Traveling North America in our RV, the Ciaowagen

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...

We left New Orleans and arrived in Florida (finally crossing back into Eastern time) on Sunday, April 14. Staying overnight at a Cracker...

Many of our trips (RV and international) start with a seed idea (e.g., visit Alaska, take a photography workshop in the Italian...

After a great month in California, we turned our attentions toward Texas. However, since it would involve a journey of almost 1,200...

NOTE: This is the 2nd of a two-part blog story about our time in California. It's on the long side because there is so much to report....

NOTE: There’s more to write about our time in California than will fit in a reasonable-length blog entry. We’re dividing our California...

In the past, we'd considered bringing the Ciaowagen into Mexico. As you have noted, the subtitle of our blog talks about traveling North...

After our initial cross-country dash, we were finally able to settle in for some quality time in Arizona and Southern California. Our...

We left home on Wednesday, January 24th, with several inches of snow still on the ground of our Virginia home. Our month-long trip to the...

For the past couple of years, our RV trips have taken place in late spring and summer and we've kept to the Northern U.S. and Canada to...

Continuing one of our annual RV traditions, here are the stats for our trip around the Great Lakes: Days on the road: 82 Miles driven by...

After two-and-a-half weeks in Canada, we drove further downstream (east) on the St. Lawrence River and crossed back into the U.S. for...

After our side trip to the Black Hills, it was time to explore the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. Canada is much less populated than...

Here are some things we didn't know about the Great Lakes before starting this year's trip. Hopefully you'll find them interesting as...

While the primary focus of our 2023 RV trip was circuiting the Great Lakes, we'd always planned on a side trip to the Black Hills. We'd...

We arrived on the Upper Peninsula (which pretty much everyone there just calls "the U.P.") on July 12 after a 3.5 hour drive north from...

After finishing our tour of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, we moved to the other side of Lake Michigan for some exploration of Wisconsin....

That's what the license plates say. And, we have to admit, Michigan is a beautiful and largely rural state, once you get away from the...

Leaving our Virginia home on June 8 (where the air quality was Code Purple due to the Canadian wildfires), we traveled north (toward the...

RVs... bad stuff can happen to them. Fortunately, we have the winter off-season to fix them back up. We did not make any internal or...

Since last October, our blog has covered our international travel (to Italy, Patagonia, and Antartica). However, we still have our RV,...

Keeping up a tradition, we've distilled the 2,750 photos taken during the four months of our trip down to our 30 favorites, presented...

Continuing a post-trip tradition, here are this year's stats: Days on the Road:104 (plus 10 at home during the trip) Miles Traveled:...

After six-and-a-half weeks in Canada, we left Niagara Falls, Ontario and crossed the border back into to the US near Buffalo on July 20....

Although it's all in a single province, it took two long days of driving down the St. Lawrence River from the Gaspé Peninsula to reach...

Newfoundland was the farthest east we’d go in our Canadian travels. After returning to Nova Scotia on the ferry and overnighting on Cape...

Newfoundland is an island, albeit a big one. It is considered a single Canadian province with Labrador, which sits on the mainland above...

As we noted in our last blog entry, transmission problems with the Fittata kept us stuck in Virginia. However, our local transmission...

Leaving Vermont, we moved on to Maine for a two-week stay. Since we needed to make a short return to Virginia for a family reunion in...

NOTE: We did a lot in the past two weeks, so this blog entry is longer than some others. Our apologies, but we didn't want to leave...

Returning home from our initial swing to the south, we spent a few days seeing family and restocking the RV, then set off again - this...

Our 2022 RV travels began with a southern swing through Virginia and the Carolinas. We wanted to begin this year’s trip with some...

RVs... Ours is pretty reliable, but it still needs maintenance and fixes. During Winter 2020-21, we'd made some substantial upgrades and...

After wintering at our "sticks and bricks" home, we are ready to get on the road again in our home-on-wheels! As mentioned in our last...

When we bought the Ciaowagen, we said to ourselves "We'll travel for a year. It'll be great!" It was great - so much so that between...

Continuing a tradition from previous years, we're sharing 35 of our favorite photos (plus a few videos) from our 2021 Ciaowagen travels,...

Here's some recent news about Denali National Park that we wanted to share. You may remember that we visited the park twice during our...

Wow! It was a fantastic six months of RV travel - definitely the most wide-ranging since we first took the Ciaowagen on the road in 2018....

We loved Alaska. We loved Canada. We loved the American West. However, we still needed to get ourselves - and the Ciaowagen - the 2,737...