Trips, trip planning and Trip Planning!

It’s been too long since I’ve posted, in part because we haven’t been on any real adventures, though it’s not for lack of wanting.  Life, it seems, wants to take all of our time this year and . . . to put it bluntly, life is succeeding.  Not all of it has been burdensome.  We recently visited Dad and family in Arizona, which was a relaxing break from way too busy work schedules.  Only for me to return to a hard drive that was dropping sectors and is now in the shop.  That has thrown a wrench not only into my work life, but my photography life - I can’t even work on images, or print, or . . . .  Two weekends ago Ann was working on images from our trip last year and it gave me an idea, why not write about our planning?  There’s a lot of it!

Actually, I was quite lucky that Ann was working on trip images, because we’ve been talking about our fall trip for some time and, when I saw her images, it dawned on me that it’s about time for campsite reservations to be opening up.  We were, in fact, a bit late on one of our hoped-for state camp ground stops - so we get one reserved night instead of two (no big deal because we know where we can camp near-by) - but we did make it for our others (reserved on 2 consecutive Sundays the minute the reservation window opened up).  Thanks for the reminder Ann!  

So where are we planning to go?  Well, it’ll be a month-long trip and it’s a greatest-hits from our previous trips, plus a make-up.  We’ll be doing a big loop, starting out at Yellowstone and then heading south into Utah, before returning home.  The Yellowstone segment, about 11 nights, will start us off-road in an area of the Beartooth Highway that, with any luck, will not be snowbound.  If it is, well, we’ll just head towards our first Yellowstone destination - the Lamar Valley for 5-7 nights.  We’ll then be heading over to Madison Campground near the geysers for three nights (campsite reserved).  Then we head south.  It’ll take us a couple of days driving (unless we don’t see anything interesting) before we get to Goblin Valley State Park.  We hope to be there 2 nights (only 1 reserved) and are hoping that the winds don’t mess up our photography sessions like it did the last time.  

We’ll then be taking the short trip down to the Caineville Wash area for a couple of nights, which we discovered on our trip to Capital Reef last year.  Since it’s BLM land, we can camp wherever we want to, and there’s a lot to photograph.  Then down the Notom-Bullfrog Road to Boulder, Utah to have dinner, then breakfast at Hell’s Backbone Grill.  Then to Devil’s Garden for a night, and Kodachrome State Park (campsites reserved - and showers!) for a couple of nights - all places you should be familiar with given our travels.  

Then we head-out on the part of the trip that got nixed by hurricane Rosa last year.  We’ll head down Cottonwood Canyon road then out to Alstrom Point overlooking Lake Powell (rated by some guys on Expedition Portal as one of the 5 most spectacular camping sites in the West), then back into the Paria Area for a couple of nights at White Pocket.  

The last week of our trip will be a couple of nights in Zion NP (campsite reserved) and Snow Canyon (campsite reserved).  Then home!  It should be quite the adventure so long as another hurricane doesn’t decide to make it’s way into Utah. 

So why the grand tour and not some place totally new?  Well, for those of you who don’t know, Ann is retiring in December.  And we’re making plans to move . . . to Portugal.  The reason time has been so scarce this year (other than a flood of work issues, for both of us, and one mini-disaster after another [nothing terribly serious] so far in 2019) is that we really only decided at the new year that it was time for Ann to retire, so we’ve been trying to figure out how to make that happen and still give ourselves lots of adventures.  After checking out a lot of options, and several different countries (with a couple of half-starts), Portugal seems the best choice and one that would give us a range of options for launching adventures.  And the more we look into Portugal, the more interesting it becomes and along with it, rising levels of excitement.

In case anyone wanted to know, making plans to take up residency status in another country is a headache.  And a ton of work.  Well, if you plan on making sure nothing big falls through the cracks.  So we’ve been juggling a dozen balls, trying to make progress on those that we can at this point, and making sure we keep track of the ones still in the air.  Which was why my mind was not on campsite reservations for our fall trip.  

Things are moving forward, although we are already a bit behind on the high house clean-out.  And behind on learning Portuguese.  And behind on working on photographs.  I just have to accept that this year will not be as fun as last year and I’m going to feel as if I’m perpetually behind on everything.  So I’d be smart not to beat myself up over it.  

But at least I got a blog post out!  Thanks for hanging around.

And a big thanks to Ann for letting me steal a couple of her images.  Good news is I’m supposed to hear about my computer today!