Roaming Free In An RV

Well, I have been the biggest slacker and I apologize for that. No blog post since April. Yikes!! Hopefully you all follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter because I have been posting consistently there. The lack of blog posts is not because we haven’t been busy exploring. We certainly have!

One of the reasons is our external hard drive where we keep all our photos and Word documents died. We were not the smartest and didn’t have another back up (except for the photos I sell, which are saved in three places). To say I was upset was an understatement but it was our own fault. Lesson learned, have three backups for everything, one being a backup not at home (like Carbonite, Google Photos, or OneDrive). We took the external hard drive to a local company but they were unable to recover anything. The next step was to send it off to a company that specializes in data recovery so fingers crossed they can help us!!

The last blog post was about our visit to St George, Utah, which was awesome. Love that area! When we got up to Provo in the middle of March, it was still a little chilly. A couple nights got down to the low 30s and it did snow twice (a dusting, luckily). We had the furnace running a lot. We didn’t want any of the underneath area to freeze (broken water pipes didn’t sound like a fun idea). We obviously survived and were glad when the weather got better mid-April.

Utah County (Provo, Orem), just south of Salt Lake, sits at 4,000 feet elevation. We didn’t think anything of it until we got here. We were constantly tired and whenever we did any physical activity, we got tired more easily and out of breath. It honestly took us months to get used to the elevation and still when we hike we get more out of breath than when we hiked in Washington.

We tried to hike here in March, but the roads to the trailheads were closed due to snow and ice. We ended up parking our truck next to the road closed barrier and walking up. Once at the trailhead, we could see why the road was closed as it was too dangerous to hike so we turned back. We at least got some physical activity in but we didn’t get a real hike in until April.

The first real hike we did was the popular and famous Y hike. The Y Mountain is near Brigham Young University and over a hundred years ago, a senior class wanted to paint the side of the mountain. With the help of many high school and college students, they compromised and painted the Y.to stand for BYU. Lights go around the Y and are lit during special ceremonies, like graduation.

This area is very pretty with huge rocky mountains and lots to do. The landscape changes from being a little city to being countryside in a matter of minutes. Cows and horses are everywhere. Driving by the highway or any street and you will see people with farm animals . . . which, can get smelly at times when the wind is just right. This area also has a big air pollution problem. It’s never 100 per cent clear here and is worse in the winter due to the lack of blooming trees and the cold air getting trapped. Why is this? No one really knows. It might be that the air gets trapped by the mountains or the Salt Lake may trigger a chemical reaction. It is a puzzle.

I promise to do better with blog posts and videos.

Happy Trails everyone and thanks for being faithful readers!!