top of page
dougsmith51
Jun 293 min read
Ciaowagen Website Index (thru June 2024)
In the past six years, we've dropped 130 blog posts. We've visited many, many amazing places. We've driven 75,000 miles through 49...
63 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jun 81 min read
Top Photos from 2023 and 2024
It's been a blog tradition to select - from the thousands of photos we take each trip - our favorite 20-30 to share with our readers. We...
32 views0 comments
dougsmith51
May 251 min read
Ciaowagen 2024 By the Numbers
Continuing a tradition... here are factoids from our winter bi-coastal trip: Days on the road: 111 Miles traveled in the Ciaowagen: 8,850...
39 views0 comments
dougsmith51
May 1811 min read
Water Explorations, Plus Disney for our 40th Anniversary
We left New Orleans and arrived in Florida (finally crossing back into Eastern time) on Sunday, April 14. Staying overnight at a Cracker...
71 views2 comments
dougsmith51
Apr 277 min read
Tex-iana
Many of our trips (RV and international) start with a seed idea (e.g., visit Alaska, take a photography workshop in the Italian...
52 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Apr 134 min read
South by Southeast
After a great month in California, we turned our attentions toward Texas. However, since it would involve a journey of almost 1,200...
58 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Apr 67 min read
California Dreaming, Part Two
NOTE: This is the 2nd of a two-part blog story about our time in California. It's on the long side because there is so much to report....
258 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Mar 168 min read
California Dreaming, Part One
NOTE: There’s more to write about our time in California than will fit in a reasonable-length blog entry. We’re dividing our California...
57 views2 comments
dougsmith51
Mar 25 min read
Whale of a Good Time in Baja
In the past, we'd considered bringing the Ciaowagen into Mexico. As you have noted, the subtitle of our blog talks about traveling North...
106 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Feb 155 min read
Fun in the Desert
After our initial cross-country dash, we were finally able to settle in for some quality time in Arizona and Southern California. Our...
56 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Feb 33 min read
South by Southwest
We left home on Wednesday, January 24th, with several inches of snow still on the ground of our Virginia home. Our month-long trip to the...
70 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jan 242 min read
A Ciaowagen Winter Adventure
For the past couple of years, our RV trips have taken place in late spring and summer and we've kept to the Northern U.S. and Canada to...
71 views1 comment
dougsmith51
Oct 28, 20231 min read
Ciaowagen 2023 by the Numbers
Continuing one of our annual RV traditions, here are the stats for our trip around the Great Lakes: Days on the road: 82 Miles driven by...
38 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Sep 1, 20235 min read
New York to Home
After two-and-a-half weeks in Canada, we drove further downstream (east) on the St. Lawrence River and crossed back into the U.S. for...
77 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Aug 26, 20237 min read
Eau Canada!
After our side trip to the Black Hills, it was time to explore the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. Canada is much less populated than...
47 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Aug 19, 20232 min read
15 Surprising Things About the Great Lakes
Here are some things we didn't know about the Great Lakes before starting this year's trip. Hopefully you'll find them interesting as...
59 views2 comments
dougsmith51
Aug 12, 202312 min read
The Black Hills of South Dakota
While the primary focus of our 2023 RV trip was circuiting the Great Lakes, we'd always planned on a side trip to the Black Hills. We'd...
75 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Aug 5, 20234 min read
Michigan's Upper Peninsula
We arrived on the Upper Peninsula (which pretty much everyone there just calls "the U.P.") on July 12 after a 3.5 hour drive north from...
54 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jul 20, 20237 min read
Wisconsin
After finishing our tour of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, we moved to the other side of Lake Michigan for some exploration of Wisconsin....
52 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jul 1, 20234 min read
Pure Michigan
That's what the license plates say. And, we have to admit, Michigan is a beautiful and largely rural state, once you get away from the...
67 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jun 24, 20235 min read
Great Lakes Cities
Leaving our Virginia home on June 8 (where the air quality was Code Purple due to the Canadian wildfires), we traveled north (toward the...
408 views0 comments
dougsmith51
May 29, 20232 min read
Ciaowagen Winter Fixups
RVs... bad stuff can happen to them. Fortunately, we have the winter off-season to fix them back up. We did not make any internal or...
115 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Apr 20, 20231 min read
Getting Back on the RV Road Soon!
Since last October, our blog has covered our international travel (to Italy, Patagonia, and Antartica). However, we still have our RV,...
116 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Aug 27, 20221 min read
Favorite Ciaowagen Photos from 2022
Keeping up a tradition, we've distilled the 2,750 photos taken during the four months of our trip down to our 30 favorites, presented...
98 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Aug 20, 20221 min read
Ciaowagen 2022 By the Numbers
Continuing a post-trip tradition, here are this year's stats: Days on the Road:104 (plus 10 at home during the trip) Miles Traveled:...
