Author: jsimpson

High clearance required

High clearance required

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One of the requirements before starting this trip was to have a four wheel drive vehicle. The Sedona area has over a dozen drives that are a little more, adventurous. We wanted to do one of these drives, as the views were said to be spectacular…and they were.
The drive we chose to do is called Schnelby Hill Road. Schnelby Hill Road is a semi-maintained dirt road that runs from Sedona to I-17 along 12 miles of very bumpy driving.
I was excited to drive up and see this sign. Soon after, the pavement ran out and that’s when things became interesting. You can see a couple more warning signs in the distance.  I’m pretty sure people don’t read those, we saw several people trying to drive low clearance vehicles along this road. We actually talked to one guy and suggested he turn back…he did.
 This area is not so bad, pick your path and just about anything can drive along that…but that’s not all there was. I have to say, the car looks pretty good going through there.  Here’s another shot, showcasing the road…and the car.
The views were amazing the whole way.
 
We stopped occasionally to do some exploring.  This is a bowl that has been washed out of the sandstone from running water when it rains.  Just beyond the edge there is about a 20 foot drop.
TEQUILA…or at least where we get it.  Agave grows everywhere around here.
Some more exploring, this was as far as we went, about 4 miles in.
We were greeted with this view at the end.
I put together a map of the route we took using a Garmin eTrex. I pulled the track off the GPS unit, converted it into something I can use and added it to the map. It’s fun to see where we went.
The whole trip was about 8 miles and took us almost 2 1/2 hours. We had such a good time trying to navigate the terrain in our 4Runner and the views…were so good!
We’re going places!!

We’re going places!!

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We spent a lot of time researching places to go during our trip. We have museums, national parks, restaurants, state capitols and their capitol buildings, beaches, state parks, historic markers, mountains, craters, volcanoes, candy factories…you get the idea.

I spent some time and put all of our locations in a file with the latitude and longitude coordinates. Being the nerd that I am, I wrote a small script to place all of these on a map for viewing and plotting routes between places.  We’ll be in all 50 states, parts of Canada, and maybe a dip into Mexico.

In general, we’re going here:

See y’all down the road!

Hello World!

Hello World!

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I think it was about a year ago that Jerl and I decided to do something totally crazy. We decided to homeschool three boys, get an RV and travel to all 50 states! When we tell people about our impending trip we usually get one of two reactions. The most common reaction is of total amazement followed with begging to come with us. The other reaction is the one where people think it’s an awesome idea, but think we must be a bit nuts to even seriously consider doing it. Five people and two cats in an RV for how long?

That would be two years (as of now).

We’ve spent the year preparing for this life changing trip and this blog will be a way for us to share the experience with anyone who might be interested or just curious about what it takes to switch from living in a house to living full time in an RV! Mostly, it’ll be my digital journal…a scrapbook of sorts so we can remember our Grand Adventure!

See y’all down the road!