More than 7,000 miles in nearly 7 weeks...

No card today, but I did want to share a little bit about our recent trip (we arrived home on Halloween afternoon).  My husband and I took our little RV - Gladys - on a big loop beginning in Minneapolis and heading west to the Pacific Coast, down along the coast and then back again through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa.

We had a wonderful time, making plans just one day at a time along our basic route.  Here are a few photos that I thought you might like to see:

Bison grazing in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.

My husband and I in Glacier National Park in Montana. The fall scenery here was spectacular and the weather was perfect!

We visited our kids in Oregon and got the chance to spend some time with our beautiful granddaughter. We don't see them nearly enough!

We took our time driving down the Oregon and California coasts, seeing beautiful scenes like this along the way.

The trees in the Redwood National Forest are immense. Here you can see me standing at the base of one of them - and it wasn't even close to being the biggest tree we saw!

 

We spent a few days in San Francisco. What a fun city! Here I am looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge, which was mostly shrouded behind the low-hanging fog.

 

It is always fun to come across some wildlife that we don't see here in Minnesota. As we traveled down the winding coastal highway, we often saw sea lions and cormorants sunning themselves on the large rocks that lay just beyond the shoreline.

 

The California beaches were mostly empty of people -- but perfect for a couple of northerners who are used to freezing temps in October and November!

 

Hearst Castle near San Simeon, CA, was a must-see on my list. It's hard to imagine the resources that were put into building this audacious structure!

 

Joshua Tree National Park offered a rough, but beautiful, landscape so different from our home state, which is filled with lakes and deciduous trees. This high-desert area is one of the few places where the crazy-looking Joshua Tree grows.

 

We stayed in many beautiful campgrounds. This one in Arizona impressed me with how neat and orderly the campsites were laid out. It also made me realize how LITTLE shade one gets from a palm tree in the searing Arizona sun!

 

As we neared Sedona, AZ, these beautiful red cliffs rose up out of the ground. Sedona sits at an elevation of 4,500 ft. above sea level, so the weather is very temperate and the scenery is amazing!

 

The last national park we visited was Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Besides the petrified remains of a forest from millions of years ago, you will also find the beautiful Painted Desert here. It looks different from every angle, sometimes more red and other times with bands of white to gray. So beautiful! I kept trying to imagine what the pioneers must have thought as they approached vast habitats like this as they traveled in wagon trains across the country.

 

Thank you for staying with me until the end of this post. It is fun to share this amazing trip with others. Believe me, I have many, many more photos I could have posted here, but I thought I might hear the loud groans of anyone who visits my blog, had I included any more.

 

I will soon begin to post the cards I began working on as soon as I returned home. I did miss being able to craft over the past two months, but seeing so many beautiful parts of this country that I had never seen before was truly worth it!

 

Thanks so much for stopping by, and don't forget to laugh--a little or a lot--every day!

Cheryl