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Carlsbad Caverns National Park

2025-05-08 by Martin

We visited Carlsbad Caverns National Park in early April 2025 while staying at the SKP Ranch RV Park in Lakewood, New Mexico. When we visited, advance reservations were recommended. This was an easy on-line process that we had done some weeks in advance. As it turned out, the day we visited was not busy and we could easily have got in without an advanced reservation.

We had previously visited Kartchner Caverns State Park near Benson, Arizona in 2024 which we had thoroughly enjoyed, so we had some idea of the type of “cave decorations” and formations to expect. What we did not expect, however, was the sheer scale of Carlsbad Caverns compared to Kartchner. We read that Will Rogers had described Carlsbad Caverns as “The Grand Canyon with a roof over it,” highlighting the cavern’s immense size and unique geological formations. He also added, “it’s got all the cathedrals of the world in it, with half of ’em hanging upside down,” emphasizing the variety and scale of the cave formations. That certainly captures the majesty of the cave quite eloquently.

There are two options for entering/exiting Carlsbad Cavern. We chose to take the “Natural Entrance Trail” down into the cave, and the elevator to leave once we had completed the self-guided cave tour. The 1.25 mile Natural Entrance Trail was quite steep, and consisted of a series of switchbacks as the natural light soon dwindled and we entered the darkness of the cave with sparse lighting highlighting some of the natural features and formations, and providing just enough light to navigate the trail. Overall, this trail loses 750 feet of elevation — equivalent to walking down a 75-story building. This section took about one hour with frequent photo-stops.

The Entrance Trail took us into the “Big Room”, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America. The trail that loops around the Big Room is is another 1.25 mile trail but this time relatively flat. It took us about another hour or so to walk it.

It’s difficult to describe the extent and variety of cave decorations that you encounter as your walk through the cavern. The magnificent speleothems (cave formations) that continue to grow and decorate Carlsbad Cavern are due to rain and snowmelt soaking through limestone rock, then eventually dripping into a cave below and evaporating. Those water drops have absorbed gases and dissolved minerals from the soil and limestone above. Wherever that water drop evaporates and releases carbon dioxide in an air-filled cave, a small amount of mineral-mostly calcite, is left behind. Thus, drip-by-drip, over the past million years or so, Carlsbad Cavern has slowly been decorating itself.

The slowest drips tend to stay on the ceiling long enough to deposit their mineral there. Common speleothems found on the ceiling may be stalactites, soda straws, draperies, ribbons or curtains. The faster the dripping, the more likely it is to make some type of decoration on the floor. A wide range of decorations on the cave floor include totem poles, flowstone, rim stone dams, lily pads, shelves, cave pools, and of course stalagmites.

A visit to Carlsbad Caverns is highly recommended. It ranks as one of the highlights of the National Parks we have visited to-date. While it’s difficult to capture the scale of the cave in photographs, the gallery below includes some of the many pictures we took that give a glimpse into the cave and its spectacular decorations.

Winter 2024/25 Review and 2025/26 Preview
(Where we’ve been and where we’re going!)

2025-05-01 by Martin

Where we’ve been and where we’re going!

For the third year in a row, we spent winter 2024/2025 at Mayflower County Park near Blythe, California amongst old and new RVing friends. We arrived in early December 2024 after spending summer and fall on the west coast gradually making our way south through Washington, Oregon, and California with some great stops along the way. Pictures from our winter stay at Mayflower are provided at the end of this post. Our days at Mayflower were filled with walks around the nearby Palo Verde Ecological Preserve, walking the dogs in the park, monthly potlucks and ice cream socials, surprisingly competitive lawn bowling, discussions and reminiscences around the evening firepit, and trips to Blythe and Quartzite. This winter we also visited the Blythe Intaglios for the first time. These are a fascinating group of well-preserved geoglyphs that were created by humans for an as-yet-unknown reason, but clearly had a meaningful purpose for those that did create them.

We stayed at Mayflower County Park in our new 30-ft Grand Design Transcend 240ML travel trailer while our 5th wheel was being repaired. Our winter stay lasted for about 3-months before we headed to Casa Grande, Arizona for a couple of weeks in early March 2025. By then we received word that our 5th wheel repairs were complete in Arroyo Grande, California (San Luis Obispo County), so we schedule a few stops along the 400-mile trip to pick up the 5th wheel in late March 2025.

