After leaving Goose Lake State Park we headed north to the small town of John Day, Oregon. It’s a pretty small town with less than 1,500 residents but it is just the type of place we were hoping to find.
As we continued to head north, we were determined to make it to Oregon. Driving from southern California to Oregon is a long haul. It is right up there with driving across west Texas. It takes just as much time to get to the Oregon border as it would be from here to Canada.
We had an amazing couple of weeks at the dry lake bed in Joshua Tree, CA. We got a chance to meet a bunch of full time travelers and adventurers. Here is a montage of aerial videos we shot during our 2 week stay.
As usual, we don’t really have many plans until the last minute. Because we know that even if we try to plan something, things always come up to try to ruin that plan. We had thought about going to Alaska first. Then we thought maybe we head to Europe for the summer. At the end, we decided to finish off the rest of the 48 contiguous states in the country by heading to the northeast. First stop, back up the 395 towards the state of Oregon.
We exited Mojave National Preserve via Kelbaker Road and Interstate 40. Rather than taking I-40 west towards Barstow, we continued southbound on Kelbaker Road outside of Mojave and connected with the old Route 66.
We took the same route out of Page as we did last time we were there. Going north into Utah and meander along the Arizonia/Utah border all the way to St. George, Utah. We decided to stay the night at the Walmart while the Works continued on to Las Vegas.
We made a mad dash for Page, Arizona after we left Wupatki National Monument because we knew that we would want to catch Horseshoe Bend at dusk. The last time we were there, we were running late as well and ended up catching it at just the right light. Admittedly, this is a place that is hard to get a good photo of. Almost every moment of the day will cast shadows in some part of the canyon and getting enough light to show it at dusk is always a challenge.
When we left Phoenix, we knew that we wanted to make our way eventually to Page, Arizona. We were just there a couple of months ago on our way to California from Albuquerque but since Josh and Jessa had never been, we didn’t mind one bit going back again. Plus, we wanted to hit up all of those National Monuments that were closed when we drove through last time.
Leaving Tombstone meant that we were once again looking for a place to stay for a few days. I have to visit the office in Santa Barbara in a few days so we decided that eventually heading over the Phoenix was the way to go since they have direct flights. But we were not so eager to go to a big city yet. We first made a few stops along the eastern part of the state.
After a short stay in Gilbert Ray, we headed out of Tucson and began making our way further south. Our friends Brian and Leigh had gone to a ‘secret boondocking spot‘ outside of Tombstone and we swore to secrecy that we would not tell where it is if they told us. So don’t ask.
Tucson is one of the first places we took the Airstream when we bought it back in 2008. Even before that, our first longish trip with our previous T@B camper was also here in the winter of 2007 when Ava was barely a year old. We love this place in the winter and have been coming back here almost every year since.
