Map of Road Trip 7

September 2017 to February 2018   Five months.  

We saw so much history and beauty, and had so many nights of the only sounds being those of nature and the only lights being the stars.  We hiked 430 miles and only on one occasion did we see any other hikers where we were.  We got to connect with Ian, Owen, Kathy and Bill and hike with them.  

We are already planning Road Trip 8.  It will be different because we will have our new home in Mesa as a base,  but mostly the same traveling, camping and hiking.  We can't wait. 

"Get me out of here!!!"

Our camper has issued us a threat.  No longer will it allow us to use it if we are going to mistreat it by taking it away from the sunshine of the Southwest and bringing it here.

We are trying to reason with it, and explain how we wanted to return home to see family, etc., but it is still holding its ground.

Can't say as we blame it. 

Marina is a teenager and Stella is ten!

We are home again and get to have another Stellerina Birthday party!  But how did Marina get to be 13 years old!  And how in the world could Stella be ten!

They are now quite proficient jewelers.  They have progressed beyond plastic beads.  Their talent deserves sterling silver and semiprecious stones.  These stones can cost $30-50 a strand at a jewelry/bead store.

I have found that if I am careful, I can find beautiful semiprecious stones and vintage beads at a much reduced cost in the jewelry cases at thrift stores. When I get home I just take the jewelry necklace or bracelet apart, and I have many beads to make my own creation!

So Dan and I took Marina and Stella to Good Cheer, the local thrift store.  For their birthday present they got to picked out several necklaces that had beads they liked and wanted to use to make their own jewelry.


As soon as we got home they started to make necklaces.  They will have enough beads to keep them busy all spring and summer.....I think.









 




Luc came over later and admired their jewelry creations.  The girls blew out their candles and we had carrot cake cupcakes....yummy!

 

Road trips map

Taking a cue from Dan's parents, a few years ago we created a map of the USA showing our routes on our road trips.  Now that we are done with Road Trip 7, we updated it.  The different colored strings represent our routes.  The yellow pins are where we have ridden our bikes. 

It's fun.  Whenever we look at the map, and places on it, we easily can remember what we did in these spots and what a wonderful time we had.

Dan's second 70th birthday party...with family

First, I got more cupcakes from Vicky:

Emily and Sean sent us matching sweatshirts:

Then we had our Seattle family over to celebrate mine and Owen's birthdays:


 

 Nora, TJ, Guri, and Myer, knowing I liked my new Mr. Rogers sweater, gave me a coffee cup to match!  

Driving home to Whidbey Island, five months after we left

We arrived home today.  Exhausted from the 26 hours of driving.  

We spent our first night 600 miles from the Mojave Desert where we began the day, camping at a truck stop at a casino.  We thought we should give something like this a try.  If you have a VERY good sound machine, it's workable:

See us with the big guys?

It's not exactly the Mojave Desert.  Here is where we were the previous night.  Guess which type of place fits us the best?

The second day's drive was over 500 miles.  We go through our favorite part of the drive home, in the Mt. Shasta area.  

We stayed at a state park.  We even got to catch some of the Super Bowl, which was a shock.  

 

 Arriving home:

The least fun part of getting home.  Crawling under the house, most of the distance on my belly, to turn the water back on.  I'm too old for this.

We were gone from our home for five months.  Although we have done this six times before, it is still hard for us to fully grasp.  That's a long time to be away from our home, and yet when we walked into it we felt like we had just been there.

We drove fewer miles on this road trip than we had on any of our previous ones, as we didn't go as far east as we have on some.  We also continue to learn how to navigate our public lands.  In particular, we have learned how to find places where we can park for 2-3 weeks at a time.  That's the ideal situation, and when we do that we aren't driving of course.

But it is much more than just "not driving" that we strive for.  In those places we are surrounded by peace.  The deserts we love so much are peaceful and quiet, with the only sounds being those of nature.  It's not really that we are "just relaxing" or "on vacation" because over the course of the five months we actually work quite hard physically--harder than when we are home in fact.  But yet the overall experience is a tremendous sense of serenity. 

