Continuing Saga of Camping the National Parks

We bought our Jayco 19 about a year before I retired. The plan was to see our country without the constraints that family and work had previously placed on us. We would leave home and only come back when we felt like it. For the first trip, we spent a month touring the Grand Circle of National Parks in Utah and Arizona. This was to be the second trip. Now we were reaching higher north to the Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier and the Badlands. We spent a month on this trip as well, and were beginning to fine tune our method of traveling in this manner.

Our plan was first, to have no definite plans. We had the time and intended to use it. Such a plan as we had was to spend about a month each year touring a different area of our country. The rest of the year is largely being spent writing about the experience and organizing our photography so that others might be able to experience some of this grandeur vicariously for themselves. Or even better, to use our trip to help plan their own.

Our trailer, being only 20 feet long, is certainly not one of the largest travel trailers on the road, but this is mostly by plan and not by accident. I wanted a small rig to be able to get into some of the smaller places and travel more easily. We have been freely modifying the interior of the trailer to make better use of the limited space.

Our unit is small enough to squeeze into a lot of places that the larger units can't use. Many of the campgrounds that we are using will not accept trailers larger than ours. We are traveling by whim and not by planning ahead. The small size of our trailer enables us to see more on our trips and enables us to make needed rest stops in places where the larger units wouldn't be allowed at all.

It has been a good activity which has opened our eyes to just how much this country has to offer. It's one thing to know about something and quite another to see and experience it. This is the only way to really feel how much is out there. Possibly the biggest thing that I have learned is just how large a land this is and how much empty space we have it. I am still having trouble fully comprehending it.

Dettagli