Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Last month I took a "little" road trip to New Mexico, by way of California. The California part was family business, but once I turned my nose south and east from there, things got fun. For one thing, I spent the first night out in a favorite camping spot, and the weather was perfect. Mono Lake at sunset. The lake and the Sierra Nevada mountains in the morning. I then took some fairly obscure roads south through Nevada. I had to stop a couple of times for the flowers on the roadsides. The next day I stopped at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, a place we visited when I was a little kid (I also always have to correct myself when I call it "Petrified National Forest"). I found the locations of a couple of old photos we'd been looking at recently, which was kind of fun. The Visitor's Center area. It was noon, and pretty hot, but the wind was blowing enough to make it bearable to be out for a while. I checked out the short trail and trees by the Visitor...

This is part of my on-going series of photo posts about my trip to Iceland in September 2025, including a  my 2-week  campervan tour of the Ring Road. If you haven't seen the previous posts and want to read them in order, here are the links to post #1     post #2     post #3     post #4     post # 5   post #6    post #7 , and post #8 .  Day 11 (Sept. 21): Skogafoss Waterfall hike. Nothing about waking up at Skogafoss was as nice as the campground the previous morning. The bare parking lot, the dingy loos (though they were a lot closer), and the weather were none a match. But the hike! Wow. I might wish I'd done it in bright, sunny weather, but I'm not sure that light would have been as good as what I had. Unlike most other people camped there, I was up at first light, and on the trail as early as possible (7:40 a.m., which isn't bad given we were at the autumn equinox--sunrise at 7:08, if it had been clear enough...