60 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Aug 13, 20225 min read
The ZigZag Road Home
After six-and-a-half weeks in Canada, we left Niagara Falls, Ontario and crossed the border back into to the US near Buffalo on July 20....
64 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jul 23, 20225 min read
Quebec, Montreal, and the Falls
Although it's all in a single province, it took two long days of driving down the St. Lawrence River from the Gaspé Peninsula to reach...
90 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jul 10, 20226 min read
PEI and the Gaspé Peninsula
Newfoundland was the farthest east we’d go in our Canadian travels. After returning to Nova Scotia on the ferry and overnighting on Cape...
286 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jul 3, 20226 min read
Newfoundland
Newfoundland is an island, albeit a big one. It is considered a single Canadian province with Labrador, which sits on the mainland above...
91 views1 comment
dougsmith51
Jun 25, 20225 min read
Nova Scotia
As we noted in our last blog entry, transmission problems with the Fittata kept us stuck in Virginia. However, our local transmission...
330 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jun 5, 20225 min read
The Maine Event
Leaving Vermont, we moved on to Maine for a two-week stay. Since we needed to make a short return to Virginia for a family reunion in...
76 views0 comments
dougsmith51
May 23, 20226 min read
Cape Cod, Boston, and Vermont
NOTE: We did a lot in the past two weeks, so this blog entry is longer than some others. Our apologies, but we didn't want to leave...
142 views0 comments
dougsmith51
May 8, 20224 min read
Northward Bound
Returning home from our initial swing to the south, we spent a few days seeing family and restocking the RV, then set off again - this...
73 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Apr 30, 20224 min read
Southern Swing
Our 2022 RV travels began with a southern swing through Virginia and the Carolinas. We wanted to begin this year’s trip with some...
62 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Apr 23, 20222 min read
Under the Ciaowagen Hood
RVs... Ours is pretty reliable, but it still needs maintenance and fixes. During Winter 2020-21, we'd made some substantial upgrades and...
66 views1 comment
dougsmith51
Apr 2, 20221 min read
Ciaowagen Travel 2022 Starts Soon!
After wintering at our "sticks and bricks" home, we are ready to get on the road again in our home-on-wheels! As mentioned in our last...
84 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Dec 19, 20211 min read
The Future of Ciaowagen Travel
When we bought the Ciaowagen, we said to ourselves "We'll travel for a year. It'll be great!" It was great - so much so that between...
133 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Nov 28, 20211 min read
Favorite Photos from 2021
Continuing a tradition from previous years, we're sharing 35 of our favorite photos (plus a few videos) from our 2021 Ciaowagen travels,...
170 views2 comments
dougsmith51
Nov 20, 20212 min read
Denali Revisited, Just in Time
Here's some recent news about Denali National Park that we wanted to share. You may remember that we visited the park twice during our...
72 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Nov 14, 20211 min read
Ciaowagen 2021 By the Numbers
Wow! It was a fantastic six months of RV travel - definitely the most wide-ranging since we first took the Ciaowagen on the road in 2018....
87 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Nov 6, 20214 min read
From Colorado to Virginia
We loved Alaska. We loved Canada. We loved the American West. However, we still needed to get ourselves - and the Ciaowagen - the 2,737...
471 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Oct 23, 20214 min read
Colorado Side Trip
The Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta was the last “scheduled” event of our 2021 travels. Rather than just heading straight back to Virginia,...
531 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Oct 17, 202111 min read
South to the Fiesta
NOTE: We’re backing up in time from the recent blog post about our visit to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. The post before that one...
62 views1 comment
dougsmith51
Oct 9, 20215 min read
Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta
The Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta is the largest hot air balloon festival in the world, and one of the world's most photographed events....
493 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Oct 3, 20219 min read
The Canadian Rockies
When we finally reached the end of the Alaska Highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, we were only halfway down the length of BC, so...
84 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Sep 12, 20218 min read
Alaska - The Last Frontier
The Last Frontier – at least that’s what the Alaska license plates say. It reminded us that the Alaska portion of our trip was nearing...
979 views1 comment
dougsmith51
Aug 20, 20219 min read
Eastern Alaska
Much of the Alaskan tourist action takes place in the Fairbanks to Kenai Peninsula corridor. The eastern part of Alaska gets fewer...
57 views1 comment
dougsmith51
Aug 10, 20217 min read
Geezers Gone Wild
Having escaped death-by-tsunami in Homer, we traveled to the other side of the Kenai Peninsula to the town of Seward. As the crow flies,...
79 views1 comment
dougsmith51
Aug 3, 202111 min read
Glaciers and Earthquakes and Bears, Oh My!
Leaving the Denali area, we headed south to Anchorage. While Anchorage is the largest city in Alaska, TripAdvisor’s list of...
71 views0 comments
dougsmith51
Jul 22, 202112 min read
Denali Days
NOTE: This is our third trip to Alaska. We first flew there in 1985, the year after we were married, and spent three weeks touring Alaska...
121 views1 comment
bottom of page