Slowly but surely we are catching up!

The new year found us in south Florida. The holidays as a whole were great, because we finally had time to see and catch up with our families. In fact, we enjoyed it so much we stuck around all the way until the middle of the month. Taking advantage of our time off from the road, we tackled some nagging van projects. MAK gave Stanley a long overdue thorough washing. She removed over 20 lbs. of dirt from his undercarriage, that we had been toting around since our run-in with the mud in Big Bend National Park. We replaced Stanley’s nearly none existent horn, and replaced our rear shocks with some fresh Bilsteins. The highlight of the van edits has to be our new bookshelf. Mak and her father did an amazing job building it (I’m more of an idea guy).

We were very sad to leave our families, but fast approaching plans for February meant we needed to get moving. One of favorite places that we stayed at on the way was High Island, Texas. It is a sweet spot on the beach, it made for a great place to sleep, explore and get some work done. BEWARE: on the second night we were ravaged by mosquitoes that were mysteriously getting into the van. (If you have any information on how they might be doing that we are all ears) Despite being 10:30 PM we evacuated immediately and drove 45 mins away from the coast! We had better luck in Austin and El Paso, TX where we received some wonderful hospitality from my cousin Austin and Mak’s family friends’ the Whites. The world needs to know that Emma White makes the most amazing German Pancakes!

After Texas, we made a stop at Indian Bread Rocks. Sadly, were only able to stay for one night, and did not get to explore nearly as much as we wanted to. It resembles a mini Joshua Tree NP in that it is made up of huge rock piles! Next time we will dedicate more time to Indian Bread Rocks. The last stop in our January was in Tucson to spend a few days with our friends, Thomas and Hanna. In our short time in Tucson we got to hike around Saguaro National Park (which is a new national park for us!) and play in the snow on atop Mount Lemmon!

February was an intense month that was solely focused on making our way across the country and work, but that is ok, because there are good things coming in February!