The Spring ’24 eight week trip recap is wind, more wind, bad roads, old friends, new friends, family, mountain biking, and vultures.

The wind was relentless the entire trip, from departing San Diego to our last stop at McDowell Mountain Regional Park. We just couldn’t escape it. Obviously, the worst was being in a tornado warning. We’d be just fine never experiencing that again. One of our favorite things to do is pull out the awning and sit underneath it in the late afternoon for happy hour. We only had two calm days when we could do this.

Wow, I thought California had bad roads. They are in great shape compared to what we experienced our entire trip. I’m surprised we didn’t blow a trailer tire. We did shear some cabinet screws and popped a few rivets inside. It was normal for the couch cushions to be on the floor when we stopped. The cheapest we paid for gas was $3.02 a gallon. It got me thinking…there must be a correlation between cheap gas and bad roads.

It’s human nature to want to rank things and make comparisons. When we wrapped up our Utah trip last fall we knew it was special. We love that part of the country. The scenery was jaw dropping, especially The Wave. We experienced sensory overload. I remember my cousin, Kahl, asking me how are we going to top it. I told him we couldn’t. This trip was quite a bit different, there was beauty, but long stretches in between with miles and miles of nothing. Our initial thought when returning home was if we are going to go east of the Rockies again, we’ll just fly.

Nowadays everyone is always busy, even retired folks, so anytime with friends is to be cherished. It was great being with our old friends Laurie and Dan in Gilbert Ray, Michelle and Dom in Bentonville, and Mike and Chris in Cortez. It was really cool to see Carolina again and have her tour us around Kerrville and Flat Rock Ranch, and introduce us to some of her biking friends. It was wonderful spending six days with my cousin Eddie, seeing his son, Holden, and spending a day with cousin Lisa and her husband, Brian. We hope we get to see our new friends again that we met at Gilbert Ray, Kathy and Mike. We really hit it off with them. We also met another fabulous couple at Cortez, Patty and Bill. And I got to meet the trifecta girls. 😊

A lot of mountain biking! Ripping through saguaros in Arizona, biking a piece of the Continental Divide Trail, seeing and believing the hype about Bentonville, and visiting our old friend, Phil’s World, again. The surprise was the East Contrabando Trails in Big Bend Ranch State Park. We loved that ride. It was so unique and beautiful.

The last take away was vultures. We see Turkey Vultures often in the spring and summer in San Diego, but nothing like the numbers we saw in Texas and Arkansas. The Turkey Vultures are mixed with the Black Vultures. We saw groups of a hundred or more, perched in the morning, soaring the thermals, which is called a kettle, and then we watched them come in to roost in the evening. It was quite a display.

The Stats

• 6,317 miles
• 56 nights: 13 full hook-ups, 34 partial hook-ups, 6 nights at my cousins, 1 parking lot, 1 boondock, and 1 dry camp. Average cost per night $31.
• 28 bike rides: 401 miles
• 12 hikes: 39 miles
• Four National Parks

Trail stickers

The border influence

 

 

 

 

How about five pounds of American cheese slices 😮. And a ten pound log of 73/27 ground beef. I’m not certain I’ve ever seen 73/27 ground beef!