We are HOME!  Our route took us a long day to Dallas the first night.   On the way Rhonda found us a fantastic steak place in Decatur, Texas

Sweetie Pie’s (that’s him on the wall…)Anyway, the steak was um, um good! And so was Rhonda’s salad!

The next day was another long day to Mobile, Alabama.  We passed through a horrific lightening storm outside of Baton Rouge, LA but came through fine.  After a good night’s sleep it was up and on our way back HOME to THE Villages.  WE MADE IT!

SOME STATISTICS…

• In 30 days we drove 9,422 MILES – in a MINI Convertible
• We consumed 248 gallons of gas – maybe we’ll look into the new electric MINI before the next trip
• Stayed at 17 different sites – most for one night, twice we stayed for 4 nights 
• Visited 6 National Parks, 1 National Memorial (Mt. Rushmore) and 1 Navajo Nation Tribal Park (Monument Valley)
• 23 States
• 10 loads of laundry
• 6 visits to Walmart and Target to restock on apples, bananas and water
• 5 Car washes
• Zero tickets
• 1 slightly chipped windshield (damn stone!)

We did upload some Photo albums to our various blog posts below with additional photos.  If you care to take a look at some more photos from the various parks we visited, scroll down and take a look.  We hope you enjoyed our travel blog.  We had a great trip but there’s no place like HOME.

Below is an Album of all our photo galleries from the trip…

Mount Rushmore 2018

15 Photos

Yellowstone 2018

58 Photos

Grand Teton 2018

31 Photos

Bryce Canyon 2018

28 Photos

Zion 2018

31 Photos

North Rim Grand Canyon 2018

29 Photos

Monument Valley 2018

37 Photos

Mystery Valley 2018

77 Photos

Apparently the photos didn’t load properly for this post so I’m reposting.  Tim

We arrived in Santa Fe late Saturday afternoon and after unpacking we made our way to the Railyard District where there are shops and an open air concert area with a live band reminiscent of the square at Spanish Springs. In fact, it’s likely that The Villages Design team took a lot of its cues from Santa Fe. The mean age of the population here seemed to be 55+. After a lovely Mexican dinner it was off to bed with plans to explore in the morning.

Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors is the oldest municipal building in the US built in 1610 as the Spanish seat of government in the southwest. Today it serves as a Museum and an outdoor market for the locals to sell their wares. And speaking of selling wares across from the Palace of the Governors is the famous Plaza which was covered with vendors this weekend for an arts and craft fair. Santa Fe is filled with artisans and crafts people and fabulous shops filled with jewelry, clothes and goods of all artisan goods of all kinds. Simply beautiful. Rhonda found her “spirit guide” a wonderful vendor with a story behind every item, and amazingly she found some things to buy.

Next it was off to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to view the artwork of this American master who spent her later years in northern New Mexico

We continued touring and then found our way to the La Fonda Hotel’s restaurant La Plazuela, along the original Route 66.

We had a delicious lunch, impeccably served with the best fajitas ever for me and a cauliflower steak for Rhonda. And of course, margaritas.

Then it was off for some more touring.

The beautiful Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi

We then toured the Loretto Chapel with its famous Miraculous Staircase

The original staircase was constructed by a single carpenter with no railings as depicted below

The Nuns were so terrified of ascending and decending the floating staircase that the railings had to be added later.

We also took a look at what was once considered the oldest house in America, dating to 1640. But further research has shown a home in Massachusetts dating to 1637. Still it’s impressive.

Finally we made another purchase! While touring the arts and craft stalls we came upon a metal worker with beautiful decorative pieces.

Juan and his wife were both artisans and lovely people and we chose a Florida Sun design he will hand craft and ship to us next month. A wonderful reminder of our lovely trip.

Today (Sunday) marks the last official day of of our touring. From here on out will be three long days to Dallas, then Mobile and finally back to The Villages by Wednesday night.

We have begun our trek back east and made our final park stop in Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation between upper Arizona and lower Utah near the four corners area. While technically not a National Park, as it is in Navajo Territory, this iconic landscape was made famous by John Ford in Stagecoach, and numerous other westerns. It even features prominently in National Lampoon’s Vacation, Back to the Future II and Forest Gump when he is running across America. There is no place in the world like it. Which bring us a point, in virtually all of our Park visits we have been surrounded by many more international travelers than Americans, especially Germans and French. It is peculiar that these foreigners travel across the world to see a part of the USA that many Americans have never seen, including us until this trip.

Our first day brought our only rain that interrupted one of our scheduled tours but it was interesting to see the waterfalls running off of the mesas in an area that typically sees only 8 inches of rainfall a year.

We visited a Navajo hogan, the traditional homes Navajos lived in before modern times.

There are too many photos to include here, I’ll upload them in an album later. The next day we had booked a tour to “Mystery Valley” which is on the other side of the main mesa that begins Monument Valley. It turned out to be a private tour as we were the only ones booked, which was great.

The tour started out with a bracing trip in the back of an open air touring truck at highway speed which will really wake you up in the morning! It turned into a beautiful sunny morning as we drove deeper into this otherworldly landscape. Everywhere you turned there was more amazing scenery and we wound up taking more photos here than anywhere else on our trip. We’ll be creating another album when we return but below are a few samples.

Our guide, Conasheena, took to us to some fantastic places including ruins of ancient Anasazi people including cliff dwelling and petroglyphs.

We are packing up and heading east to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Gallery from Monument Valley

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Gallery from Mystery Valley

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Originally we planned on spending a second day at Zion today but given the crowds and the heat we decided to call an audible last night and change to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Boy was that a good call! Only about 10% of the Grand Canyon visitors go to the North Rim and when we arrived at 7:15 AM we virtually had the canyon to ourselves.

We drove to the furthest point you can reach by car, Cape Royal, where you can hike out onto Angels Window – you can see how it gets it’s name…

We then had a wonderful lunch in the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, built in 1936. The views were spectacular.

Tomorrow on the road to visit our Native American friends in Monument Valley, AZ.

Gallery from North Rim Grand Canyon

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