After selling our cruising sailboat in Panama and doing a massive roadtrip in our 2007 BlueBird All-American Skoolie (Bus) across the US, we purchased our adventure base in Southern California. The Adventure Base is located in a small town with a very, very warm summer climate, so we took off during June to do some traveling, touristy stuff and tent camping. This trip allowed us to meet all of these goals…in spades. The trip we did from Southern California up to Montana and back over the course of nearly three weeks was ALOT of driving and a lot of camping. We broke up the trip a bit by allowing ourselves a few single night stops at hotels located in towns we thought would be interesting…allowing for laundry, wifi and some site seeing. The longest driving day we had was from Zion to Dinosaur, as the drive wasn’t all freeways and included some stretches that could be called challenging, mainly just because of the miles and the need to slow down on some of the roads. But we had planned accordingly and 95% of the trip involved tent camping. Weather didn’t always cooperate with us and we were rained on several nights in a row, but that also didn’t stop us from doing the drives or getting out and seeing the sights.
For a trip of this length, the planning for camp sites was critical, as most of the places are fairly popular and normally booked solid. Our saving grace was that we were content to only stay one or two nights in most places and were not looking to for longer stays. We just would not have been able to book longer stays, but this in turn led us to break down and set up our camp multiple times, which became a bit tedious.
This trip took us from Southern California to Zion, Dinosaur, Cheyenne, Mt Rushmore, Windcave National Park (Black Hills), Little Bighorn National Monument, Billings, Bozeman (Spire Rock Campground), through Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Logan, Nephi (Ponderosa Uinta Campground), Las Vegas and back to Southern California.
This is the introduction post to the road-trip series I’m going to write in the next few weeks, detailing our June roadtrip and camping tour of the western US. Since we’ve already done the whole west coast of the US previously, we thought these states and various national parks and monuments would be interesting and fun to see as we put some miles on during the extreme summer heat where our house is located. The trip didn’t disappoint. More posts to come, but I’ll break them up a week at a time.
