Alabama Hills in Lone Pine, CA

Beautiful sunrise 

Alabama Hills in Lone Pine, CA is RV heaven. We spent a week here in October and it was fabulous!

Great camping among the rocks

Enjoying the perfect evening with a fire

Great sunsets

Möbius Arch with Mount Whitney in the background.

Loving life 

Pink sky

Biggie Moms looking good at sunset

Last light

The Climb: Mount Whitney

Mount Whitney 

In the lower 48 states, at 14,508 ft Mt Whitney tops out higher than all other peaks. Naturally, people who like to hike mountains add Whitney to their bucket list. The Pacific Crest Trail and the John Muir Trail both intersect with Whitney and since it's right there most through hikers add summiting Whitney to their trail miles. Consequently, the USFS controls the number of hikers on the mountain with a permit system. Most people plan Whitney trips far in advance and have their permit reserved, but cancellations happen so it's possible to walk into the Eastern Sierra Inter-Agency office and just get lucky. That's what happened to us. Kristy walked into the office to find out "how to" details and walked back out with a three 3-day permit.

Quick change. Here we sit in the Agency's parking lot, trailers in tow, knowing we need to fill up our water tanks before heading into the nearby BLM's Alabama Hills to dry camp. Now we need an immediate plan to set up camp and hustle up the mountain to start backpacking. Luckily, we had all taken the time to pull out our gear and ready our backpacks during our stay in Bishop, CA. All we had to do was find a good camp spot and lock up the trailers. In less than three hours, we're at the trailhead and ready to go.

This is our journey in pictures:

Happy about our permits

Wander women feeling fine

Annette and Lynn making their way up.

First night we ran out of daylight so we camped in a not so comfortable spot.

Mirror Lake

Sunrise greetings 

Annette making her way up the 99 switchbacks 

A view from the top

Annette resting at the top. Super cold!!

Annette and Kristy at the top

Annette and Kristy at the top of Mount Whitney. Yippee

A NEW SPIN TO OUR TRAVEL LIFE

Trying new things is one of the fun aspects of RV travel. Often, when we stop near a town to camp, we don't have any agenda except to wander and get the feel of the place. Adding disc golf into our repertoire of activities, opens another window into a town's psyche.

Lynn putting

Disc golf is a game where you throw a disc (fancy Frisbee) on a rustic version of a golf course and try and sink your disc into an elevated steel basket. There are rules and specialized techniques, but we're not ready to care about them yet. We're still trying to get the hang of getting the disc anywhere close to the target--worry enough for now. Just like in real golf, each hole has a suggested par, the number of tosses it should take to get from the tee to the basket; suggested is the key term.

Kristy using her mid range disc

Here's how we got started. First we bought a three pack of cheap discs at a local sporting goods store. Included in the three pack is a driver, a midrange disc, and a putter. Choosing bright colors to make it easier to locate discs gone wild is a good idea.

In Aberdeen, our online search leads us to a sweet 9-hole course in an old part of town. We park, grab our colorful discs, and head for the first tee. Finding the first tee proves challenging, but after wandering around most of the park and asking two kids, a person eating lunch on a bench, and a dog-walker if they've seen tee #1, we follow vague directions to the far corner of the park and find the tee off pad. Already we can see that disc golf is a great way to meet people.

Annette, Lynn and Kristy stand on tee pad #1 and look 352 feet out and spot the metal basket--this one has a bright yellow rim that makes it seem deceptively close. How hard can this be? Annette steps up and flings the disc. It drives itself hard into the ground and rolls listlessly into a bush. Kristy sends hers flying up, and up, deep into the branches of the only tree on the fairway. Undaunted, Lynn steps up and flips her disc hard and low, smack into the back of Kristy's head. It (the disc, not Kristy's head) bounces, rolls, and lands 10 feet in front of the tee pad. We scatter to retrieve our discs and proceed down the course.

Somewhere around tee 4, Shug, who's on leash and has been yawning and rolling her eyes, makes a break for it and races to retrieve Annette's driver which is rolling toward a god-forsaken, thorny bush on the edge of the course. Zig-zagging while we chase her screaming nnooooooo!!!, she swoops up the disc in her grinning white teeth and tears off across the field. Eventually, after romping through half the park, Shug gives up the disc which now bears her distinctive piercings.

Occasionally, we throw a disc straight and there's glib talk about how we're getting the hang of the game. But, for the most part, we throw left or we throw right, and end up searching through brush or digging our discs out of trees and bushes. On one noteworthy throw, Annette sends the disc spinning high into the air where it catches a gust of wind and arcs back behind the tee pad for a loss of 2 feet. We've become overly familiar with the phrase, "I've been robbed, " as a putter clangs into the basket chains and bounces guiltily onto the ground. Most holes are a par 3, we usually make it in about 6, and officially stop counting at 8.

Disc golf offers us a chance to get out and explore local parks while getting a little exercise and a lot of laughs.

IN A LATHER ABOUT SHOWERS

Showering on the road proves to be an adventure all on its own. Since installing solar we spend most of our time boondocking in quiet out of the way places where potable water is not available. Trying to conserve water makes using the shower in the RV not an option. We're not saying we're not clean, we're just saying that getting a good shower can be challenging.

