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.
The next stop is going to be our last one in the eastern Sierras before the caravan officially disbands for us to all go our separate ways. We will continue to head north towards Mammoth Lakes to camp at Crowley Lake. Before that happens, we are going to double down on the Burger Barn in Bishop before we leave because it is that good.
It has been awhile since we posted on this blog. That is because we have been busy getting ready for our next adventure. Since we got back to southern California in March, we have been doing a fair bit of local traveling. Before we head out on our next trip, I thought it might be a good idea that I first catch up on our travels since we got back. This was back in April of 2013 when we headed out to the California desert to meet up with some friends. You might even recognize them.
Being here near Palm Springs feels like we are already home. This is one of our go-to places for a getaway while we are home based and even though we are still technically full-timing across the country, it definitely feels like our trip is all but over. Officially, it will be in a couple of days but it is hard for us to make that distinction. We still won’t have a house to move into for a couple of weeks but we will be sleeping under a roof supported by walls sitting on a concrete foundation at Marlene’s parents house.
During one of our first visits to Tucson several years ago, we were introduced to the great Hotel Congress. Our friend Carrie use to live in Tucson and she acted as a tour guide and introduced us to lots of neat places in town.
As some of you might know, we have been back in California for some time now and have gone on many other adventures within the state since then. However, we cannot start sharing about those experiences until we are done with these last couple of weeks of our trip around the country. This is my best attempt at wrapping these last couple of weeks up so we can move on closer to the present. Let me rewind back a couple of months: Today, we are in Tucson.
We intentionally spent the night just short of Tucson last night in the town of Benson so we can go see one of the best preserved natural caves in the world. We found a Wal-Mart in Benson that had a no RV overnight sign but the manager had no problems with us being there. It is becoming more common to have cities and counties ban RV overnight parking in Wal-Marts.
As we drove west last night out of Las Cruces, we contemplated making the long drive all the way into Arizona and settle somewhere in Tucson. That would have been a really long trek and we would be missing a stretch of I-10 that we have not explored much in the past. We decided to stop at the town of Deming, New Mexico for dinner and stay the night at the Wal-Mart.
Marfa is quite an amazing place to be this time of year. Something is different about the high desert in West Texas. We are only sitting at 4,600 ft in elevation but the lightness of the air and the special hue of blue in the sky makes you feel like you are much closer to outer space.
Our ordeal with the Texas Highway Patrol last night left me pretty riled and unable to sleep well for the rest of the night. If you don’t know what I am referring to, go read the end of this post and you will know what happened.
Last night we spent our first night at a Texas rest stop. Most, if not all, of the roadside rest stops in Texas allow at 24-hour stay. It stems back to the depression era when people were moving west to look for work and needed a place to camp for the night.
Our campground in Dickinson is located about 20 miles southeast of Houston. It is just about right in the middle between Houston and Galveston just a few miles away from Johnson Space Center. We intentionally found a spot there so we would be able to spend the day at the Space Center after we check out in a couple of days. Today, we are headed into Houston.
