After two travel days and 720 miles, we arrived at our RV Resort in the Naples area. It's really nice with many resort amenities: pools, putting greens, tennis courts, shuffle board, bocci ball courts, exercise room, laundries, and an auditorium style function hall that holds 180. The resort has 500 or so sites. Some have so called "park model" trailers (think double-wide) and the rest are either motorcoach sites or trailer sites like ours. You can buy a trailer site here for about $130,000, but since it costs about $2000 per month to rent, we would be dead before we broke even. The place has many activities, including dinners, dances, aerobics classes, golf putting tournaments, and lots more even stained glass artwork making. So far, we like it a lot and will probably return next year. ... read more

Tuesday August 16th: Today we went to Acadia National Park and drove the 27-mile scenic Park Loop, a beautiful one-way road that follows the rocky coast. You can spend a week here exploring all the scenic drives and much longer if you are a hiker. There is a free bus service that goes to all the scenic locations, but we drove, since we had our truck with us anyway. Cadillac Mountain, in Acadia National Park, is the highest point on the Atlantic Coast, with 360-degree views of Bar Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. The pictures indicate what a beautiful day it was. One scenic location along the Park Loop was Sandy Beach. Sandy Beach had a lot of people braving the cold water (in the 50’s). Another interesting location with the largest crowds was Thunder Hole. ... read more

On Tuesday, August 2nd, we arrived in Medora, ND, home of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the badlands of North Dakota. The time Roosevelt spent here in the 1880’s shaped his attitudes and philosophies regarding conservation. We took a 36 mile scenic loop drive through the park and tried to capture the beauty of the soft sedimentary rocks that have been carved into various shaped mounds and cliffs over millions of years. The entire park is fenced in, so that domestic animals, like horses, will not mix with the wild species. Prairie dogs, once almost extinct, now have established numerous prairie dog towns. They chirp and squeak among themselves when approached by danger – like a camera bug. The colors on the sandstone rocks were thin horizontal stripes and ranged from jade green and burnt orange to ... read more

BE SURE TO SCROLL DOWN BELOW ADVERTISING TO SEE ALL PICTURES. We stopped two nights on the way from Oak Harbor to Banff National Park in a resort town that I had never heard of, Kelowna, British Columbia. After that, we set off for Banff. We traveled most of that distance on the Trans Canada Highway. The Trans-Canada Highway is not like our interstates. For most of our trip to Banff, it was two lanes only with limited passing. The road followed lakes and riverbeds and then went up and through the mountains including Rogers Pass, almost 4000 feet in altitude. About 80 miles west of Banff, it became a “fenced and divided through-way". The entire length, on both sides had unobtrusive but strong looking fencing. Periodically we passed under bridges with trees growing on ... read more

We woke up to brilliant sunshine and headed for The Gallery, a beautifully manicured golf course, which is part of the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. We were paired with a nice couple from Oak Harbor and we all agreed that the golf course and the weather made for a perfect 10 round of golf, although playing an unknown course for the first time probably added 10 strokes to our game. I wanted to take pictures at every hole, but golf requires a lot of concentration and effort. I managed to get a couple of fleeting glimpses of the P-3 anti-submarine planes, which were on maneuvers overhead. Those plus the F18's made it fascinating.... read more