Pining for the Fjords

As you know from reading the blog over the past year, Chris and I still traveled fairly consistently during the pandemic, albeit in a different, safer way - namely, by taking our own tiny home, complete with kitchen and bathroom, with us everywhere we went.  While we loved trucking around the western United States with Arlene (and we'll continue to do so), once we got our vaccines, we were ready to start researching other travel options, including what deals were currently being offered to locations far and wide.  Since the travel industry (and its associated subsets, such as airlines, hotels, and the like) was truly hit hard in 2020, we found all sorts of great prices on vacations, and figuring we'd want to stay relatively close on our first, post-vaccine excursion, we booked a four-night stay at the Marriott in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (it helped that Southwest now offers direct flights from Phoenix to PV).  Over Labor Day weekend, we took our trip! Masked up and i...

Did you read Part 2 yet?  You should! Scenery! We woke up on our final morning at the Rose Canyon Lake campground as the sun peeked over the horizon, having slept quite well after going to bed relatively early the night before.  After repeating our chai/coffee and fancy breakfast sandwich successes from the day before, we once again changed into workout clothes and loaded up the truck for another hiking adventure.   Chef Chris, busting the grill out of the bear box. We love Arlene, our little travel trailer, but like most things, there are a few features we'll be looking to upgrade whenever it comes time to purchase our next rig.  One of our number one items is that we'd love to have a trailer with a slightly bigger fresh water tank capacity - right now, Arlene has a 20 gallon tank, and if we're dry camping, we can only make it about 2-3 days before we're running on empty.  That means we have to be really careful about how much water we use, and once you ...

On the last blog , we climbed partway up Mt Lemmon (near Tucson) to stay at the campground at Rose Canyon Lake . Wandering around Tucson Per our normal, I woke up earlier than Chris, so I read in bed while he snoozed on; once we were both awake, we started our normal camping coffee/chai service and prepared for breakfast - gourmet breakfast sammies with Butcher Box  breakfast sausage, fried eggs, sliced Asiago cheese, arugula, and a lemon thyme aioli we made at home before we left, inside a Dave's Killer Bread English muffin (high fiber, because that's how we roll).  Does it sound delicious?  It was, and we were very proud of ourselves.  So proud, in fact, that we documented this via a bunch of really crappy pictures: Okay, so Bon Appetit  won't be calling us anytime soon with food photography assignments. I promise this tasted amazing. Figuring we needed to do something to burn off the approximately 8,000 calories we'd just (happily) ingested, we put on our wor...