While in campgrounds, we utilize the campground showers and if boondocking, we find pay showers in RV parks, campgrounds, showers in public swimming pools or, occasionally, in hostels. Our shower experiences make us laugh, grimace, wander around perplexed, feel traumatized, and, every so often, rejoice.

To achieve a successful shower, our first order of business is buying a cheap pair of flip-flops to ensure that our feet never touch any surface of the shower floor. Sometimes we forget the flip-flops and always return to get them, even if it means a five-mile walk to retrieve them. A shower bag packed with all of our products is a necessity. It is not fun to step into the shower and realize you don't have shampoo or soap or to step out of the shower with no available towel and end up using the shirt you came in to blot the water from your body. Dogged determination helps in a shower quest.

In several Texas State Parks, we dodge mesquite worms who climb the walls of the shower. There's nothing like shampooing your hair while keeping one eye on the acrobatic worms crawling and straining their body toward yours. The Texas two-step is a dance we do to avoid the bugs crawling across the shower floor. At Caprock Canyon State Park, the resident herd of bison make it their mission to keep shower-needy campers away from paths leading to the shower house. Woe to anyone carrying a red towel.

Texas shouldn't feel bad because other states have shower challenges, too. In one California park, the touted shower is one of those outdoor surfer showers near the lake. We take a modified cold shower in our swimsuits and forgo shampooing our hair. At a hostel run by genuinely friendly young men who live there for extended periods of time, we take turns waiting to shower in a single bathroom where black mildew streaks the walls. On the plus side, the water flows hot and steady. At a state park in the desert, we drop coins in a pay shower anticipating a dust-busting spray and instead get two drops of hot water or a weak stream of cold.

Worse even than showers that run cold, some showers entice you in, talk you into taking off all your clothes and slipping into your flip-flops and then give you nothing. When one shower doesn't work, we gather up everything and move to the next, which really sucks because the next shower is outside and around the other side of the building.

Three-minute showers are the standard in the pay shower world. Which means you need two sessions if you want to wash your hair along with the rest of your body. Here's how it works: Insert $1.50 for three minutes. Wait 2 minutes for the water to get warm enough to step into. Jump in, get wet, and start lathering yourself up like crazy. The shower turns off. Shampoo your hair and if you dare to risk the carnage from the goose bumps, shave your legs. Insert another $1.50 and endure only 30 seconds of cold water before luxuriating in two and a half minutes of pure bliss.

One of our favorite shower experiences happened while backpacking the Oregon coast. We pitch our tents in a private campground in the beautiful town of Cannon Beach, a very nice and expensive RV campground mostly due to its location. The neat and clean restroom with four showers available looks promising. There's a dressing room area in front of each individual shower stall with a curtain in-between to keep your stuff from getting wet. When in the dressing room everything seems normal, but stepping from the dressing room to the shower stall proves different. A six-inch step up makes the shower head chest high. To wash our face and head, we now have to duck and stoop while attempting to keep the shower curtain from sticking to our wet behinds. We laugh at this one, grateful for a hot shower, and envious of those lucky short people.

Of course, we find many great showers while on the road and feel elated when we do. A great shower is quite the treat these days. The past fifty years of life, we took showers for granted. Sometimes, while out in the middle of nowhere, a simple basin substitutes for a shower. Standing outside and out of sight, we wash hair, shave legs or just stand and bathe--no extra charge for the fresh air dry.

Lassen Volcanic National Park

Lassen Peak 

Lassen Peak is one of the largest plug dome volcanos in the world and spectacular for sure. We enjoyed a beautiful drive through the park with jaw dropping views of the rugged landscape. All four types of volcanos are found here; shield, cinder cone, plug dome and composite.

Annette and Lynn on Bumpass Hell Trail 

Kristy standing in front of a fumarole

Hydrothermal Basin 

Shug not being allowed on trails in the National Parks limits us a little but we make the most of it. While Shug waits in the truck, we take a short walk around the Devastated Area interpretive trail which highlights the historic eruptions of Lassen Peak and points out various rocks and boulders that ended up miles from where they originated. We sadly skip hiking Lassen Peak, but enjoy the Bumpass Hell hike to the active hydrothermal basin and follow a boardwalk out to see bubbling mudpots and fumaroles.

Hydrothermal Basin

Boardwalk over the hydrothermal Basin 

Annette viewing Broke-off mountain 

Boiling mudpot

Before leaving the park, we stop at the Manzanita Lake Camper Store for showers. Showering on the road is quite an adventure and could have a blog post of its own. We end another great day and drive a few miles outside the park to Ashpan Snowmobile Park where our home on wheels awaits.

Once back at the RV, we all agree that we can't leave until we climb Lassen Peak. So we hatch a plan to get up super early, take Shug out for a long hike, leave her in the RV and go back into the park to hike as fast as we can up Lassen Peak. And that is exactly what we did, enjoying every minute of the well maintained trail and its interpretive info along the way!!

Lassen Peak Trail

Annette and Lynn making their way up

Lynn, Kristy and Annette on Lassen Peak 

Kristy and Annette at the top

Lassen in the distance 

A view of Mount Shasta from Lassen Peak 

We highly recommend a visit to this beautiful National Park. After hiking just a small sampling of its many trails, we plan to come back and explore Lassen again.