AUTUMN COLLAGE

Near the beginning of every school year, kids always seemed to have an art project using fallen leaves.  I still think that collecting leaves is fun.  But this virtual collection is less messy.

Autumn really is a great time to travel.  The weather is usually fine for walking, colors are spectacular and there are fewer people traveling than in the summer.  The best part of it for us nowdays is that we usually avoid the wet and cold season that used to come after fall.  We go from summer to fall and then back to summer again.  This is the Ozark Mountains  where we are now.

We visited Bosque Del Apache Wildlife Refuge, near Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1999 on our first long RV trip. We've been back a couple of other times since. It is one of the best places for birding during fall migration.

The picture below is what the whole Vermont countryside looked like in 2003.  We stayed in Danville.  This was our first trip across country.  We had always wanted to see the Fall leaves in the East. 

In Vermont and New Hampshire, locals call Fall tourists "leaf peepers."  We were happy to be among them.

This is Hannibal, Missouri in 2004. 

It's early Fall and the colors are not so vibrant but the "Big River" was a good place to be in the Fall.  We walked along it and took a riverboat cruise — and imagined floating it on a raft — and we bought copies of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" at the Mark Twain gift shop.

This reflection is Barker Dam on a clear sunny day at Joshua Tree National Park, Fall 2005.Joshua Tree is one of our favorite National Parks.  It is an understated park and you have to be a scenery junkie to really appreciate it.  We love it.

The little Cabin below is on Clark's Fork of the Snake river in Idaho.  We stayed near here in 2006.  Just a little later that year, we were in light snow at Yellowstone, but a few days later we were in Colorado where it was still beautiful Fall weather.  A month later, in Texas it was summer again.  So that year was a very mixed up year seasonally. 

  Last year, we experienced the worst fall weather we've had for a long time.  We were barely out of Oregon, in the coastal village of Fortuna, California, when the "storm of the century" hit the Pacific Coast.  We only had a few days of lovely fall color before it began to rain and rain and rain.  It's so beautiful along the Oregon and Washington coasts (when it is dry).  Here's a picture of the Eel River — taken a couple of days before the storm hit.

We were happy when it stopped raining enough for us to hook up and get on the road again last year (we headed for the desert near Niland Caifornia).  And we're even more happy not to have experienced anything but lovely Fall weather this year. 

It is this time of year that truly makes us think about how fortunate we are.

If we had to choose just one season, it would definitely be Fall.