We're in Santa Fe!

Mountains and pine trees are the best!

Yay!  It seems it took long enough for us to get ‘on the road’ but we are finally traveling again.  It was a crazy few days taking exams, packing up Silver and doing everything (I hope we remembered everything) one has to do to be gone for about 3 months.

Cactus and Indian paintbrush are cool too...

When we arrived in Odessa, my dad was not well enough to travel so we didn’t make it to Ruidoso with my parents.  Still, we had a nice time hanging out with the family and eating a lot of good meals together.  Hopefully, we will get everybody to Ruidoso in August on our way back.

With dad doing a little better, we bid everyone good-bye and were officially on our way. It felt so good to be traveling again in Silver with David and Maya and the whole summer stretching ahead of us.  We arrived in Santa Fe on Tuesday and have been taking some short hikes to get our lungs used to the altitude and our legs back in hiking shape – not to mention a few trips to some of our favorite New Mexican restaurants.  After all, stomachs have to be kept in shape too!  (And we are in Santa Fe so all the food is healthy, right?)

We spent our first night 'On the Road with Maya'

at Bottomless Lakes State Park near Roswell, NM

We are all getting used to the RV ‘routine’ again.  Maya turned 12 in December and she is having a harder time getting in and out of the RV but with a little help she does fine.  I have been concerned about how the hiking will go this summer.  She has been slowing down on her walks for the past 6 months but so far on our 3 – 5 mile hikes things are going well, just a little slower than past years.  And right now David and I are not moving all that fast either although that should get better once we are more used to the altitude.

Salt cedar is quite invasive in the marshes at Bottomless Lakes SP

This plant can use up to 10 gallons of water a day!

Anyway we may not log as many miles on our feet (or our RV for that matter) on this fifth summer on the road as previous years.  For one thing we are only traveling for three months instead of the usual 6 to 8 months outside of Texas.  That being said, it is probably a good time to do our usual recap of our past year’s statistics.

The shores of Lake Superior

In 2015, we traveled from May 2 until August 30 in the Midwest – Texas to Arkansas then Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri (again) and Oklahoma before returning to Texas.  Throughout our travels we suffered many plagues of rain, poison ivy, ticks, mosquitoes, biting flies and various other ‘bite-mes’ so our hiking mileage was down compared to previous years.  Still we had a fabulous time, especially once we arrived in Michigan and we absolutely loved our time traveling the shores of Lake Superior.

David’s Stats for 2015 (out of Texas miles and hikes):

Days Hiked     67
Total Miles Hiked    266
Total Elevation Gain     32,394
Number of Wildernesses Hiked   5
Days hiked on the North Country Trail   10                                       
Days hiked on the Superior Hiking Trail   10

Miles driven on the RV   5,680
Miles driven on the Honda   6,830

Our first year out in 2012 we didn’t start until June 12 and because it was hot we headed quickly up to the Pacific Northwest and Canada.  We didn’t have our GPS so we don’t have statistics except car and RV mileage. (I do seem to remember hiking my butt off that year in the Canadian Rockies!)  In 2013 we went East and hiked many miles along the Appalachian Trail and other trails racking up over 635 miles.  In 2014 we were in the West again but started in early April and explored more of the southwest before heading to Oregon and Washington then coming back through Montana and Idaho.  Our mileage for 2014 was 610 miles. 

Gooseberry Falls in Minnesota

So 2015’s 266 miles seems pretty pathetic.  But as I mentioned it was a season of many plagues and we came back about 3 months earlier because of starting school in Nacogdoches.  Though we will only be traveling the summer months and we are all a bit slower these days I am hoping that we will at least match last year’s mileage. And being in the West we will easily top last year’s elevation.  Stay tuned and we will see!

One of our Midwest 'plagues,' biting flies...

Hopefully the West will be much kinder where flies are concerned!