I've been at a loss for words not a few times while we've been full time travelers by what's happening in the U.S. politically, specifically, policies happening because of the election and re-election of Donald Trump.

If our life on the road appears to be generally blissful and joyful, generally it is just what it appears.  We are not on vacation, but we are in a position to do vacation-like things as often as we want. There's mundane day-to-day living stuff too, but we are happy with the choice we made to travel without a home base.

So, with all the chaos being created by the current administration and their toady minions in Congress and the Supreme Court, we also feel a grave obligation to speak out, to let our voices be heard now.

We don't stream cable news shows. Ever. We, until recently, read two newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Now, only the Times. We have a subscription to The Atlantic.

We exchange ideas about the state of the U.S. and world daily with each other. What's happening today in our country reminds me of the growing up in the 60's when many of the policies being attacked now were settled, sometimes not so peacefully because of the intransigence of our government to the will of its citizens. 

I read various Substack contributors, including Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance, Slow Boring, Judd At Popular Information, Letters From An American, The Weekly Dish, The View From Rural America, Art Cullen's Notebook, and Chris Geidner at Law Dork, to name a few.  I also continue to follow Kyle Whitmire and John Archibald in Alabama.

And Melanie started following the 50501 Movement early on and, because of that, we've gotten out to be among like-minded citizens who also don't believe that the wholesale dismantling of government is normal, who don't want oligarchy, who don't want theocracy, who value our civil rights, the rule of law, and who are angry with politicians who are unresponsive.

Our own representative in Florida won't show up in person for Town Halls, instead choosing to communicate via telephone Town Halls.  Like many of President Trump's toadies, he's just another coward.

We've now attended four 50501 protests: two in Tucson, Arizona, one in Everett, Washington and the most recent one in Salt Lake City, Utah.  

Photos below are both mine and Melanie's from the Salt Lake City protest of April 19, 2025.

We've been in residence at DINO for just over a week and I'd not gotten Melanie's bike out storage on the back of the van. She was too busy being a Ranger-in-training.

Yesterday, she was off work and in the afternoon I retrieved her bike and we took our first ride in the Monument together. 

We rode as far as an overlook where the Green River Campground can be seen a few hundred feet down on the Green River, then we explored the Split Mountain Campground group camp area where a boat ramp is located.

Beautiful day and really nice first ride in our National Monument for Melanie.

After dinner, Melanie shared with me a video, River Reflections, I think you may enjoy. She tells me it's one of the reasons she choose to become a Seasonal Ranger here. 

Aside from the usual morning reading and social media check, I did a few domestic sorts of things yesterday morning, you know, washing dishes, laundry, remaking the bed, straightening things. Nesting behaviors.

Watching White Tailed Prairie Dogs forage from our windows.  The Dogs live in our front yard and in our back yard and they have young ones making their way out of the burrows into the world above ground, foraging, and engaging in a bit of rough and tumble as kids will do.

My phone tells me we are at 4,790 feet (1,415 meters) above sea level at the residences near the Quarry Visitor Center. High desert. Not far away from us is Split Mountain peaking out at 7,642 feet (2,329 meters).

I mentioned my cycling is a bit challenging here.  It's a world of up and down.  The scale of my surroundings is also challenging.  Cub Creek Road provides spectacular vistas with long sweeping curves and long downhill/uphill views of the Monument mountains. 

So far, everytime I'm out riding feels like I'm seeing the Monument for the first time.

Yesterday was one of those days. The clouds were high and light, just a bit fluffier than Cirus, not quite Cumulus Nimbus. They provided a very nice diffused light for photographs.

I've decided to stay close to home when cycling for the next little bit and use Cub Creek Road in DINO to get back into riding shape. I'm really not out of shape, but I can stand to cycle more consistently and get a bit stronger near term. Cub Creek Road from our residence to Josie Morris Cabin provides a beautiful and challenging terrain for Spring Training.

We haven't had any rain since our arrival on April 20. The humidity is low.  My nose and skin tell me so. Today the humidity is 25% under mostly sunny skies. The temperature is delightful at 73 degrees F. The windows and doors are opened wide to take in a gentle breeze.

