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  • bettinadownunder

Fisch on Tour 2024

Travelling the Western US in a Campervan Leia mais
  • Inicio da viagem
    21 de fevereiro de 2024

    Preparation Time

    9 de fevereiro de 2024, Alemanha ⋅ ☁️ 10 °C

    After 2 busy months at home on the couch, visiting friends and family, checking on the colleagues and verifying if the beer still tastes good at B&W, skiing, following up the first part of the tour, going through thousands of fotos, preparing the next part of the tour... only 12 days until I take off again.

    Tentative route attached: From Vancouver straight south to Palm Springs, spending a few days there, then via Joshua Tree - Anza Borrego Desert SP - Phoenix - Tucson - Tombstone - Chiricahua NM to Big Bend NP in Texas in late March. After that, the weather decides!
    Leia mais

  • 2000 km south - Day 2

    24 de fevereiro de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☀️ 21 °C

    Lots of driving as I cross Oregon and the mountains in Northern California. Mount Shasta again! Late afternoon breaks for sightseeing in the old gold mining town of Shasta, historical buildings and ruins now a State Historic Park, and then an architectural highlight: Calatrava‘s sundial bridge in Redding! Fitting with the architect‘s origins in Valencia, Spain, it was very nice and warm. And green - they‘ve had lots of rain, notice the flooding Sacramento River…Leia mais

  • 2000 km south - Day 3

    25 de fevereiro de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ⛅ 13 °C

    I stop after only 1,5 hours driving to visit Sacramento, the capital of California. A town of about 200,000 inhabitants, founded as a trading post and prospering during the gold rush time, it has several historic areas, albeit heavily reconstructed. Worth visiting, though! The rest of the day is again spent on I-5, beautiful drive this time of the year as millions and millions of fruit trees are in bloom….Leia mais

  • Palm Springs

    26 de fevereiro de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☁️ 20 °C

    I meet my Canadian friends, Rob and Sandy, for 3 days in an RV Resort close to Palm Springs. Lazy days… beer being drunk…. Short visits to Palm Springs and La Quinta. On the 3rd day I go hiking (see separate footprint).Leia mais

  • Hiking around Palm Springs

    28 de fevereiro de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☀️ 24 °C

    A first hike in Tahquitz Canyon, up through a wide canyon to a nice waterfall. With all the rain, lots of water in the falls and the desert is very green! Lovely flowers in the flat desert areas, I hope to see much more of this! The second hike of the day is to Thousand Palms Grove, where the native California Fan Palms have grown forever in waterbearing groundLeia mais

  • Hollywood!

    29 de fevereiro de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☁️ 16 °C

    3 days in LA - starting with the most famous places of them all, the core of Hollywood: Hollywood Boulevard between Orange and Vine, then down to Sunset Boulevard. They already blocked off the street in front of the Dolby and TLC Chinese Theatres to prepare for the Oscars. Apart from Movie stuff, Hollywood mainly consists of souvenir shops, homeless people and a run-down neighborhood. But it‘s cool nonetheless!Leia mais

  • Getty Villa & Getty Center

    1 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☁️ 15 °C

    Jean-Paul Getty was one of the richest men in the world and dedicated his fortune to art - constructing a full-scale replica of a Roman Villa close to Pompeji to house his Greek-Roman collection, and the huge Getty Center to house art from the Middle Ages to about 1875. Amazing to walk into old Rome, and to stroll through 500 years of European masterpieces within 3 hours!Leia mais

  • A driving tour through the LA metro area

    2 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    The world is a small place - especially when jobs take you around it. Martin my brother in law was in LA, and we spent Sunday together. It rained most of the day :-(
    Therefore we mainly drove around everywhere without getting out much, enjoyed drinks on the 70th floor of the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown LA and had a great dinner at Porterhouse, Bourbon & Bones. We made sure porterhouses and bourbons were quality-controlled :-)Leia mais

