We’re home!
It’s been a couple weeks since my last blog post, so let’s recap. –
Yosemite was like a dream. 😍 We spent several days there, but I could have stayed the rest of my life.
I didn’t realize how HUGE these parks really were. Since we came without a plan and didn’t have reservations to stay in the parks, we had to drive out every night and back in every morning. That’s a lot of driving (and gas – at California prices 😅) when it takes an hour just to get out and into the park. So instead of staying a week, we just saw Yosemite 3 days. I would love to go back one day and stay a while – it seriously looked like we stepped into a post card. 😍
Next up was Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park. I didn’t know this, but the two parks are connected, so we got to see both in one day. The Sequoia trees were crazy, and the mountains looked like a painting.
Then we had to check out Death Valley – the hottest, driest, and lowest National Park. 🥵 We were able to stay the night at one of their dry (no hookups) campsites and realized that our generator isn’t powerful enough to run the rooftop A/C unit. Thankfully, it did cool off over night, and the vent fan kept us alive. 😅 We did only make it one night though, and mostly just drove through the park. I was not prepared to hike in that heat!
Then it was Vegas, baby! The city isn’t really our speed, and big groups of people kind of make me nervous, but we had to check it out! We got some lunch, walked through some of the huge hotels and casinos, stopped by the sign for a picture, then took off again.
If I’m being honest, I thought the Hoover Dam was going to be kind of meh… It was just one of those things that we needed to see, but not be super exciting. But I thought it was super cool! It was amazing to learn a little about how it was constructed and see the awesome mountains surrounding it too.
There’s not really anything I can say about the Grand Canyon other than WOW. It was incredible.
We had to stop at the corner in Winslow, Arizona.
And our last big stop on this trip was the Petrified Forest. This one was super cool, and we got to see so many cool trees/rocks that I didn’t even know existed. 🤯 If there’s one thing I have learned on this trip, it’s that I don’t know very much. 😅
After we saw the last park on our trip back home, we were ready to hit the road. And when we decide to move, we do it pretty quick. We made the 1,500 mile trip in just a few days and made it back home today!
Our deadline to be back home was May 24th, but we knew we wanted to be back before then. We have more work to do on the van (because we were too impatient to finish it before we left), and we have some boring, adult things to do too.
Our taxes have been a disaster, so we have to get them sent off. Side note – Turbo Tax does not work around a “duplicate W2” flag. Since we did the exact same job for the exact same amount of time (the Sugar Beet Harvest) last year, we got flagged for a duplicate W2 (even though there’s two different names with two different SSNs 🤨). Anyway, that’s been a disaster, and I’m taking a day off this year so those numbers are a little different.
I have to get a new license, since mine has been expired for many months. 😅 And we have a whole list of other boring, adult things to get caught up on.
Then we’ll be headed to camp at the end of May!
It’s been a wild ride, but it’s good to be back home – for a little while at least.
-Rachel
PS – Have you read about our summer plans? Rett will be working at BCC, a non-profit summer camp, and part of his responsibilities are to raise his own support. If you feel lead to do so, you can donate to his funds here or by sending a check (with “for Rett Russell” in the memo line) to the Lincoln church of Christ at 760 Patton Chapel Rd. Lincoln, AL 35096. And as always, THANK YOU so much for the support! ❤️
The Rolling Russells 