Traveling North America in our RV, the Ciaowagen

Utah has 5 national parks, all in the southern half of the state, and we planned to visit them all. We crossed into Utah from Arizona on April 30, changing time zones (to Mountain Daylight Time) in the process. Zion National Park Our first destination was a small campground in Mount Carmel Junction, which lies close to eastern entrance to Zion National Park. Zion is the 2nd most visited national park, and most people come to it via the town of Springdale on the southern side

We left Tucson on Wednesday, April 15. Before departing town, we had the six tires on the Ciaowagen changed. RV tires tend to age out rather than wear out, with the rubber deteriorating from sun damage, and our tires were five years old. They also had 60,000 miles on them. We headed north to the Phoenix area, about a two hour drive. We parked the RV at the Elks Lodge in Tempe (near Phoenix). During the drive north from Tucson, we discovered that the dashboard air conditioning

Our last blog post focused primarily on our adventures in the Tucson desert. We've moved on to northern Arizona, but wanted the opportunity to share some of the other things we did during our time in the Tucson area. Some of these were repeats of past experiences. Others were entirely new for us. Mount Lemmon Skyway This beautiful road travels 12 miles up from the valley floor to the summit of Mount Lemmon. The road has a number of pulloffs, offering spectacular views of Tucs

We arrived at Desert Trails RV Park on Saturday, March 14. This is one of our favorite campgrounds, and we'd been here before in 2019 , 2020 , and 2024 . It's an RV park that caters to "snowbirds." When we began planning this trip in November 2025, we'd hoped to spend two months at Desert Trails, but the recovery from Jeannette's two bunion surgeries shortened that time to one month. You can see the Ciaowagen on the left side of this photo of part of the campground. During t