An extended road trip in our truck camper to visit more national parks and monuments — while avoiding forest fires and COVID-19 restrictions.
This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 Well, all good things must come to an end and ours ended a bit prematurely with an unscheduled need to get home. We had hoped to take the Pacific Coast route going back, but with the flare-up of the Glass and Zogg fires,…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 From Lake Powell, we made the quick trip into Utah to begin a 10-day visit to five of the state’s national parks and monuments. We had been to some of these before, but this time we were going with friends and we had…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 When I was in school, we learned about the Anasazi and Mesa Verde. It was cast as this big “woo woo” mystery, as if an entire population simply disappeared. After traveling around the Southwest US and Mexico for many years, it has become…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 In travel, sometimes change is thrust upon you, and sometimes you just feel like changing. Our plan was to leave the Vegas area and to spend 3-4 days up at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We were doing that to kill…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 There were lots of things that we wanted to see around Las Vegas, without actually going there (too many crowds and unmasked people). Our first stop was the second of our “discoveries” during the trip re-plan — Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument. …
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 After leaving Lava Beds National Monument, we needed an intermediate stop on our way to Devil’s Postpile and I had actually never seen Lake Tahoe before — or any of the other famous places like Squaw Valley. It seemed like a natural. A…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 As we headed south from Newberry, the smoke became thicker in nearly all directions. At one point, Deb asked if we were driving into a fire. I suggested that they would have closed the road if that were the case. Having said that,…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 After getting our truck’s air conditioner fixed, it was time to head down to the Newberry National Volcanic Monument — just a short drive from Bend, OR. Two very important things struck us as we pulled in: (1) the park was officially closed…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 We started our trip to Mt. Hood with a detour to get the truck’s air conditioner fixed. We were actually quite fortunate to find a small diesel mechanic shop who could do the work since most of the dealerships and big repair shops…
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This is part of a series called COVID and Fire Tour 2020 It’s a little weird — we’ve lived in WA state since 2009, have been to the other national parks in the state multiple times, and yet this was our first trip to Mt. Rainier. I suspect it’s because you always see it in…
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