Traveling North America in our RV, the Ciaowagen

We are headed east, back toward Virginia. On our way, we are visiting some national parks and monuments that were closed by COVID-19 in the spring, but have now re-opened. This blog post is the first of two about those explorations. First, we need to catch you up... After visiting the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, we spent a few days relaxing and resting up at Arizona's Lake Lyman State Park. As the name implies, it's located around a lake, although that lake was much smalle

[NOTE: This blog entry follows on directly from our last one, profiling our travels in the first half of September 2020. We'd decided to...

We left Idaho after spending the month of August there, and first traveled south into Nevada. Nevada is a state with wide open spaces -...

After sweltering in Utah, we were glad to get to the cooler temperatures of Idaho at the beginning of August. We'd only been in Idaho...

So, we are spending August in Idaho, and we will have a blog post about Idaho soon, but eastern Idaho (where we first arrived) is just...

Our intention for a while has been to move from Colorado northwest into Idaho, but with a couple of stops along the way. First up, five...

Continuing our time in Colorado, we traveled south from Black Canyon to the small town of Ouray (pronounced "YOU-ray"). It bills itself...

Before leaving the eastern side of the Rockies, we spent three days in Fort Collins, visiting our longtime friend Marge Corcoran - she...

NOTE: We've upgraded the "Travels" tab on our website to show more about past and future plans. Check it out! After three months in...

On June 9th, we left the Grand Canyon and headed south to Williams, Arizona. Williams is the town where people who take the train up to...

As with many national parks, the Grand Canyon closed in mid-March due to COVID-19. In hopes that it would reopen, we made reservations for four different periods in May and June. The first reservation was cancelled, but we managed to get into the park on the first day it re-opened for camping, June 5. It was a great time to be there. Because the park had just reopened, there were no people coming to stay in the hotels, no one riding the train up for the day, no tour buses, an

As COVID "watch and wait" continued, we relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico in early May. As noted in a previous post, we'd enjoyed our...

Before there was a Ciaowagen, there was another Smith family RV, one with no name. Our experience in the RV-With-No-Name led, years...

One of the reasons we decided to hunker down in Tucson, Arizona (and wait on COVID-19 developments) was so we could stay at Desert Trails...

NOTE: On April 10, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of getting on the road for our full-time travels. It's been a great adventure...

As COVID-19 continued closing in, we spent about a week in Texas. Our original plans had included both Austin and San Antonio, and we did...

Wow, life in the time of coronavirus is changing rapidly. We just spent a few days in the New Orleans area. Friday we went into town and...

After a couple of weeks at home in Virginia, we drove the 800 miles back to St. Augustine, Florida, and settled in to explore America's...

When we decided to include Florida in our 2020 travel plans, we knew that part of those plans would include Orlando and time at both...

Leaving Virginia in freezing temperatures, the first part of our 2020 adventures took us to Florida. On the way down, we spent a few days...