Phil and Megan's Blog

Megan’s Take Bandelier National Monument is beautiful! What a welcome change in scenery after our disappointment at Petroglyph National Monument. We’re “off-the-grid” in the campground here, but with Phil’s solar panel set-up, we could use our air fryer and all the basics. We’re being conservative with our electricity use, but we’re still very comfortable. Fortunately, […]

Megan’s Take Petroglyph National Monument was a disappointment. I probably had big expectations because Colorado National Monument last year was really cool. This monument isn’t worth visiting again. The views aren’t as striking as other monuments since the sites are dispersed among residential areas, and the petroglyphs don’t seem as well-preserved as others we’ve seen. […]

Megan’s Take This morning, Emmett and Emilia had a couple hours to play with their campground friends before we all left. (We “slept in” until 7 am and I was relieved that our neighbors were still there. Last night, the girls had told me they’re early risers. Emilia would have been heart broken if she […]

Megan’s Take Today was primarily spent visiting the three sites within the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument – Quarai, Gran Quivira, and Abó. Gran Quivira was probably our favorite site for how extensive the pueblo ruins are, but I also really liked Quarai (the title image) – church ruins plus a beautiful 1 mile hike […]

Megan’s Take Today we said goodbye to the fun swimming pool at the Alamogordo/ White Sands KOA and headed northward. Our final destination was Manzano Mountains State Park, but we did not take the quickest or most direct route.  We stopped at the Valley of Fire Recreation Area – very cool valley filled with black […]

Megan’s Take Today’s biggest adventure was visiting White Sands National Park. We hiked the 1-mile dune nature trail, which was really pretty and just the right length for the kids. One of the big activities here is dune sledding. We opted not to bring/rent sleds for the dunes, but instead gave them free play time […]

Megan’s Take Today started as the kind of day that makes me think “why are we doing this kind of trip?!” But it ended as “those are (fun) memories!” We checked out of Brantley Lake State Park this morning, and Emilia had a massive meltdown in the morning about an unfinished campground chalk project as […]

Megan’s Take We headed to Guadalupe Mountains National Park today. It is much smaller and less visited, but we wanted to check it off our list. Today was a cloudy day, following overnight/early morning rains. (The ranger said it’s a special day, since it’s not often like that down here.) We hiked the Smith Spring/Manzanita […]

Megan’s Take Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which has “North America’s largest single cave chamber by volume” , is so cool! I hadn’t seen many pictures in advance and wasn’t totally sure what to expect, but it really is BIG. First, we hiked about 1.2 miles down hundreds of feet through the natural entrance to the […]

Megan’s Take Today was our second full day of driving. I would not / could not do a third. Yesterday felt exciting with the promise of adventure. Today felt like a slow grind – getting across west Texas and then driving from Hobbs NM to Carlsbad NM. We were all starting to feel tired and […]