Over the last five weeks, the Great Lakes Rendezvous Trip Plan has gone through five more iterations. It is now nearly complete. We will be leaving towards the end of April and return the tail end of July. The trip, barring unexpected events, will take 100 days, which makes it the longest road trip we’ve ever done. The long-pole-in-the-tent was the stay at Isle Royale National Park. That’s an island, so there are no RV campgrounds there and the boat ride to get there takes a full six hours. This is not one of those parks, even like Dry Tortugas off of Key West, where you hop over, spend the day and come on back. You have to spend at least one night there. And there are only two options for spending the night. One is ... read more

2017.7.6 Last post on this trip, I laid out the bucket list of national parks, monuments, and lakeshores that I wanted to see in the states bordering the Great Lakes. Next step in the process was to research each of those parks, determine what kinds of things we wanted to see and do and come up with a liberal estimate of the number of days we might want to spend in each of the parks. Researching a park requires looking them up in various reference books (I especially use two from National Geographic), going to the nps.gov websites for each of the parks, and looking at the Chimani apps for additional information and ideas. As I research each of the parks, I also collect information about campgrounds, lodging, restaurants, fees, and, important to us, the policies ... read more

The first step in planning Northern Lights is to lay out the bucket list. This is really a pretty easy thing to do. First, we consult our main bucket list source, The Complete National Parks of the United States, put out by National Geographic. The last chapter in the book is all about Alaska and starts with a map of the state, highlighting, in green, all of the National Park Units. There are 19 of them listed in the book. But that is just the starting point. The list goes through a series of steps deleting and adding items to the itinerary. For example, we already filter the Park Service lists to remove those units where it just isn’t likely that we are going to find things that we can see or do. Wilderness areas and ... read more

Now that all the checks have cleared and credit card statements have been reconciled, I am finally in a position to figure out just how much this wonderful trip cost us. There are several difficulties in deriving such a number. Clearly, gasoline is one element, but is it fair to include car maintenance? On the one hand, driving the car adds mileage which expresses itself in higher maintenance costs. But eventually, those maintenance costs would have been realized anyway. So, although the trip meant that the car had to be serviced early, that isn't exactly a direct cost of the trip. Similarly with the trailer - while operational costs, like propane, are clearly a direct cost of the trip, maintenance work on the trailer really isn’t. What should be counted are items directly related to the ... read more

Qhouse, Questa, New Mexico Made it home, safe and sound! Drove the last 200 miles home from eastern New Mexico. Took US64 all the way to Eagles Nest and then up and around the Enchanted Circle to home. Stopped for a hamburger and a margarita at the St. James Hotel in Cimarron, always a good bet. Saw a bit more rain at lunch and on the way, but nothing like the night before. Although I haven't checked out all the systems in detail yet, QHouse appears to have made it through Spring just fine. Batteries were fully charged when we got home, and the water system is working. No signs of any vandalism or any other damage from three months of neglect. There is a fresh crop of weeds in the front yard, but otherwise, everything ... read more