Okay…first off, it’s been a LOOOONNNGGGG while since writing to the blog! Oops. I really do want to chronicle our RV adventures here, so I will be back-loading all the great trips we’ve been on so far.
Since we picked up the RV back in 2019, we probably made a good 8-9 trips in the first year. Mostly local trips…no more than 3 or 4 hours. Fun trips, though, and we certainly learned a lot.
Then COVID-19 struck, and the poor camper ended up sitting in storage for more than a year. The pandemic isn’t over, but we have a terrific opportunity to head out to Utah this month. Dad and Gail have done another of their crazy cross-country treks in their RV, and all of us would really like to take advantage of their proximity to meet up in a place we’ve not yet been.
We’ve never had the opportunity to see southern Utah’s amazing parks. Zion and Snow Canyon are supposed to be gorgeous, and Dad and Gail are heading back east along that route. So, we decided this is an excellent chance to see some new sites, dust off the RV and spend some quality time with Dad and Gail.
So, I brought the RV up to the house this weekend. It lives not too far away…maybe 4 miles or so…and gave it a good cleaning and once-over. I also decided to take it in to have the undercarriage looked at, since it’s been sitting idle so long. The guy at our storage place suggested a tire repair shop up in Ripon, so I hauled the RV up there today and just decided to have them put on some new tires. Our old ones were already 4 years old, and only 8 ply. He had some brand new 10-ply tires at a really good price. No brainer!
We just got back from putting the RV to bed in it’s tiny space, and this coming Sunday we’ll once again bring it up to the house and stock up on food and supplies for our Monday departure. Dad and Gail will meet us somewhere on the road east of here and we’ll caravan out to Utah taking the south route through Bakersfield and near Las Vegas.
One of the cool things I’m looking forward to seeing is the (now defunct) Crescent Dunes Solar Energy project at Tonopah. This was a large concentrated solar power project that used hundreds of moving to focus the sun’s rays onto a boiler on top of a tall tower, which produced steam and ran a huge generator.
I think it ended up killing lots of birds.
Anyhow, I’m sure there will be lots to see. Sounds like we’re limiting daily driving to 300 miles or so, so we’ll need to stop a couple nights on the way out. The total distance is 653 miles from us, or about 9 hours, 9 minutes total time, although that’s probably calculated using actual highway speeds. We’ll only be doing 55mph the whole way out, so it’ll take us more like 12 hours, hence breaking the trip up into segments.
We’ll be staying at Zion River Resort, which is between Zion national park and St. George. I did visit St. George before when my friend Brandt got married, but that was a LONG time ago.
