Posts In The “Destinations” Category
For our route from Reno to the Pacific Coast, we took the lesser-traveled Highway 70 along the historic Feather River Canyon route of the Union Pacific Railroad. This trip includes unique and dramatic early 20th-century railway architecture, such as the Williams Loop, where the track loops back over itself in a 1-mile descending turn, and…
The National Automobile Museum in Reno, NV contains over 200 classic cars. Most are from the collection of deceased casino founder William H. Harrah, who amassed what was then the world’s largest collection of historic cars with about 1,450 automobiles. One of the museum highlights is a 1907 Thomas Flyer, winner of the 1908 New…
The 408-mile (656 km) stretch of Highway 50 across Nevada is dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America,” with only a few small towns along the way and not much else. The route was the main overland route across Nevada until the first trans-continental railway was completed in 1869, and was part of the Pony Express…
Hell’s Backbone Bridge in Utah was a major engineering feet when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built it in the 1930s. The bridge spans Hell’s Backbone, a narrow spine of rock with canyons dropping of steeply on either side. Completion of this bridge gave the first automobile connection between the towns of Boulder and Escalante….
Capitol Reef National Park in Utah is known for its many long and narrow canyons, some so tight a person can barely squeeze through and others wide enough for vehicles to pass. One of the more unique is Capitol Gorge with its Pioneer Register: as 19th- and early 20th-century pioneers and settlers passed through the…
Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah is packed with spectacular, spire-shaped formations. Known as “hoodoos”, these red-rock pillars form over time as holes in the canyon walls form when frost enlarges cracks. The holes eventually collapse, leaving the hoodoos. From Springdale UT, near Zion National Park, we drove 232 miles northeast to Bryce Canyon,…
Utah’s Zion National Park is exceedingly popular, and for good reason. The rugged red-rock canyon scenery is spectacular, with many hiking trials, climbing and canyoneering opportunities for unique perspectives and experiences. And after enjoying a day at the park, nearby Springdale has excellent accommodations and restaurants. From Flagstaff, AZ we drove 328 miles to Springdale,…
Grand Canyon has long been high on our list of places to visit, and we finally got there on our cross-country road trip from Charleston to Seattle. Even after seeing countless pictures and reading many descriptions, Grand Canyon still appears unbelievably immense when first seen in person. We spent most of our visit on an…
Tucson, Arizona’s second-largest city, has interesting historical architecture, a number of diverse attractions, and a college-town vibe from the 46,000 students at the sprawling University of Arizona campus. Area attractions include the Pima Air and Space Museum, the “aircraft graveyard”, and the Arizona-Sonora desert museum. The Pima Air and Space Museum is one of the…
We spent three nights in Texas on the next leg of our road trip to Seattle, first in San Antonio and then in El Paso, traveling 1,097 miles (1,765 km) from New Orleans. This brought our total trip distance up to 1,897 miles (3,052 km) across seven states (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,…
On the second leg of our road trip to Seattle from Charleston we traveled 202 miles (325 km) from Pensacola, FL to New Orleans, LA bringing our total trip distance to 800 miles (1286 km) across sixstates (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana). In New Orleans we stayed in a 43rd-floor room with…
In early June, we loaded Spitfire and our luggage into a rental car and set off on a 4,200-mile (6,760 km) road trip from Charleston, SC to Seattle, WA. We spent the first two nights in Florida, first in Jacksonville and then in Pensacola, after passing from South Carolina through Georgia and traveling 598 miles…
We really enjoyed our first week back in the US at Charleston City Marina after our month-long passage from Dublin via Horta. It was hard to believe that a few months earlier we were in Farsund, Norway and frozen in with ice so thick we could walk on it and now we were in Charleston,…
We completed the final leg of our passage from Horta to Charleston in the same conditions as we started, with light winds, calm seas and great speed. In the middle, we had two weather systems to contend with, including the first named storm of the year, tropical storm Ana. Photo courtesy Pierce and Janet Guyer…
In determining our route from Ireland to Charleston this May, we had a number of choices. The naive option was to proceed directly from Ireland to Charleston, taking roughly the opposite route to our 2017 passage from Newport, RI to Kinsale, Ireland almost four years earlier to the day. But a near-steady procession of intense…
The most direct route from the Azores to the US is an 1,800-mile great circle route to Bermuda (the red dashed line above), then a 600-800-mile run to the US, depending on our landing choice. The problem with that routing is that the winds predominately blow from the west, on the bow, and we would…
Horta has long been a stopover for ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Explorers and settlers arrived in the 15th century, followed by trading ships in the 16th through 19th centuries, and most recently, ocean-crossing pleasure craft. To accommodate the increasing numbers of these smaller boats, a large 300-slip marina was constructed in 1986. It is…
We got our first glimpse to the Azores archipelago on the morning after our eighth night after departing Dublin. We reached the port of Horta shortly after day break and proceeded to our berth in the commercial harbour, with views to the historic town on the opposite shore. The protocol for pleasure craft arriving into…