Wacky Wanderers

BLM camping in Nevada

Our first sightings of Joshua Trees on this trip! They are such funny looking things. We found a great little spot to camp, Lovell Canyon Dispersed Campground, on off a semi-trafficked paved road. This spot provided a nice place to enjoy nature after the Vegas whirl wind. We also experienced two things we hadn’t planned on. One terrifying and the other magical.

Las Vegas

Just to let you folks know, I’m not a fan of Las Vegas. Justin and I have been here twice, both on our honeymoon as a break from National Parks. The architecture and art of the casino’s and the amazing shows Vegas has are it’s only highlights in my opinion. That being said, they also often have cheap flights and that is why we found ourselves here! We were picking up my lovely Mom to spend a week with us!! Hurray!!! We were so excited!

Christmas

Since we were going to be on the road for Christmas, one of our good friends’ Mom, who lives in Colorado, so very graciously invited us to spend Christmas with the whole family (including our dear dear friends from Portland of course). We knew this was going to add a lot of long driving days to our trip but also couldn’t bear to be so close to them and not spend the holiday with them.

Santa Fe, NM

This was part of our trip where we were trying to get from warm weather to our chilly Colorado Christmas destination with little stops along the way. We wanted to breeze through the cold weather as swiftly as possible with some effort in not making it feel miserable.

We spent about a day and a half in Santa Fe. It’s a cute city that we definitely enjoyed!

Tucson BLM Camping

As you saw in our last post, we had quite the laundry saga so our day to explore Tucson became the day to retrieve laundry and let the girls play.

Justin ended up leaving around 7:30am to fix his mistake. Justin and I contemplated having the girls and I dropped off downtown to explore while Justin got the laundry, but because the drive to the laundromat was 5 hours round trip with no traffic we decided against it. And boy, I’m so glad we did!

On our way to Tucson

I don’t usually create an entire post about driving days but this one in particular deserves a post itself. What a day we had!

Arizona: Full-time Families meet up

Justin and I joined a group called Full-time Families before embarking on this journey in hopes of meeting other like-minded families with kiddos that our girls could have fun playing with. In December we finally had a chance to meet up with other families from this group!

Rocky Point Mexico

While we were boondocking in the Tucson area we met a lovely family who had kiddos just a little bit older than our girls. The kids totally hit it off to the point where we didn’t see a whole lot of our oldest when we were camping there. Half of the time they were adventuring around the land and the other half of the time they were playing in a Palo Verde tree. It was pretty sweet and our oldest was able to sport a handful of new bandaids each day! Ah, the prickly desert. We learned that the family we met had a boat down in Mexico that they lived on for half of the year. They very kindly invited us to follow them down to Mexico to check out the area while they were preparing their boat.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

While we were in Tucson, we made a last minute change of plans to head down to Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point) Mexico. Since the drive from Tucson to Puerto Penasco was to be 3.5 hours, we decided to break it up by making a one night stop at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Not only was it a beautiful park and campground, it allowed us to dump and top-off our fresh water tanks before making the trek into Mexico.

Saguaro National Park

Part of Saguaro National park is right next to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum that we had visited the day before, which was only a 20 minutes drive from our boon docking site at Snyder Hill BLM. We decided to head over to the park as a day trip to see the cacti and allow the girls to earn another badge.