This time we made it! Yes, we finally got to visit the south west! And yes, we really enjoyed it. This, combined with our travel experience from last year’s trip, gave us the confidence to… linger a bit on the way back. After visiting friends and family between LA and San Diego, we took a couple of days off by ourselves in Huntington Beach to just soak up a bit more SoCal vibe and savor some quiet time on the coast before turning around and starting the return trek across the country. It would start to snow at home in less than a month.
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!*
Sue along the Badlands Loop Trail in 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
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!
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 severaltimes and enjoyed every minute.
We really wanted to visit Joshua Tree National Park as we head east. We didn’t know what to expect with the government shut down, and in this case we were pleasantly surprised. With the help of many volunteers and paid staff from the Joshua Tree National Park Association, a non-profit partner that provides support to JTNP to meet all of its goals, and a skeleton crew of National Park Service staff, the entire park was open and almost fully operational. We made sure to thank all of the volunteers and staff for their time and effort so that we could visit this wonderful place. Several thanked us back for having come despite the shutdown.
I’ve “known” Dennard from the Blues Guitar Unleashed forums since he first lit up the stage at the BGU Live jam at Lake Arrowhead, CA in 2018. I wasn’t at that event, but his original songs and charismatic stage presence brought him immediate fame within our online community. This man is a player!
Sue and I first crossed paths with Dennard in person at the 2023 BGU regional jam in Grand Rapids, and again in 2024 in Albuquerque. We were looking forward to jamming a few tunes with Dennard again earlier this month in Parker, but, alas, at the last minute he could not attend due to a family visit. We’d also been looking forward to meeting up with Dennard here in SoCal around this time one year ago, and that was one of the visits confounded by our sudden change of plans. Not this time!
My aunt Marcelle, one of my dad’s 15 siblings, was a party girl. Despite having 5 kids, she and my uncle Jerry held at least one major family reunion each summer. My cousin Rachel was about my age, and her brother Brian was close to my brother’s age. The youngest of the brothers, Gary, was 10 years younger than me so when I was about 10, we older girls thought it was fun to hang around with the new baby, forming a bond that lasted over the next few years so we got to know each other pretty well. (Youngest daughter Sharon was born when I was in college and has lived in New England her whole life, so I only got to know Sharon when we were both a good bit older.) And in between, in kind of a no-man’s land, there was Keith.
This blog’s primary purpose is to be a journal of our travels. We aim to be light and occasionally irreverent, although from time to time, we sneak in a somber and reflective post. That we may at the same time inform or entertain our loyal readers (or a random stranger on some obscure google quest) has been a welcome bonus.
This will be probably be one of the posts that is a little more serious, a little less irreverent. The post outlines some of our thoughts about politics and the current state of our country. If you choose to read it, please read all the way to the end – it’s not very long. And there are pictures!
