November 2025 – The Destinators

Return to The Compound, Los Lunas, NM

In 2014, before this blog began, even before RV travel entered our lives, Sue and I traveled to a blues jam near Augusta, ME. This event was run by a high school teacher and tennis coach with a serious guitar habit who calls himself “Cowboy” in the BGU forum, though his real name is Wilbur. At Wilbur’s jam, we met a whole bunch of cool people from the Blues Guitar Unleashed forum, including one who had chosen “sloslunas” for his forum name, likely because his first name is Steve, which starts with “S,” and he lives in Los Lunas, NM.

But that was my first jam of any kind, my first time playing my guitar in public, the first time I ever plugged into an amp and played at stage volume – a whole bunch of firsts. At one point Steve came to me, acting real serious, and then he told me I was a player (“You’re a player, man!”). I found that to be incredibly encouraging, uplifting and enabling. We became friends. When Sue and I started all our traveling, we stopped in to see Steve and Hy in Los Lunas. That was in April 2017, way too long ago. Though we’ve tried a few times to get there again, each of those efforts was thwarted – until this year!*

Death Valley National Park

We’d really wanted to see Death Valley National Park on this trip – that was right up at the top of our list of reasons for undertaking this repeat visit across the country. Once again, due to the government shutdown we didn’t quite know what to expect, and up-to-date information was hard to find. However, given our recent experience at Joshua Tree, and considering that from Bakersfield we were less than 3 hours from the park, we headed over to check it out. And once again, we were pleasantly surprised! The Death Valley Natural History Association is a non-profit that supports all of the goals of DVNP. They are funding park staff salaries during the shutdown, and the park was nearly fully open! And most of the closures were due to planned improvements or repairs to flood-damaged roads, unrelated to the current budget issues. Our heartfelt thanks to the DVNHA and all of the staff we met in the visitor center and campground for enabling us to have an amazing visit in Death Valley

Bakersfield, CA

Mutual friends introduced us. “You should meet this couple we met! They both play music and travel in an RV with an insane amount of music gear. You’d love them!” So we first got together with Rod and Tanya at their home in Egan SD in 2016, and love them we did! That was our first year out on the road and we learned so much from them about RVing, traveling with music gear, and making music. Mentors! We were humbled that these pro musicians, traveling as RVDreamTour, invited us to jam with them. We were fortunate to cross paths again later that year, in one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever played music in, and once again in 2019.

When we first met, Rod and Tanya were able to work remotely while traveling for months at a time. Although they still do that, their latest work situation requires them to occasionally be on site at several places in the west. They still spend summers in Egan, but winters now in St David, AZ which is nearer to the work sites. We checked in from Palm Springs, when we were about to be heading towards St David and – surprise! – they were in Bakersfield, CA. Well, that’s not very far from Palm Springs, is it? Set a course!

Palm Springs, CA

We became friends with Nancy and David within minutes of meeting them for the first time in 2017. Our friends Mark and Linda had encouraged us all to cross paths in our respective RVs at Lake Powell while we were all out on our own respective adventure trips. We got along so well with Nancy and David (Mark’s cousin and her husband) that we joked about perhaps having been friends in a former life. Despite living on opposite coasts, we’ve connected again several times and enjoyed every minute.