  • On the road

    18 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ 🌬 15 °C

    The towns I’m passing here in southeastern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas share common story: founded as boomtown due to mining, cattle ranching or rail road stops, the economic basis has disappeared. Now what? some sort of make it, most struggle, some are ghost townsLeia mais

  • Fort Bowie

    18 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ 🌬 15 °C

    Once the main army post in the 16 year search for renegade Apache chief Geronimo, Fort Bowie (1862-1897) used to have 300 inhabitants. Once given up by the army, it was stripped of wood and deteriorated quickly. Walking around a few remains, the sheer size of the Ford area was surprising, something that’s hard to show on picturesLeia mais

  • Big Bend Ranch State Park

    21 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☀️ 21 °C

    A huge state park protecting Chihuahua Desert Wilderness, only accessible by 4 x 4 for the most part. I drive the River Road along the Rio Ganda, the border river to Mexico. No border wall here! Every time you see a river in these pictures, the right side is Mexico. After the cloudy weather yesterday, it is unbelievably beautiful today.Leia mais

  • Big Bend NP 3 - Chisos Basin

    24 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ 🌬 25 °C

    Today I drive up into the mountain island, as they call cooler climate on isolated mountains in the desert. Looks Mediterranean to me. I hike down to The Window, the top of a dry waterfall, and then all the way back up. My first stop of the day though was a trail to Balanced Rock not far from my campsite. It was very windy all day, and the air is full of dust.Leia mais

  • Marfa again - Chinati Foundation

    27 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ 🌬 14 °C

    I complete my loop in taxes with the return to Marfa because I really wanted to visit the art museum Chinati Foundation by Donald Judd. No photography permitted inside, but Judd’s large scale outdoor installations are the centerpiece of the museum. It is located on a former US Army base. I then drive towards Carlsbad Caverns through a desolate landscape, full of oil wells and oil industryLeia mais

  • Carlsbad Caverns NP

    28 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C

    The only national park in New Mexico is essentially underground, protecting a system of more than 100 caves. One can be visited, tiny fragment of a cave system by far not fully explored. It’s a mixture of flowstone (Tropfstein) and other formations. I took the natural entrance, walking down 230 steep vertical meters, but I took the elevator up!Leia mais

  • UFO Crash in Roswell

    29 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ ☁️ 26 °C

    It’s quite a drive to get to Roswell, and I have to admit that I was rather disappointed. The town is fairly ugly, and seems to focus more on being a county seat rather than banking on global fame as alleged site of a UFO crash on July 2 1947. Only businesses get into it - you have to look closely. At least the chamber of commerce provided a nice welcome!Leia mais

  • Billy the Kid Scenic Byway

    29 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ 🌬 20 °C

    After driving through flat, unattractive desert landscape, riddled with oil rigs and oil industry infrastructure for hours in Texas and New Mexico to get to Carlsbad and Roswell, getting back to the mountains was a treat. I follow in the footsteps of Billy the Kid and visit Lincoln (where he escaped from the courthouse and was later hanged) and Fort Stanton - found it in 1855 to fight the Apache, it served as a hospital and an internment camp for German and Japanese nationals in WWII. Lincoln is a very nice, very authentic Old West Town, I really loved it.Leia mais

  • Salinas Missions NM

    30 de março de 2024, Estados Unidos ⋅ 🌬 16 °C

    I spent the night at Valley of Fire, a lava field, and walk the nature trail both last night and this morning. Most of the day I spent at the three locations of Salinas Missions National monument, three large Indian Pueblos, that were Christianized by the Spaniards in the 1620. In the evening, I visited Bosque de Apache Wildlife Refuge. It’s mainly a bird sanctuary for birds migrating between North and South America. Not too many bots today unfortunately, problem of the season, and it’s too windy, but I see ducks, deer, turkeys, and Javelina. Generally, in New Mexico, drives along and attractions spread out.Leia mais