I thought how we would start our new adventure would be totally different than what actually happened. We were suppose to pick up our motorhome the day of closing on our house of seventeen years and hit the road running, with our jeep in tow, in search of our new adventures. Here is what actually happened.
It was three weeks after our closing, and we still didn’t have our motorhome. We thought we were a couple of days from picking it up, but we knew this story too well. That’s right — it didn’t happen. So, what did we do? Without a home to go back to, we started our next stage adventure in our 2014 Jeep Rubicon, built and outfitted to overland and explore remote areas that can only be reached with very capable vehicles but with many of the comforts and amenities we’re all used to. Thankfully, we had become pros at overlanding during the last two years as we gained valuable experiences and established our routines that complimented each others’ tasks and abilities quite well.
The places we saw in just a few short weeks were astonishing, most of which we could not have experienced without our beloved “Lion Crawler” (if you’re a Penn State fan, you can relate to this, and after all, what else would you expect from two Penn State Alumni). Our Motorhome is our “Lion Roamer.”
To recap our first week, we completed what we called the Colorado Alpine Loop — seven off-road alpine passes, six national forests, one national park and ten small mountain towns. Check out our two-part video playlist to see more. Then, in hopes of picking up our motorhome, we headed back to Castle Rock only to hear that it will be another one to two weeks for the motorhome to be complete. So, we winded up staying with our beloved neighbors.
Now what do we do next? What else, start another overland trip. This one was to South Dakota. Our main objective for this trip was to establish our state residency and start the process of acquiring a new address, obtaining new drivers licenses, registering our vehicles and other state requirements. We hopped, skipped and jumped through Wyoming for one night and off to explore what South Dakota had to offer. Wow were we impressed! We didn’t really have any expectations, but we were surprised by how beautiful this state was.
Some of the sights we saw along the way were: Black Hills National Forest, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Custer State Park, Wind Cave National Park, Badlands National Park, and a handful of small towns like Custer, Hot Springs, Hill City, Sturgis, Rapid City, Lead, Deadwood, Keystone, Scenic and Wall. During our travels it’s always a pleasure to experience wild life and in this trip we saw free roaming bison and big horn sheep. One unexpected spot we came across near the city of Hot Springs was a Mammoth Site and a Research Lab that continues to be actively excavated with new findings every year. It contained the remains of sixty-one mammoths, three wooly and fifty-eight Columbian mammoth, a giant short faced bear, lamas, camels, prairie dogs and more, all from the sinkhole sediments of this site. Check out our video of this trip.
In the end, we started our next stage adventure with a very important lesson. What did we take away from this experience? To enjoy the moments that every day has to offer us. There will always be situations that we encounter and have to deal with, but they don’t have to consume us. Instead, we need to remember to let it go, move forward and enjoy the journey!
