned to visit some of the areas around Cottonwood, Jerome, and Sedona that we’d missed during our first year on the road in 2016.
We also spent a week in Flagstaff, which we had not visited before, where we enjoyed the slightly cooler temperatures that came with the higher elevation. While we were there, we spent a full day and evening at the famous Lowell Observatory (where the planet Pluto was discovered) and visited Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument.
July
The first week of July found us in Panguitch, Utah for the Red Rocks of Utah Escapees Hangout. This was our very first time attending a Hangout as regular participants rather than the directors of the program, and we thoroughly enjoyed it!
As we continued north, we stopped for a couple of nights in Cascade, Idaho, to visit RVing friends and former Escapade Directors Jean and Duane, who now live there.
Our next destination was a week-long stay in Chelan County, Washington, near North Cascades National Park. We took a day trip by ferry to the remote town of Stehekin, at the northern end of Lake Chelan, wandered the Bavarian town of Leavenworth, and saw a delightful performance of The Sound of Music that used the hills around the stage as the setting for some of the mountain scenes.
From the North Cascades area, we headed to the northwestern corner of Washington State to spend a week with our dear RVing friends Jason and Lisa, who now have a house in Lynden. While we were there, they took us into their native Canada twice: once for a food tour on Granville Island, and a second time to bike the seawall around Stanley Park and downtown Vancouver.
On our last day in the Lynden area, just a couple hours after we received a photo from our friend Faith of her with Cheryl’s mother, Roberta, Cheryl got the sad and unexpected news that her mom had passed away from a sudden cardiac arrest. She had just celebrated her 85th birthday in May, and in our grief, we were also happy that she had been happy, smiling, and independent right until the end.
We had planned to spend the following week at the Evergreen Coho SKP Co-op in Chimacum, on the Olympic Peninsula. But instead, Cheryl caught a red-eye flight to DFW, I moved our RV to a spot on Jason and Lisa’s street the next day, and then flew to Dallas the day after to join Cheryl and her family members as we remembered her mom, the last of our parents to leave us.
August
In early August, we returned to Washington to retrieve our RV and pick up our travel itinerary. We spent the next 17 days on the Olympic Peninsula, catching up with friends and visiting several different areas of Olympic National Park:
Blog posts:
Our circumnavigation of the Olympic Peninsula concluded in Olympia, where we spent a week with our RVing friends (yes, in case you haven’t realized it by now, we have a LOT of RVing friends!) Deb and Chuck at their gorgeous residential RV park. They were kind enough to show us around Vashon Island and downtown Olympia, and we got to enjoy many meals and evenings with them–including some wood-fired pizza that rivaled the best ones we had in Italy:
Blog post: Olympia, Washington
We ended August with a few days near Mount Rainier National Park, which was the last of the national parks in the lower 48 states that Cheryl hadn’t yet visited (I had been there in 1986):
Blog post: Mount Rainier National Park
Early September
From northwestern Washington, we began moving more quickly in anticipation of our upcoming trip back to Italy. We spent Labor Day weekend in Winlock, Washington, with our friends Cindi and Roger, who were our Covid “isolation pod-mates” for five months during 2021 on their property in rural Utah.
Then we swung through Hillsboro, Oregon, to catch up with my college friend Brett, who was also in our wedding party.
From the Portland area, our southbound route jogged eastward a bit to Crater Lake, which had been too smoky on our first visit in 2017 for us even to see the surface of the water. Fortunately, the weather this time was much better:
Blog post: Crater Lake National Park
We made an overnight stop in Rogue River, Oregon, near Medford, to see more RVing friends, Tania and Warren, and visit the Rogue Gorge.
And just a couple of days later, we were in Sacramento, California, where we packed for our three-month trip to Dallas and Italy and prepared to put our truck and fifth wheel into storage while we were gone.
Mid-September to Mid-November
On September 11, we flew from Sacramento to DFW for our semi-annual doctor and dentist visits, catching up with friends, and celebrating Rosh Hashanah with our community at Adat Chaverim in Plano. Twelve days later, we were on our way back to Italy for almost nine weeks to continue our Italian language studies and check out possible cities where we might live.
Blog posts:
November and December
We returned to Sacramento on November 22, retrieved our RV from storage, re-stocked the refrigerator and freezer, and then drove the short distance to Pleasanton, California, where my brother Mark and his family live. My other brother, Mike, and his family flew in from Colorado, and Ethan flew in from Plano, so that we could all celebrate Thanksgiving in one place for the first time since our mother passed away in 2020. Unfortunately, our daughter Lauren and her husband Tom, who live in Wisconsin, and Mark and Stacy’s younger son Daniel, who was away at school in northern California, were unable to join us, but the rest of the family had a great time together.
After Thanksgiving, we spent a day in San Francisco with Cheryl’s Uncle Kenn and Aunt Esther, and went to Los Gatos to catch up with my longtime work colleague Derek and his wife Susan. (See, we do have a few friends outside the RV community!)
Our last stop in California before heading back to Benson was a weekend in Northridge to visit with Cheryl’s father’s cousins Robin, Dana, Audra, and their families. We enjoyed big family-style meals with them over the weekend.
On December 9, we finally rolled back into our co-op lot in Benson, where we will stay until early March of next year. We’re glad to be back together with our Escapees friends for happy hours, parties, trivia nights at a local bar, and all the other social activities that make SKP Saguaro such an enjoyable place to spend the winter.
Big changes ahead for 2026
Of course, our biggest news of the year–just in case you missed it–is that we decided to move to Italy! We wrote about the reasons behind this huge, exciting next chapter in our lives here:
Blog post: From RV Life to Italian Dreams: Our Next Adventure
With the help of a firm in Italy, we have been working since mid-summer through the complicated process of obtaining our long-term residency visas. And just this week, the Italian authorities notified us that we have cleared the most challenging hurdle in that journey. So even though there is still plenty of paperwork and bureaucracy remaining, we now have one-way airline tickets for our move to Lecco, in the region of Lombardy, on March 17, 2026!
Even though we’ll no longer be full-timing, we’ll still be “Landmark Adventures” on our blog and on our Facebook page, and we’ll continue to share our travels in both places. We would love to have you follow along! All you need to do is subscribe below, and our new posts will land in your email inbox as soon as we publish them so that you don’t miss a thing. (We don’t monetize this blog and don’t sell or rent our list of subscribers, so the only thing you’ll ever get from us is our new posts.)
We wish you and all our friends and family a happy, healthy, and exciting year in 2026. Arrivederci e buone feste! – Goodbye (for now) and happy holidays!
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Wow what a year! Thanks for taking us along on your journeys as always! We’re very excited for the next landmark in your adventures… your move to Lecco, Italy! 🇮🇹 look forward to seeing you there sometime in 2026! 🎉👏 – Julie and Marc