Nevada just might be the most surprising state we’ve been to yet. This wasn’t our first rodeo in Nevada. Okay, there weren’t any rodeos, but that would’ve been fun. Our previous visits to the Silver State were to Las Vegas—where the majority of visitors go. This time we wanted to explore the land and history of Nevada. We wanted to know what Nevada is like outside the giant concrete maze and flashing neon lights of Vegas. Pause for a moment…
Admittedly we had some post eclipse blues after watching the sun become blotted out by the moon. I mean how do you follow-up day becoming night at 10:30 am? It turns out that hiking up volcanoes is a good next move. After watching the eclipse from the path of totality in Central OR we headed down to Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern CA. This is another park that we’ve never really heard anyone talk about. Honestly, our knowledge of…
First Things First We don’t want the announcement to get eclipsed (see what I did there?) so let’s start with the reveal. No, we didn’t get a dog. Sorry to disappoint. Our announcement is that Tom’s starting e-learning development work again on a contract basis. We’re extremely excited about this because it’s the first big step in making this new lifestyle sustainable for the longer-term. So what does this mean for the blog? Well, I’m going to take over more…
We had one main goal for our visit to Mount Rainier National Park: See Mount Rainier. We lived 3 hours away from the mountain for over a decade and the most we’d seen was a glimpse of Rainier’s snow covered top from a distance. We’d never been up close and personal with the behemoth. Seeing Mount Rainier sounds pretty easy right? It’s a giant mountain after all—just look up! Well it didn’t turn out to be quite that simple. Wildfires…
The Olympic Peninsula. Home to Olympic National Park, Olympic National Forest, 24 State Parks, 73 miles of protected primitive Pacific Coastline, amazing beaches, and the most northwestern point in the lower 48. That’s over a million square miles of mountains, coast, and rain forests! Yeah, I sound like an infomercial, but it’s really that awesome. It seems like you could never stop exploring the Olympic Peninsula. We only scratched the surface in the 8 days we were there. Our most…
We experienced déjà vu driving through eastern Washington on our way to North Cascades National Park. It reminded us a lot of North Dakota. There’s a similar abrupt change from farmland to rocky dry wilderness. We were initially worried that the free campsite we’d selected was in the middle of a giant wheat field. I’m talking wheat in all directions as far as you can see. Suddenly the wheat fields turned into rocky craggy formations. We found our camp in…
Glacier National Park. The park that we were most excited to explore. Amazing lake hikes, beautiful waterfalls, and the most spectacular white peak mountain views. Glacier is also the park that kicked our asses. We cracked the radiator getting here. Our computer broke. Stan popped a tire on the bumpy roads and needed new brakes from all the mountain driving. And I suffered a mild case of Bell’s Palsy. Part I of our adventure had its ups and downs. Determined…
We made it! Glacier National Park may be the place we were most excited to go as we traveled the country. 1 million acres. 130 lakes. 200 waterfalls. The Rocky Mountains. How can we go wrong? We decided on a primitive campground on the southeastern edge of Glacier National Park called Cut Bank Campground. It was down a 5 mile dirt road. We didn’t realize it was a super rough dirt road. While Stan makes for a cozy rolling home,…
After completing the first leg of our travels we spent a few weeks in Wisconsin. It was an event filled time. We visited family and friends, celebrated Tom’s father’s birthday, and my baby sister got married! Congrats sister! We also worked on Stan a lot. We made improvements to help with organization/storage, replaced some broken or malfunctioning items, and installed a solar panel. If you missed it be sure to check-out Tom’s full tour of Stan the Tan Van. The…
It’s been a few months since Hitting the Road with Stan the Tan Van so we wanted introduce everyone to our tiny rolling home. If you’re considering or just curious about vanlife this van tour will help paint a picture of what vanlife is like for us and give you some organization ideas. Living long term in a van is getting more popular by the day. There are people with vans of all shapes and sizes tooling around the world…