After our Wednesday wanderings of Portland, Oregon and Crater Lake National Park, we finally found our way back to California after nearly 4 months. We initially had planned to drive to Eureka, CA, but instead drove all the way to Sacramento, CA (although we still did drive through the Redwoods National Park and state [...]

“It’s time to go,” says Travis, so here goes:

Crater Lake National Park was underwhelming for us — this was partially our fault, and partially the fault of mother nature. We left Portland, Oregon early afternoon and weren’t slated to hit Crater Lake until around 5pm. This would have been fine on a normal [...]

After spending a few days in Calgary, we are finally back to our actual driving and road trip wanderings. Today we made the journey from Calgary to Banff, which was a fairly short drive (~80 miles). Banff National Park is Canada’s oldest national park, established in 1885 — it’s located in the Canadian [...]

Our stay in Montana was fairly quick (1.5 days), but we stopped at a few different places Travis remembered from when he was here a long time ago to see how they’ve changed. The first place we stopped was Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, which was a former open pit copper mine active 1955 [...]

Originally we were planning to spend 2 days in Yellowstone, but once we got there we decided that one super action packed 10 hour day would be sufficient. We did a good portion of the figure-8 road through Yellowstone, and I think we hit most of the important stuff (and if we missed something, [...]

It seems I forgot to post the links to my Mount Rushmore pictures yesterday, which is fine since the light was better this morning so I took new ones. Like I said, we were too cheap to pay the $10 to get into their parking lot and visitor’s center, mostly because we have the [...]

Today we went to Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore.
I was excited we found deer, sheep (and lambs) and a solitary buffalo along our travels. There were also a lot of scenic rocks. I thought it was nice since it was a good change from the city environments we’ve seen so [...]

Have I been bad at posting these past few days?
Travis and I are in Florida now — got here last Friday and we stopped in Pensacola, Gulf Islands, Panama City, Apalachicola, Cedar Key, Tampa, Naples, and now Marathon, which is in the Florida Keys. I haven’t really posted much, because we’ve been pretty [...]

Yesterday (Tuesday) we went to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico (we are trying to do the best we can with our National Parks Annual Pass). We got there too late to go in the “natural cave entrance” so instead we got to take the 75 story elevator down to the “big [...]

#1 - Random Sand Dune swirls
#2 - a Yucca plant (I finally learned the name of the plant after I got bored of calling them “stunted palm trees with alien fronds”
#3 - close-up of the Yucca flower/frond
#4 - some sand dune flowers
#5 - little beetle struggling to climb a dune
#6 - some plants in a [...]