Hello fellow national park enthusiasts! I posted this last week but have added a few clarifications.

I’d like to bring to your attention a big change to the confusing entry requirements for Glacier National Park and Yosemite National Park starting this year.

National parks usually require some type of entrance fee unless you have an annual pass or a senior pass (i.e., America the Beautiful pass; there are a few other types of passes with which you might be familiar). This is still required at Glacier and Yosemite.

Starting this year—May 6 for Glacier and May 21 for Yosemite—through September 2021, both parks are requiring an additional entry reservation ticket.

LET ME REPEAT. To get into Glacier and Yosemite National Parks this summer (and most likely all future summers), you will need a park pass (or pay an entrance fee when you arrive) AND a reservation (with an entry reservation ticket in hand or on phone).

Wow. Wow. Wow. Taxes, high prices, and crazy traffic aside, California’s diverse landscapes are breathtaking. From desert and palm trees in the south to high elevations, towering trees, and snow in the north. Or cliff-lined shores in the west to plunging waterfalls in the east. California does not disappoint.

Change is constant. Change is good. Change is inevitable. Especially when traveling full time in an RV!

You may have read my blog, “Alaska – On, Off, Back on Again,” that I posted a few weeks ago. Before covid, we had planned to go to Alaska this coming summer. Then, because of the pandemic and the Canadian border closing, we were forced to change our plans. With the recent approval of a third vaccine by Johnson & Johnson, I was re-energized about the possibility that the Canadian border might be open by the end of May, which would be the perfect time to head to Alaska for the summer. Carl was a little wary of the idea, but got caught up in my excitement. Within a couple of days, we realigned and rescheduled our travel plans through California and Oregon to be near the border above Bellingham, Washington by May 16.

As I started to plan our driving route and itinerary so we could make camping reservations at Denali National Park, signs of a slow re-awakening from the pandemic were evident on various websites. I began to realize that maybe this summer was not the best time to go. On the one hand, there would be less traffic and easier accessibility to various locations and activities. On the other hand, many things would still be at reduced capacity or not entirely open, and our trip through Canada might be restricted. Carl voiced the doubts I was starting to have, expressing a desire to go to Canada and Alaska when everything was more open and back to some semblance of normalcy. I reluctantly agreed. Not even a week after I posted my Alaska blog, the trip was OFF … AGAIN!

We are fortunate to have the flexibility to change our plans on a whim, but sometimes it leaves an impression that our decision-making capabilities have deteriorated. Alaska has not been the only decision we’ve toyed with recently. Carl has waffled a few times on upgrading our 2003 Ford F250 pickup to a newer model. And, just in the past day or two, we have been negotiating a realignment of our upcoming travel plans to Rancho Oso RV & Camping Resort near Santa Barbara because others have reported there is no cell phone or TV signal there, and Carl doesn’t want to miss the Masters golf tournament! Priorities, priorities.

This is what we know today: We are postponing our trip to Alaska for next summer after Rachel graduates, assuming the world is past the pandemic. We are tabling the truck decision until we get back to North Carolina in November. And we are still jumping through the hoops to change our location so we can watch the Masters April 8-12. We are adding in Sequoia National Park for a day or so before going to Yosemite, and we plan to camp on the Oregon Coast at the beginning of May. We might make it to Glacier National Park in June—and maybe even the Tetons—but we have yet to decide our route back to North Carolina, where we plan to be in November.

The good news is we are beginning to make new friends, and some of them might be traveling to Alaska next summer as well. Meeting up with them in different locations will be an added bonus to this trip of a lifetime.

Stay tuned for future RIVETING travel decisions. It definitely keeps US on the edge of our seats.

Dirt. Rock. Barren land. Palm trees. One can get over-saturated with the desert view after a while. Luckily for us, we were still in Palm Springs, California when Desert X started, and we were able to get some culture!

Desert X is an exhibition of thirteen art installations around Palm Springs, basically turning the area from Palm Desert to Sky Valley to downtown Palm Springs into an outdoor art museum. A free app is available to download that introduces each artist and the piece he/she created along with directions to its location. It is free with parking and easy access to each piece, although timed tickets are required from Thursdays through Sundays for many, if not all, of the exhibits. It runs from March 12 to May 16, 2021, with one of the installations not being available until the early part of April. We spent a day driving around to see some of them. For more information about the artists and their creations, click on the names or visit desertx.org.

When someone says they’ve patronized a desert bar in Arizona, you might think that isn’t a big deal since Arizona is mostly desert. In fact, you might be envisioning driving down a regular, paved two- or four-lane road, seeing a brightly-lit neon sign that reads BAR with an arrow pointing to a run-down hole-in-the-wall on the side of the road surrounded by barren landscape with scraggly brush and a few cacti.