I'm about to head out yet again for another bit of cycling. Probably fewer photographs today, enjoy those I made yesterday. DINO, your National Monument, is a magical place.

We're finishing up day three here at Dinosaur National Monument (DINO).  Melanie has a couple of work days behind her and I've taken a couple of very nice bicycle rides on Cub Creek Road which runs in front of our residence and east past two campgrounds and various sites within the monument.

The month before we arrived here neither of us got much exercise as travel up the California and Oregon Coasts accompanied by cool and/or rainy weather didn't permit it. Couple that with being at nearly 5,000' above sea level here in Jensen, Utah and I'm feeling the miles I've put in on the bike over the past couple of days.

It's early, but Melanie tells me she's enjoying the new environs here at DINO and the folks with whom she's going to be working.

The landscape here is other worldly. Here are a few images from today's cycling. I'll fill in the blanks as the season progresses.

We traveled from Salt Lake City, Utah to Jensen, Utah yesterday, our last "Travel Day" until October 18, 2025.

Melanie begins work tomorrow as a Seasonal Interpretive Ranger for Dinosaur National Monument.   This will be our longest time in place since we began full time travel.  I'm sure we'll spend some time traveling around exploring and camping in Utah and Colorado as our season progresses.

Another difference for us is housing provided by NPS. We've pretty much completed a move from Miranda into a one bedroom apartment as of today.

We ran errands today, picking up groceries and a few items we needed to make things a bit more livable. The apartment is clean, with new appliances.  I cleaned the nice windows we have facing North and South.  We have communal laundry and a fire pit.

Our animal neighbors include magpies, white tailed prairie dogs, robins, osprey, great blue herons, mountain lions, big horn sheep, gopher snakes, and black bear.   We'll post photos as we catch them on camera.

We've got lots of hiking, river rafting, camping and learning to do.  We both agree the season's gonna be great.  Watch this space.

Salt Lake City to Jensen, Utah and Dinosaur National Monument

Melanie and I attended the "Hands Off" protest sponsored by the 50501 Movement in Everett, Washington yesterday.  This protest makes the third of its kind we've attended, and it was by far the largest one.  There were easily several thousand in attendance at the Snohomish County Courthouse.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary
 is guided by a great feeling of love.
 It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
― Ernesto Ché Guevara

Presidents’ Day, February 17, 2025. Tucson, Arizona. 

We love our fellow humans so much that we joined several hundred like-hearted souls at El Presidio Plaza in Tucson for a peaceful protest against the fascism that is falling darkly over our land.  Steven captured some of the crowd and their clever and passionate protest signs with his Nikon.  I was heartened to see someone giving out American flags – some of us don’t accept the narrative that we hate our country.  What I do loathe is the evil of this dangerous new administration of oligarchs -- doing all that they can to wage war on the poor and working class, the marginalized and the sick, and anyone who would dare speak out against them.  Join us on Friday, February 28, for the Total Economic Blackout (don’t buy anything, anywhere, online or in person.) 

Good morning and Happy New Year from Cape San Blas, Florida where we arrived yesterday ducking the colder temperatures to our north and where we'll spend time with friends from Birmingham, Alabama later this week. We're camped at St. Joe Peninsula State Park Campground. 

As in years past, I'm cutting and pasting much of the text from the previous year's annual report to save some time.

As many of you who have been following us know, I started keeping tabs of all our expenditures when we started living in Miranda full time. For those of you out there who may aspire to the van life, living in a van down by the river, I hope this glimpse into what our costs in 2024 were provides an assist.

2024 was a bit different in that Melanie was employed full time by the National Park Service as a Seasonal Ranger from July through October. She was an Interpretive Ranger at Salem Maritime National Historical Site in Salem, Massachusetts.

I again offer this disclaimer: you may experience traveling full time differently.  Variables include  your means, your interests, whether you're working or retired, how often you like to move, etc. Use this as a very general guide for the related costs. Costs reflect our way of traveling. The world is/remains your oyster.