The 5th wheel repairs were done by Mullahey Collision & RV Service Center, and we were very happy with their work. They did a great job of the bodywork and interior repairs, including replacing the three-way refrigerator workings and completely rebuilding the kitchen slide and pantry. Fortunately, the repairs were fully covered by Progressive Insurance, and Mullahey did a great job of coordinating insurance company approvals for all of the work.

We had originally planned to switch back into the 5th wheel and store the new trailer for our upcoming trip, but after a few months of living in the new trailer we decided, instead, to take it on our trip and store the 5th wheel. We figured there would be some tight roads and campgrounds as we head to the east coast, and the smaller trailer will make travel easier and give us more flexibility on where we can stay.

Since putting the 5th wheel in storage in late March, we’re now officially on our “east coast trip”. The highlight of the year is going to be seeing fall colors in the US Northeast, and then traveling from north to south through most of the east coast states with a plan to spend winter 2025/2026 in Florida. As we get into 2026 we plan to spend spring and summer in the southern states visiting some of Allen’s family and then head up through the Midwest states through late summer, finally looping to the south through Colorado, and making our way back to Southern California by late 2026. That’s a big trip, and if we follow the current plan, we will have RVed through all 48 contiguous states by the time we complete it. The picture shows a map of our planned 2025/2026 trip.

At the time of this post (late April 2025), we’re in Tennessee. Since leaving California in late March, we’ve stayed in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. A recent highlight of our travels was a visit to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, and we will post a separate description of that visit on our blog.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

2025-01-09 by Martin

We visited Monterey Bay Aquarium on a sunny day in late October 2024. The aquarium is located right on the Pacific Ocean in Cannery Row, Monterey, California. The museum, and the Cannery Row area have repurposed old sardine cannery buildings to create an attractive tourist area with a variety of hotels, stores and restaurants.

We were fortunate to visit on a mid-week day so crowds were relatively light. We were told by staff that the aquarium was at about 20% of its capacity on the day we visited. It is easy to imagine how crowded the aquarium must be at full capacity. Although the aquarium doesn’t have its own parking, we were able to book parking on-line in advance at a nearby parking lot right across the street.

The aquarium had recently opened its newest exhibit called “Into the Deep” featuring the largest collection of deep-sea animals in North America. We particularly enjoyed the spectacular sea jelly displays. We spent several hours at the aquarium and were able to visit all of the exhibits. We enjoyed the variety of ocean life on display that included fish, corals, crustaceans, wading birds, sea otters, and penguins. Having visited several large aquariums, the Monterey Bay Aquarium stands out to us as one of the best.

A gallery of some of our photos from the visit are below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.

Joshua Tree National Park

2025-01-062025-01-06 by Martin

While the Joshua Tree area has been inhabited by humans for at least 10,000 years, by the late 1920s the development of new roads into the desert had brought an influx of land developers and cactus poachers. Minerva Hoyt, a Pasadena resident who was extremely fond of desert plants, became concerned about the removal of cacti and other plants to the gardens of Los Angeles. Her tireless efforts to protect this area culminated in 825,000 acres being set aside as Joshua Tree National Monument in 1936. As part of the Desert Protection Bill, Joshua Tree National Monument was elevated to National Park status on October 31, 1994. The bill also added 234,000 acres. Elevations in the park range from a low of 536 feet to a high of 5,814 feet at Quail Mountain.

We visited Joshua Tree National Park in late November 2024 while staying at the Thousand Trails Palm Springs RV Park in Palm Desert, California. We entered the park at the Cottonwood entrance at its southeast side, stopping at the small visitor center on the way. Following Pinto Basin Road to Park Boulevard generally took us from the southeast side of the park to the northwest side, eventually exiting at the West Entrance Station.

While we had visited Joshua Tree a number of times over the years, this was our first time driving the full length of the park and we got to appreciate the wide variety of scenery and ecosystems that exist in addition to the famous Joshua Trees that everyone associates with the park. There are three unique ecosystems within the park. As we entered at the southeast side, we found ourselves in the Colorado Desert that was characterized by stands of spike-like ocotillo plants and “jumping” cholla cactus. We stopped at the Cholla Cactus Garden which includes a flat 0.25-mile loop trail. We walked through a section of the thousands of teddy bear cholla cactus with a backdrop of distant mountain views.

