Category: Uncategorized
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Archenland
My first stop in Utah was my campground, a state park conveniently located at the entrance to Canyonlands National Park. Fortunately, it was a nice park with an electrical hookup for my RV. Unfortunately, the park’s name is Dead Horse Point State Park. Yeah, it’s pretty awful. The park is beautiful and deserves a nicer…
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Blue Table to Green Table
This part of the world has lots of steep-sided, flat-topped hills known as “mesas,” the Spanish word for table. Mesa Verde is Spanish for “green table,” while my last campsite was known as Blue Mesa. So I went from the blue table to the green table to see Mesa Verde National Park. Of note, as…
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Sands of Time
I’ll be honest, when I was thinking ahead about parks I would visit this year, Great Sand Dunes National Park in south-central Colorado didn’t top my list of places I was excited about. Beach sand is part of the seaside experience, and enormous inland piles of sand seem like a curiosity perhaps worth a few…
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Rim to River
As promised, I’m following my plan of working during the week and doing national park visits on weekends. This last week was pretty intensely busy, and next week looks the same, but I took time out yesterday to visit what is probably one of the lesser-known national parks, Black Canyon of the Gunnison. My first…
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Altitude Adjustment
As I said at the end of my last post, I found out at the last minute that Wind Cave National Park’s main attraction, Wind Cave, is closed this year because they are redoing the elevator shaft that leads down into the cave. That’s a bummer, and I definitely want to come back sometime when…
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Not-So-Bad Lands
On Tuesday I made it to Badlands National Park in southwest South Dakota. This is actually my second visit to a “badlands” park, as I went in 2021 to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota with a similar kind of terrain. The badlands got their name because they are certainly inhospitable to travelers, with…
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Little RV on the Prairie
My National Parks tour called for me to move on from Voyageurs in Minnesota to Badlands in South Dakota, but the town of De Smet, South Dakota was more or less right on my path, so of course I had to plan a stop there. For those who don’t know, De Smet was the home…
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Voyageuing
Once again I have fallen behind on blogging. I am already juggling to keep up with sightseeing, full-time self-employment with strict deadlines, and grad school. When push comes to shove, blogging becomes a low priority. But I’m going to try to get caught up now. I’ve decided that rather than do one mega-entry, I’ll break…
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Barns and Baseball and Breton
You may not be shocked to hear that the most outstanding feature of rural northern Illinois is corn. Yes, it’s a stereotype, and yes, it’s true. It’s pretty different from the Appalachians, but believe it or not, I find it beautiful too in its own way. The land is such a vibrant green and the…
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From the mountains to the prairies…
Summer of ’24 is underway! I launched my travels with a drive to eastern Tennessee. The start was a little rough as I found I had lost one of the safety clips for my flat tow hitch pin to pull my truck, and the bolt I tried to substitute didn’t do the job and got…
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