Charming Adventures

San Jose, CA: The Bizarre Winchester Mystery House

Winchester Mystery House adds to our growing list of fabulous, weird properties we’ve visited around the country. Why is this place so weird?  Well, its construction was driven by a psychic medium advising a very, very wealthy woman, with nothing but time and money to blow on its strange, 40-year progression.  Sarah Winchester, wife of Winchester Rifle magnate...

Carmel, CA: The Greatest Meeting of Land and Sea

Carmel, California: It has been called “heaven designed” and deemed “the greatest meeting of land and sea in the world.” And who are we to disagree? While much/all of the nation swelters under a heat dome or is washed away in flooding, Carmel CA temps are in the high 50’s, practically begging us to come out and explore. Exploring is best...

High @ Pinnacles NP, & Low @ Forestiere Underground Gardens

PINNACLES NATIONAL PARK Isolated. Serene. Majestic. A place for rejuvenation! These are some of the ways Philip describes Pinnacles National Park in Central California. It’s a peaceful place of great beauty, and our 70th National Park Service site in 10 years of RV’ing. At only 44 square miles, Pinnacles is on the smaller size, and yet the single road...

Bakersfield, CA: Sounds and Sights

I’m just gonna say it. Bakersfield, California is probably not on most people’s bucket lists. But if you’re a country music fan, there’s a good chance it is, and that reason in “The Bakersfield Sound!” The Bakersfield Sound is considered less smooth and a little twangier than that which comes out of Nashville, but arguably no less...

NorCal: Fourth Time’s A Charm

Northern California … our fourth attempt! It’s been planned, and cancelled, three previous times: once for wildfires, once for Covid, and once when Philip slipped and ruptured a disc in his back on the way there, necessitating a quick return home for emergency surgery and rehab. Fast forward to 2023: fourth time’s a charm! We’re comin’...

Westward: A Mixed Bag + A Buc-Ees

As always, heading home in an RV, from a long distance away, is a mixed bag of excitement and dread. Long days of driving, mixed with a lack of upcoming adventures. Teeth-shattering bad roads (don’t get me started on I-20 through Louisiana) mixed with coma-inducing flat/straight/boring highways through West Texas. Surprisingly nice campgrounds like this one...

Jekyll Island, GA: The Most Golden of the Golden Isles

Destination: charming Jekyll Island, Georgia! With wide open spaces, nature galore, safe biking to literally the entire island, historic mansions that harken back to an altogether different time, independently owned shops and restaurants, beautiful golf courses, and endless dog-friendly beaches, RUN – don’t walk – but RUN like the wind — to...

St. Augustine, FL: Oldest City in the U.S.

There’s old, and then there’s really old, and I’m not referring to Tony Bennett. Nope, it’s this place, the nation’s oldest continuously occupied city, starting way back in 1565! With colonial history galore, beautiful Spanish-style architecture, shopping-shopping-shopping, and lots more, St. Augustine is a jewel of a destination...