About the Blog
Our primary purpose is to communicate with family and friends who have expressed interest in our travels.
We will also be posting some topics (campground experiences, for example) that may be of interest to a larger audience. We have benefitted from websites and blog posts of others describing campgrounds, points of interest and general rv/planning/traveling tips, and hopefully some of our posts will be useful to others planning their trips.
During our travels, we will try to update our blog once or twice a week. However, there will be times when we do not have internet at our campsite, so expect extended periods without updates on those occasions. The blog will also be quiet when we are between travels.
About Us
We are a younger (50’s) retired couple who love to travel. In our 20’s and 30’s, we traveled through a lot of the USA and Canada. Time and work eventually broadened our horizons to the rest of the world. Now that we are both retired and have more time, we are returning to our roots and are excited to begin new explorations of North America.
Although we enjoy exploring cities for a few days, we love natural beauty and the outdoors. The mountains, coasts and canyons of the West are our favorite areas. You are most likely to find us on public lands (frequently in a state park), but we also choose private campgrounds when they work for us.
We travel with a large dog (90 lb. mix) and a cat, both rescues.
Although we will travel for up to four months at a time, we still maintain a sticks and bricks house and are not full-timers.
Consequently, we consciously try to keep information that would make it easy to identify us off of our blog so that we don’t advertise that our house might be vacant when we are traveling.
About Annie and The Beast
As a rule, we don’t name vehicles. Our current truck and fifth wheel became the exceptions to that rule.
Annie is an Excel 31′ fifth-wheel that we ordered with several customizations. She got her name from Little Orphan Annie. On the day we signed the papers to bring her home from the dealer, Peterson Industries, manufacturer of Excel fifth-wheels, closed their doors after 50 years in business. She became an orphan, and shortly after was christened Annie.
The Beast is an F-350 dually crew-cab long-bed pick-up truck. It does a great job of towing Annie, who (fully loaded with gear and fresh water) weighs in at about 17,000 lbs (that’s trailer only). Although there are more beastly tow vehicles out there, this 22′ long, 8+’ wide “beast” is the largest we’ve owned and even when driving solo requires a lot more manuevering room than any car or short-bed, single-rear wheel pickup. Not surprisingly, the nickname was coined one day when trying to maneuver it into a space designed for more petite vehicles.