Once again we saw some incredible places, including several we had never been to.  And we saw some old friends, like Valley of the Gods and the Mojave Desert Preserve.  Two major events were being able to camp and hike with both Ian and Owen for part of the trip.  We got to share our life on the public lands experience with them.

Now we are home on Whidbey Island.  We will not live in the bed of a pickup again for seven months.  But our time in the bed of our pickup will be here before we know it.  Time flies when life is good.

We frequently remark on how our feeling about our experience on our public lands is captured well by a Pink Martini song Splendor in the Grass.  It is ironic that it was one of the very first songs we danced to when we were getting to know each other.  We didn't understand then how much it would capture our future lives together:

Going where the hills are green
And the cars are few and far
Days are full of splendor

And at night you can see the stars

Life's been moving oh so fast
I think we should take it slow
Rest our heads upon the grass
And listen to it grow

My 70th birthday in the Mojave Desert Preserve: Ready to go home (& my 69th birthday)

Tomorrow morning we will set the alarm for very early, and we will leave our beloved southwest desert and return home to Whidbey Island.  The trip home is a slog, although we are looking forward to the journey.  We are ready for it.

After leaving Leisure World, in Mesa, AZ, we spent two days and three nights at our favorite place in the southwest---the Mojave Desert Preserve.

Here, we hiked two days high upon a mesa (coincidence?) next to our camper.  We had two lovely, and fairly difficult hikes.

Us, on our final hike of Road Trip 7, on the mesa in the Mojave National Preserve:



One of the fun parts of being here this year was that it was my birthday.  My 70th, gulp:

Here I am with my gifts from my Vicky.  I got happy birthday calls from the people who I hold most dear. 



My "desert birthday cake:"

and my birthday balloon from the Mojave Desert Preserve.  It says "Happy Birthday!!!:

(we find and put into the trash dozens of these balloons every year that people release and don't consider where they go.  We retrieved about 10 of them on our two hikes these two days.  The funny thing was that the first one was a Happy Birthday balloon, JUST FOR ME!!!!)

On one of our hikes up on the mesa behind our camper Vicky spotted a structure far out into the desert.  We have learned, as did the people in the film Prometheus, that there are no straight lines in nature.  Here is what she saw---it is hard to see in the photo just as it was hard to see when we were on the mesa, so I drew an arrow to it for you:



After we scrambled down from the mesa we searched in the desert for it, and found it;




 
 

Our theory:  It is one of the few remnants of a Desert Training Center that was in the area---the Clipper Mountains/Essex Training Center.  These were created by General Patton in WWII to train soldiers to fight the Germans in the North Africa Deserts.  We have been to several of them in the past few years.

There was one in this area, although according to everything we have read, there are no structures remaining.  This one looked like one, though.

In addition, on our way back to our camper, we found this;

  
  

There are no straight lines in nature.  :)

In the Desert Training Centers we have gone to there are large numbers of walk ways and roads that are outlined by rocks.  The fact that these were so close to the structure led us to believe that this area was part of that Desert Training Center.  It was pretty exciting making this discovery.

Here are a few more photos of our hikes in the area.

Tomorrow we head home.  We are so excited.  It has been 21 weeks since we left.  

My 69th birthday.

Why it is here:  We forgot to add it when we got the scrapbook published.  So we decided, what the heck, just put it in here, so that's what we did:

Vicky always makes the kind of cake I request.  This year I asked for carrot cake. 

 We went for a veeerrrry cold bike ride:

For my dinner we had our enchilada casserole. 

 
 I got new shirts!

And notes from Soren and Sebastian:

And gifts from them:

 

 A few days later, Jules, Jessica, Ian, and Adam came out and I got another party!

 And LOOK what Jessica made for me!