Traveling North America in our RV, the Ciaowagen

Leaving the Glacier NP rains behind, we crossed the border into Canada on June 30. There was no line at the Chief Mountain border station, and we crossed over in about two minutes. In most of our Ciaowagen travel years, we run into a lot of Canadians at U.S. campgrounds. We've seen a lot fewer this year (probably since the most visited national parks now cost four times as much as they did last year for foreign travelers). Also, Parks Canada has been offering free admission

Our last blog posted documented our visit to Yellowstone, one of the crown jewels of the national park system, and America's (and the world's) very first national park. Grand Teton National Park On June 22, we drove south through Yellowstone to reach Grand Teton National Park, which sits directly below Yellowstone in Wyoming. We'd visited the Tetons with the Ciaowagen in 2019 and 2020. The park is about 45 miles long and 20 miles wide, encompassing most of the Teton mountain

We needed to return to Northern Virginia in early June for about 10 days to attend a family reunion, a family wedding, and many doctor appointments. While there, we kept the Ciaowagen in a campground very close to the Boise airport. Smith family reunion in Lancaster, PA. Great to spend time with Doug's siblings, nieces and nephews, and great-nieces and -nephews. This is jeannette's niece Kat Morris and her fiancé Jared at the wedding rehearsal celebration. We returned to Bois

Baker We left Moab for Baker on Thursday, May 21. As Moab sits close to the Utah-Colorado border, we headed pretty much due west for 330 miles, crossing the entire state. Baker is just over the Nevada border, and we moved into Pacific Daylight Time for a few days. The last 50-60 miles of the drive was through empty desert - just sagebrush, salt flats, sand, and a whole lot of nuthin'. The town of Baker is quite small, with a campground, a motel, a general store, a gas station

We traveled to Moab on May 12, and on our way from Capitol Reef National Park to Moab we stopped at Goblin Valley State Park (which according to at least one list is "The Best State Park in Utah"). Goblin Valley State Park The valley is full of compact hoodoos that look like they're made of mud but are in fact Entrada Sandstone (the same material that makes up Arches National Park). Hoodoos are rock formations that have very solid stone on top and softer layers of stone benea

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

NOTE: Have you ever looked at the " Maps " tab on the Ciaowagen website ? On it, you can see the progress of our 2026 trip-so-far, as well as maps for every Ciaowagen travel year since 2018. You can also see where we're currently located, and upcoming travel plans for the next few weeks. We update all that frequently. We left our Virginia home on March 1, right after the last of the February snows had melted. One of the challenges with planning a vacation in the western part

Happy 2026, readers! After a few surgeries during the late fall and winter (feels like the price of admission once you're in your 70s...), Doug and Jeannette are both ready to get on the road again, and so is the Ciaowagen! You may remember that our 2025 Ciaowagen adventures ended prematurely when our RV's engine crapped out while we were in Nashville, TN and had to be replaced. Fortunately that's all been taken care of. The Ciaowagen is like a heart transplant patient with

Continuing a tradition, here are some of our favorite photos from this year's travels. We've included photos both from our April-May trip to Scandinavia and our September-October Ciaowagen trip on the Great River Road down the Mississippi. Boat Trip on the Sognefjord, Norway Norwegian coastline from the MS Richard With ferry Norwegian coastal sunset A very typical (but amazing) view of the Norwegian cost from the Coastal Express ferry Walking in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, 10:30

Continuing a blog tradition, here are some statistics for this past year's Ciaowagen travel: Days spent on the road: 58 (plus 3 retrieving the Ciaowagen from Nashville) Miles traveled by the Ciaowagen: 4,874 Additional Miles traveled by the Fittata: 2,390 TOTAL miles traveled: 7,264 States visited: 15 Campgrounds visited: 20 Fellow RVers traveled with: 29 (in 15 RVs) Depth of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca: 10 inches Depth of the Mississippi River at New Orleans: 200 fe

If you read our last blog post , you'll know that we had a serious hiccup as we were returning to Virginia from New Orleans at the completion of our Great River Road group trip down the Mississippi River. Our engine died. We confess that the Ciaowagen has more than 105,000 miles on the odometer, 73,000 of those added by us since 2018. Our 2018-2025 travels, mapped out on Google Earth Although we've had multiple repairs/upgrades to the Ciaowagen during that time, the underlyin

As we said goodbye to our fellow Caravan Adventures travelers, we turned our sights to home, a trip that we thought would last about three weeks. Baton Rouge, LA Our first segment took us just an hour-and-a-half north to Baton Rouge, the Louisiana state capital. We took it easy on our arrival day, decompressing from the pace of the group activities. Interesting side note: we bought the Ciaowagen from Miller's RV, a Baton Rouge dealer, in May 2018. On Saturday, we participated

We ended our last blog post in St. Louis, the halfway point of our trip down the Mississippi River. After a long driving day, we arrived in... Memphis, TN Caravan Adventures, our travel company, booked us into the campground across the street from Graceland. We'd stayed at the campground once before all the way back in 2019, our first year of RV travel. Our first full day in town was a bus day and a rainy one (although we had been very lucky so far on the trip, with little

NOTE: This is the 150th post on the Ciaowagen blog! Amazing that we've been able to keep it going these past seven years. Thank you to...

Our caravan trip down the Mississippi River would begin in northern Minnesota. We gave ourselves a couple of weeks to make the 1,500-mile...

Except for two recent weekend camping trips, the Ciaowagen has been sitting in storage since August 2024. During the intervening time, we...

It's been a blog tradition to select - from the thousands of photos we take each trip - our favorite 20-30 to share with our readers. We...

Continuing a tradition... here are factoids from our winter bi-coastal trip: Days on the road: 111 Miles traveled in the Ciaowagen: 8,850...