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July 11, 2018
I’m a firm believer that if you don’t get out and see the world, you are living a life half lived. Not just because you miss out on the wonders of the world, but you miss out on experiencing life outside of what you are accustomed to living. That all being said – sometimes you just have to get out and check out some local flavor too. I recently got an opportunity to take my teens and some of their friends over to All in Adventures in Fort Wayne to try out an Escape Room. The kids have participated in […]
July 2, 2018
When I say we don’t like crowds – I mean it. We were at the Hoover Dam before anyone else. Waiting patiently for a tour that was not to be. (Broken elevator). We did do the visitor center – very informative, very interesting. We spent quite a bit of time checking it out, and headed out for the rest of the day. If you don’t get a pic in front of the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, it doesn’t count, right? And even though, the gang is never there, we still wanted to see the Pawn Shop. Fremont Street…the kids […]
July 1, 2018
Our last real day of travel has arrived. We are all feeling it a little – ready to head home, but at the same time totally in love with this trip we’ve taken. Or at least most of us are. My daughter is 14, and she’s…well, she’s weary by this point. For our finaly day, we were up by 5am for an early morning hike for a few reasons. 1. The husband and I have done this hike before, and it gets hot down in the cathedral. It’s best done early in the morning. The hike out is brutal, and […]
June 30, 2018
This post wins for longest title ever…but I couldn’t leave any of them off! The day started just outside of the Grand, at our campground at Ten X. I want to stress again that this was in our top 5 campgrounds of the whole trip – and it was TEN DOLLARS a night!! So, I’ve been to the Grand Canyon before. A couple of years ago, the husband and I stopped here at the tail end of our trip through Utah on our way back to Vegas. It was kind of like this: Not that I was unimpressed. It’s pretty, […]
June 29, 2018
From Death Valley, we started heading toward the Grand Canyon. Along the way, we had plans to stop at Seligman. If you’ve got kids, you’ve surely seen the movie Cars. Seligman was the main inspiration for the film. When Interstate 40 was built, Seligman (built right on Route 66) experienced a serious decline. After years of lobbying, local barber, Angel Delgadillo, was able to obtain Historical status for the iconic route. We stopped by his old barbershop (now a tourist-y shop where you can often catch sight of Angel himself), and ate at his late brother Juan’s Snow-Cap Drive-In nearby. From […]
June 28, 2018
The trip from Sequoia to Death Valley was basically uneventful, save for a very fortuitous stop at Gus’s (don’t bother with the grammatical error of that) Jerky. It’s phenomenal, and very worth the stop. Round about here, we got buzzed by what we think was an F-14 Tomcat. But it was going hella fast…and though I was desperately fumbling with my phone, I didn’t catch it. We googled once we got signal again, and as it happens, that gorge pictured above is none other than “Star Wars Canyon”, or what pilots call the “Jedi Transition”. It’s used as a training […]
June 27, 2018
Contrary to the name – you will find no glaciers at Glacier Point. This fact bummed me out. There ARE glaciers in Yosemite – but you have to hike over 14,000 feet peaks to see them, and since I couldn’t hack Vernal Falls – well, yeah, it’s just not happening for me. You will however, find the most amazing view of the Yosemite Valley. Legit, the best view in the park. There used to be hotels up there, but the park wisely chose not to rebuild, making that view accessible to anyone who wanted to drive up. It IS worth […]
June 26, 2018
When you leave Lake Tahoe to the South, you will encounter an agricultural inspection point. They grill you about what kind of fruit you are bringing in and where you got it from. We blew the fellow’s mind because we’d been in California, only very briefly back in Nevada, and then in California again. He asked where we were headed, we said Yosemite, and he asked if we were going in the front way or the back…and we were actually prepared for that one. We really wanted the kids to see it first from Tunnelview. We set out from there, […]
June 25, 2018
Collectively, this was our least favorite stop on the trip. Lake Tahoe is lovely. But… The mountains surrounding this gorgeous lake are incredible. The whole area looks like a postcard. We arrived by noon local time, and desperately wanted to rent a boat – but 30mph winds for the afternoon meant there were no rentals available. Just to get out on the water, we decided to do the MS Dixie II Paddleboat tour to Emerald Cove, and while that was fine, and the Cove itself was very pretty, it was a little underwhelming. AND it meant we missed out on […]
June 24, 2018
It’s said that when Teddy Roosevelt saw Burney Falls, he said it had to be the 8th Wonder of the World. He’s not wrong. (Full disclosure: I have a massive dead-guy crush on Teddy Roosevelt, so I would probably just believe everything he ever said, but, this is legit) Burney Falls and Lassen Volcanic Park are literally in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing near them. There is spotty service at best. But Burney Falls is probably the prettiest waterfall I’ve ever seen. Lassen is kind of like mini-Yellowstone, but we didn’t get to experience much of it. It’s lovely. […]
June 23, 2018
You’ve seen those pictures of sea glass beaches on the west coast. They say that the beaches at Fort Bragg were once so covered with sea glass that you can see nothing but glass everywhere. They are no longer like this. Or rather, there may be one more – but it’s only accessibly via boat. And I didn’t have a boat. We did stop to check it out, and while it wasn’t nearly as epic as we hoped, it was pretty cool. There is still enough that it’s quite visible, most being green, brown or white. The hunt for chunks […]
June 22, 2018
If you are going to do Alcatraz, I suggest doing the earliest tour possible. At the time of writing this – that’s the 8:45. I also suggest skipping the little ranger talk they give you when you first arrive. They’ll tell you it’s mandatory – it’s not. And the only valuable piece of information they give you is the location of the bathrooms. Really, it’s just a diversion to leave space between you and the group in front of you – and if you happen to be on the first tour, AND you skip that, you will be alone in […]
