Welcome to the John and Michelle Grand Adventure Blog! For the first time in our 70+ years, we (and our three Cairns – Bob, Raven and Wren) are doing the “snowbird” gig. Our seven months of travel will take us through New Mexico and Arizona, up the California coast and over to the red rocks of Utah, then back home to Tamworth. Click here to download our itinerary.
We will use the blog to share periodic (no promises on how often!) updates on our adventures, including some narrative – depending on how verbose we are feeling! – and pictures of people, pets, places and panoramas.
Here’s how the blog works. There is no password to access the blog. (We all forget those way to easily!) You can check in on it on your own time schedule, or if you want, you can register to get a notification of updates. That way, whenever we post a new blog, a message will be sent to your email or text letting you know it is available. There aren’t any places on the blog website for comments or messages – we figured that would get too complicated! And you all know how to find us if you want to connect.
We hope you will all enjoy following this adventure with us, and we hope it will inspire everyone to travel this incredible country of ours! There are so many amazing places we have not yet explored, and we can’t wait to do it.
As Michelle is fond of saying: “Off we go!”
Click here to view our blog posts.
Seeking Bread and Deserts
First, A Word About Blog Writing My first recommendation is that if you’re thinking about committing to a travel blog – don’t do it! Just joking of course…But it is true that you can’t grow a blog on a predictable timetable. It takes time for a storyline to emerge that has the right feel to…
An Ode to the Everyday
The first name for this blog was: “Ode to the Mundane”. But Michelle thought that was a bit too negative sounding so she looked up synonyms for mundane, and the best match that came up was “everyday”, as in: “having to do with the practical details of regular life.” How true this rang! After two…
Adventures in Phoenix
We’ve now been outside of Phoenix in Gold Canyon for a week. In retrospect, we can’t really remember why we decided to stay on the outskirts of such a large city – it is not our usual traveling style! I think it is because we looked at the state map and decided we should camp…
Desert Mountain Adventures
Our New Neighborhood in Black Canyon City, AZ Black Canyon City RV Park is a small community of mostly full-timer snowbirds that own their lots. There are a couple of sites for us “short termers”. Like all these places, the neighbors couldn’t be nicer. The resident “pastor” (Pastor Pat, who holds services on her lot…
Stories From Las Cruces
Our New Neighborhood — Las Cruces KOA Making Friends on the Road If the trailer is your home and RV parks are your neighborhoods, then the next circle of social intimacy is your neighbors – who do you interact with and get energized by? On the road, the RV park is a natural “bump factor”…
Mountain Views in Riudoso
This morning, Michelle and I drove up a winding, hairpin turn road with sketchy guardrails (not my favorite!) to the top of a 10,000 foot mountain. In the afternoon, Raven and I did a low impact hike up Moon Mountain (5 miles, 700 feet vertical). Both trips had great mountain views. Clearly, this scenery is…
Getting Used to Having New Neighborhoods Every Few Weeks
As our trailer is our new home, each RV park is a new neighborhood. We are going to be visiting a total of 18 of them on our trip, so we clearly need to get comfortable with the wide diversity of places we are going to be living in – and letting the last one…
Making A Home on the Road
There is a saying in the RV community that “Home Is Where We Park It!” We are finding, not surprisingly, that there is an art to making that aspiration a reality. Honing that art has pushed us to think more deeply about what it means to “have a home”. Before heading out on this adventure,…
This Vast Land of Ours
It is a long way from Tamworth NH to Albuquerque NM. It took us 6 days to cover 2,400 miles through New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. The trip reminded us of how vast our country is and how easy it is to forget that. The landscape…
Off We Go!
We are heading out on Tuesday, October 14. Our first five days will be 2300 miles taking us through New York, Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and finally to Albuquerque New Mexico. We doubt there will be much to post about until we get to New Mexico, which is new territory for us. See you all…
John and Michelle's Grand Adventure 
You must be logged in to post a comment.