As we continued along the road, we passed from the Colorado Desert into the southern boundary of the Mojave Desert which reaches across the northern part of the park. This is the habitat that includes the park’s namesake: the Joshua tree. We stopped at several areas along the road where there were many photo-ops. Along the way we pulled into the Live Oak Picnic area, driving a short distance on dirt roads to a secluded spot among the Joshua Trees and rock formations to enjoy a late picnic lunch as the sun was low in the sky on this short winter day. As we drove out of the park at its northwestern side, we got glimpses of Joshua Tree’s third ecosystem where the Little San Bernardino Mountains provide habitat for a community of California juniper and pinyon pine above 4,000 feet.

Our half-day visit to Joshua Tree was an enjoyable trip through the variety of ecosystems, geological features, and plants to inhabit the park, and we learned there was more to the park than just the eponymous Joshua Tree plants.

Photos of our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.

Temporarily Downsizing
(Our New Travel Trailer)

2024-11-13 by Martin

We’re (temporarily) downsizing into our new Grand Design Transcend XPLOR 240ML travel trailer while our 5th wheel is in the shop for repairs.

What Happened

The story starts back in July 2024 when we came out on the wrong side of an encounter with a particularly stout gatepost at the Grandview National Forest Campground in Ashton, Idaho. We had some fairly major damage to one side of the 5th wheel, but fortunately we were still able to live-in and tow it, albeit with a broken refrigerator and one non-functioning slide-out.

The 5th wheel needed to be repaired, and we learned that the repairs could take some time (possibly months), so we were faced with the dilemma of where to live while our full-time home is in the shop for repairs. We had been thinking about getting a smaller trailer to allow us to visit some of the national parks and other areas where our 42-foot long 5th wheel is just too long to fit. Although we hadn’t planned to buy one just yet, we decided to go ahead and purchase this 30-foot 2024 Grand Design Transcend XPLOR 240ML travel trailer for our temporary home, and for future use in the many parks that have a 30-foot trailer size limit.

We scheduled our 5th wheel repairs at Trailer Hitch RV in Nipomo, California, the dealer where we made the original purchase in 2020. At the same time, we purchased the new trailer from Trailer Hitch RV so that we could pick it up and transfer our belongings immediately prior to dropping off the 5th wheel for repairs. As we got nearer to the scheduled repairs in early November 2024, Trailer Hitch decided they couldn’t handle the needed repairs and referred us to a nearby RV repair shop in Arroyo Grande.

We had a busy few days in early November when we picked up the new trailer, transferred selected belongings from the 5th wheel, and then dropped off the 5th wheel for repair. We were able to secure two adjacent sites at the Pacific Dunes Ranch Campground in nearby Oceano to make the transfer of belongings as painless as possible.

Why we chose our Grand Design Transcend XPLOR 240ML Travel Trailer

We had several criteria to meet in choosing our new trailer in addition to a target budget, including:

Between 25 and 30-ft length
Separate bedroom area (with door)
No bunks (we don’t need them, and many trailers come with them)
No walk-through bathroom (bathroom between living area and bedroom)
Relatively good size living space
Preference for a Grand Design unit based on our positive experience with our 5th wheel

Based on our target budget and criteria, we settled on Grand Design’s Transcend XPLOR model line (this is their lowest cost travel trailer model) and looked at both the 221RB and 240ML models. In the end we decided the 25-ft 221RB was just a bit too small for us and settled on the 240ML which gives us pretty much everything we were looking for in a smaller travel trailer. The unit comes with two recliner chairs, a dinette area, and a floor plan that suits our needs nicely. One big difference from the 5th wheel is that we have way less storage space, so we had to be very selective in choosing belongings to bring with us. One plus with the travel trailer, however, is that we now have the full bed of our pick-up truck available for storage, which was not the case when towing the 5th wheel due to the bed-mounted 5th wheel hitch.

As of the time of this posting, we are about a week into living in the new travel trailer and we are about to hit the road with it as we travel south for the winter. So far, so good. We haven’t had too much trouble adjusting to the smaller space, and all of the trailer appliances and features have been working as expected.