In 2024 we traveled 20,463 miles. That's up 7,935 miles from 2023 and reflects our time working in Salem where we drove from Gloucester where we camped at Cape Ann Campsite to Salem Common and parked while Melanie worked 5 days a week, plus various recreational exploring trips during our stay in Massachusetts.

We continue to chase those ideal temps, climate and peak experiences from state to state, sometimes succeeding, sometimes, not so much. We've experienced cooler temps than we like while camped at the beach on Cape San Blas, but as I told a friend, there's no sleet or snow.

Winter 2024 was spent largely in the Southeastern United States. We opted not to travel west because we wanted to view the April Solar Eclipse at our friend Diana's home located just outside Burlington, Vermont. 

We camped in 85 unique spots in 20 different states and 3 Canadianprovinces in 2024.

We spent 14% of our total costs budget dining out and 14% on groceries, down from 2023.   

Campground fees last year were $12,631.53 (13% of our total costs), an average of $1,052.63 a month. In 2023, we spent $7,964.01, a difference of $388.96 more monthly than in 2023. The National Park Service did not provide us with a full hook up campsite in Massachusetts like we had as volunteers on San Juan Island in 2023 and our seasonal site in Gloucester was exponentially more than we normally pay monthly for campgrounds. However, our Gloucester site was the only campsite around and we were grateful to have gotten it despite our late-in-the-season request.

Our time is divided between staying at private campgrounds, National Parks, State Parks, County and City Parks. We also have the Harvest Hosts service which provides us a data base of businesses and private individuals who will allow us to stay for free for up to 5 nights. We sometimes stay on BLM land, too.

Every now and again we park and sleep on a city street or a driveway for a few days. That generally happens when we are visiting a friend or family. We also have a few friends with summer homes in great places that offer us refuge when we visit them.

I could, of course, get off in the weeds here and tell you precisely how the Campground category is broken down, but usually our choice of campground is determined by a given route we've chosen. We prefer National, State, County, City, and BLM or free spots when we can get them, choosing private campgrounds, like a KOA, for amenities like proximity to a city or bike trail, laundry, pool, hot tub, etc.

Campendium is my go to application for finding campgrounds. We are premium members of the Campendium service called Roadtrippers.

Diesel fuel cost us $4,616.74 (5% of total costs) or an average of $359.36 a month in 2024 and an increase of $25.36 monthly over 2023.  

We're glad to see prices continuing to drop again, and are anticipating reductions in 2025 barring unforeseen circumstances. As a point of reference, we spent more in 2021 on diesel, $362.56, traveling about 100 fewer miles. Diesel prices were $2.716 nationwide in January, 2021.

As of January 6, 2025, the national wide the average price of diesel today is $3.561 down from  3.947 a gallon last year, and down from $4.638 in 2023.  

We use Gas Buddy sometimes to find fuel, but generally just to give us an idea of what prices are like in the area. Prices along major highways are generally anywhere from $.20 to $1.00 more per gallon than prices sometimes only a few miles off a major highway.

Also, be aware that using Gas Buddy doesn't always mean the price you see listed is the price you'll pay. Not sure what is going on, but increasingly I've found that the price is inaccurate when I get to pump. Not always, but enough to give me pause. It's a bit frustrating especially when you've traveled a bit out of the way to get the price you believe is a substantial savings.

Mercedes scheduled maintenance cost $946.71 (less than 1% of total costs) in 2024. We had an B service done in the Spring. That's about $7.00 more than 2023.

We spent $9,614.06 (10% of total costs) on miscellaneous maintenance, repair, and replacement items for Miranda such as dumping tanks, tank treatment, DEF, water filters, replacing our refrigerator, replacing the water pump, repairing our steps, repairing our leveling system, installing a storage unit where the Cummins generator had been, replacing shocks, replacing the macerator hose, new mother board for our Truma Water Heater, and other miscellaneous items we needed for general operation.

Our two six year old Electric Assist Trek bikes cost us $1,223.32 (1% of total costs) to ride in 2024. Costs include repairs of flats, miscellaneous items for both bikes and a battery replacement for one bike. The bikes serve us as transportation and recreation since we don't tow a car.

All of this financial minutia can't capture the priceless joy we experience continuing to live this life.