Now that it’s the two of us, we have become planners on our long vacations. We start with trying to figure out how many days in each location, and then look for Airbnb’s or motels to stay in, and based on availability we might change locations or durations. Then we book our stays, and any flights and car rentals. It all gets written out in a text document so that there are no gaps or overlaps – we learned that lesson the hard way when we set up or Ireland & Scotland trip and left a gap. We have kind of a rough notion about what we are going to do, but it begins with the spine of where we are spending the night and how we are getting there, booked in advance. Later we investigate each location for all the things we might do, and those all get included in the trip planning document. Some places, especially with COVID, require advanced booking (like Biosphere 2 this trip) so we go ahead and make those reservations in advance. And then while on the trip each night we review our options, look at the weather forecast, consider suggestions from friends and locals, and decide what we are going to do the next day.

Then one day all your options are outdoors and the forecast is cold and windy. And when you wake up, it’s snowing. And snowing. So you do laundry, hang around the Airbnb, eat lunch at a diner – we’ve had the best luck eating in diners at RV parks in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully, your rental car is just fine after the roads you drove it down yesterday, so you kind of just putz around minor attractions including the local maxi-mart where you pick up a couple of things and drive the car down some more dirt roads, which seem to be most of the roads in this part of Arizona. It snows and rains on and off all day, but the wind never stops blowing. You keep an eye on the nearby National Monument but all you see is clouds and precipitation of some form dropping out of them over the park all day.

So you write your daily post early and relax with MBH. And you remember, Tomorrow is another day.

This is the view from our Airbnb towards Chiricahua National Monument in the afternoon. There wasn’t near that much snow yesterday
Our Airbnb here is an odd mix of rustic and opulent. This is the opulent part (except for our suitcase). The bedroom and living room have huge overstuffed and leather furniture, the kitchen/dining nook is fairly rustic. The outside is extremely rustic, as a later picture will show.
One way keep track of how many nights left. We put the vitamins in a single large bottle for easy transport, and when we get to new location I sort them out by days.

Yes, I take more than MBH, I need all the help I can get
The view out the front of our Airbnb. I think the setting qualifies as extremely rustic.