The Adventure Begins -- Year Three!

Spring storm approaching Llano River State Park near Junction, TX

With spring finally here it is time to load the RV for our 3^rd year ‘On the Road with Maya.’  We are excited to follow the road to new places for yet another spring, summer and fall.  We aren’t sure how long we are going to keep up our wandering ways.  Maybe like Forest Gump, one day we will just be done and want to go home.  But in the meantime, here we go again.

We’ve been very busy these last two weeks saying goodbye to Government Canyon, San Antonio and our friends and family all over Texas.  The RV is serviced, cleaned and ready to go and so is the car.  Maya, David and I have had our checkups too. We have all been declared ‘road worthy.’
 

Going 'east' - The Blue Ridge Parkway

Last year’s eastern journey following the Appalachian Trail exceeded both David and my expectations.  Starting on the Natchez Trace Parkway then over to Georgia and up the Blue Ridge Parkway and eventually arriving in Maine, we couldn’t have asked for more.  The journey was filled with spring flowers and rains, fantastic hikes along the AT and other trails, breathtaking drives, lots of history, fresh picked blueberries, lobster, pink granite next to blue, blue ocean and the most amazing fall leaves ever.

Dogwoods blooming along the Natchez Trace Parkway

From the time we left Texas last April and crossed the Louisiana border until the time we crossed back into Texas from Arkansas in November we traveled 8,427 miles in the RV and drove another 8,222 miles in our Honda CRV sightseeing.   We were ‘on the road’ outside of Texas for 213 days.

Thanks to David’s new GPS unit we also have hiking statistics that we didn’t have for our first year’s journey.  We hiked 630.43 miles (it felt like more!) which only averages out to about 3 miles per day.  But we only hiked about half of those 213 days, so 6 miles a day isn’t so bad, I guess.  And when you figure in the elevation gain of 113,165 feet, that’s like climbing Mt. Everest a tiny bit less than 4 times (without the altitude effects, though).  Now we have a goal and we have to see if we can top that this year. 
 

Hiking in Acadia National Park, Maine

Ping, pong – west, east.  So it is “westward, ho” this season.  We traveled west in 2012, our first year on the road, but we didn’t start the journey until the middle of June after our house sold.  The summer of 2012 was hot and dry so we went north very quickly.  This year we thought we would try to visit some of the southern parks and forests in our beautiful country before the heat sets in.  But as always weather, fires and other acts of nature will guide our journey.

People always ask us, “Where is your favorite place?”  And we have a hard time with that question because there are many, many wonderful places – it is hard to choose!   We are not the least bit worried that we will get bored going west again.  By fall we should have a whole new list of ‘favorite places.'

 

Adios, Texas...