Evans Outdoor Adventures

To our faithful blog readers, we’re sorry we’ve been MIA for the past month. In our last post, we had just celebrated the beginning of a new decade and were enjoying beautiful sunrises and sunsets at Lake Mead National Recreation Area just east of Las Vegas. I have more Vegas area activities to blog about, but first I want to share some news with you.

Rethinking Our Style

We never have been very good at doing things the same as everyone else. It always seems like we chart a different course than others. Turns out, it is the same in our travel life and the time has come to shake things up again.

We are in the process of making big changes to our travel style. We absolutely love all the traveling we’ve been doing and can’t imagine ending our adventures. We want to continue to travel as much as possible, but after four months on the road, we found we still want a home and community where we can take care of business, regroup, and have some personal space before heading out on the next adventure. We want our travels to be more about traveling and less about the mundane chores of daily life and vice versa.

With that in mind, a nearly 29 foot motor home is not the right RV for us. We only went that big so that we’d have more space for living full time on the road. The better fit is something rugged that can negotiate rough roads to remote destinations. We miss being able to turn down roads that most RVs would never dare travel. We miss traveling light and fast. The last four months have taught us we aren’t ready to give that up yet. I guess in short—we want more comfortable daily living and less plush travel. While we know there is no perfect combination, we are thinking the best combination for us is a home base and a rugged RV.

Base Camp Adventure

Our sudden departure from full time RVing might give you the impression that we want to slow down and adventure less. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We actually want to speed up our travels and see MORE! While we have missed our family and friends back home in SE Washington, that area is too far from the places we want to adventure and we are done with the cold winter months that grip the region for a significant portion of the year. We want a base camp with mild winter weather that is in close proximity to a plethora of scenic places where we can hike, backpack, and explore. We are in the process of developing a short list of potential Southwest locations that fit the bill. Some have been quick to point out that desert summers are hot. That’s nothing new for us—we come from Hells Canyon country. They don’t call it Hell for nothing! We’ll still be highly mobile and plan to return to the Pacific Northwest each summer to visit family enjoy our favorite mountain backpacking and fly fishing locations where it is nice and cool.

Plan For 2020

We have already begun the process of switching gears. Back in December, while traveling between St. George and Lake Mead, we passed a dealership in Mesquite, Nevada that sells Fords and RVs. After deciding that we’d like to get out of the big motor home and into a more rugged RV, we paid them a visit to see what kind of a deal we could work out. We knew exactly what we wanted, a one ton Ford diesel truck which will be all the truck we’ll ever need to pull any RV we would consider in the next ten years. Dave at Mesquite Ford was a pleasure to work with. He was happy to deal on trading the motor home for a Ford truck (minus our lithium batteries which we took with us). He even let us take the truck several days before handing over the motor home so that we could have time to pack up and move out.

We’ve already started researching our next RV. It must be small and rugged. Not living in it full time, we don’t need or want anything big. We need a place to sleep, a toilet, and we need to be able to take the cats for trips longer than a few days. Currently we are thinking a very small pull trailer or pop up truck camper, but we’d love to hear your suggestions!

We also need to start downsizing our belongings. We’ve been care takers for a family home for the past two years, but we need to be out this fall and our new base camp will be a significantly smaller place…so we have a LOT of downsizing to do. We don’t want to be packing this spring and summer when the weather improves, so we’re taking advantage of the cold February days to make good progress.  

The Future of Evans Outdoor Adventures

This is anything but the end of the road for Evans Outdoor Adventures. We’re simply turning down a different route. One that we hope will lead to even more exciting adventures. We feel good about these changes and we hope that you’ll continue to join us as we explore this beautiful nation. The sites we’ve seen and the people we’ve met have only fueled our passion for more travel and adventure.

I have a couple Lake Mead area posts that I’ll be working on over the next few weeks and early spring hiking and backpacking will be here soon. And we’ll share our latest RV search with you as well. So stay tuned—there are lots of adventures on the horizon!