Our next park on the trip was Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota. It believe it’s one of the most northern parks in the lower 48, and shamefully, it’s one of the least visited. This park is 40% water and comprised of four main lakes; Rainy, Kabetogama, Namakan, and Sand Point. This park shares some of their waters with Canada, and was a prominent international trade route. While there is plenty for everyone at this park, most of this park…
After visiting Death Valley National Park, we did a bit of a 180 in landscape and visited Great Basin National Park in northeast Nevada. While both parks have incredible valleys, peaks, and colors, Great Basin is lush with lakes and caves and some of the oldest trees on our planet! This park is severely underrated. Before this trip, if I was to name National Parks off the top of my head, Great Basin would have been on the bottom of…
Next up on the journey, one of the most visited and popular parks in the country… Yosemite National Park! Yosemite is full of waterfalls, valleys, giant sequoias, rivers, wildlife, huge granite cliffs and rock formations, and more. With all these amazing things, they also bring ALL. THE. PEOPLE. In case you haven’t noticed, Mike and I tend to shy away from the crowds, and we were here during prime vacation time. We arrived at sunrise, as it’s proven to be…
It seems like it was a month ago that I wrote a post about relationships and van life… but it was one year ago, on our one year wedding anniversary. Today marks our second wedding anniversary, so I re-read what I wrote a year ago to see if it hold true: communicate, take alone time, don’t be a jerk. And yes, it does. In fact, I’d say this past year we’ve done all those things a million times better than we…
Dear Diary, After a long winter break, we’re finally back in the road again. It was a little hard to leave Xena… mostly because she wanted to try the long distance thing. But I was like “girl, I gots things to do, and I need to get my scent everywhere, if ya know what I mean.” Mom and Dad sold the van/my big kennel on wheels! They got a nice red truck (why are they obsessed with red??) though where…
“How can you afford this?” is one of the questions we’ve gotten most, after “ew, how do you take showers?” and “how do you not kill each other?” (see this blog for answers on that one!). When we started thinking about this adventure, I turned to the never ending wisdom of the internet and social media van life accounts. I quickly became frustrated (and quite frankly, continue to be) on how many people, van lifers and others, claim to fund…
After my friend-venture week, Mike and I headed to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia! It was a perfect place to spend our first anniversary together! We were a little nervous to be there during Labor Day weekend and expected it to be crazy busy, but it turns out most people visit during October to look at the foliage. Shenandoah is an extremely long and narrow park. It’s main road, Skyline Drive, is over 100 miles from North to South. We entered…
Dear Diary, So remember when I said I think we live in Maine? Well, as always, I was right. Even though we left briefly, the van part that Dad got fixed here broke off the van, and so we came back to stay at Auntie April’s house while it gets fixed. However, we’ve been here waiting for like a month (although it feels like it’s been closer to 7 months to me, why is that?) so I’m pretttttty sure I…
Meet Mike. He’s my husband of one year, but we’ve been together for about six years. We’ve obviously had our ups and downs, like everyone does, but for the most part… it’s been pretty easy for us as a couple. There has only been one huge screaming fight, about six months in of us dating. But overall, when we disagree or frustrate each other, we tend to make up pretty quickly and easily. Now, when we decided to do this…
After Zion National Park, Mike and I headed to the Grand Canyon! We were meeting our friends there the next day, so we spent the evening at the North Rim to see the canyon from the less viewed side. It was wonderful to relax on the beautiful lodge deck with a delicious Grand Canyon beer. We also met an amazing Park Ranger that majored in geology that typically works on the South Rim side, but was visiting this side with…