Welcome to Our Trips and Travels!  This website is the product of nearly four decades of family road trips, backcountry hiking, mountain biking, big city touring, and even one experience with cruising in the Bahamas.  But for that relatively recent venture, all our travels have to date been within the U.S.  We have not yet made it to the West Coast.  But we have explored fairly extensively in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.  In recent years, the road trips West have given way to air travel East – first to the New York City area and now southern Florida.

During our travels illustrated on this website, “we” were for many years a family of three – mom, dad, and son, who we in his words “dragged along with us on all kinds of backwoods hikes into unknown wildernesses”… but since his moving East at the turn of the millennium, we necessarily want to head that direction – rapidly, a.k.a. by flying, not driving – for a visit whenever we’re able to accumulate the time off.

I began keeping journals to track our expenses, particularly gas, and monitor our gas mileage.  We traveled on a shoestring, so to speak, and prided ourselves in how cheaply we could get by for a week, 10 days, two weeks on all our travel, food, lodging, and entertainment. 

After a while it became something of a habit, and I began to embellish them a bit with more descriptions of the terrain we were passing through, the weather, the surroundings and distances of our hikes and bike rides – as well as an actual spreadsheet at the end adding up all the expenses in each category, calculating the average cost per day per person, etc.  It’s kind of fun to read about spending zero for lodging (camping in a national forest) and filling our gas tank for $5.00!

My first travel journal record was in 1974 when we were still just a couple.  Back then, the photographs were much fewer and of course lower quality.  With the advent of digital cameras, the number of pictures exploded -- and the number of my journals decreased as I never really kept them on air travel trips, just the classic road trips.  However, I was able to match up many of the narratives in the 15 journals – basically transcribed ver batim, with corresponding photos.  Obviously, with 45 photo galleries, there are many with no journal notes.

The site is a work in progress and will continue to have “chapters” added through 2010 and hopefully beyond.  I hope as you browse through the galleries you enjoy looking at our trips and travels, as we certainly enjoyed experiencing them.

~~ Jenith Hoover

1972, August ~ Colorado "Honeymoon"

1989, August ~ South Dakota-Black Hills/
Mt Rushmore/Devil’s Tower;
Yellowstone w/bicycles; Tetons-Jenny Lake; Colorado-Trail Ridge Rd