The 4Runner's Last Ride - Time to Get Away

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

This year has been very busy for us, and we haven’t had much time for travel.  Val had her hip replacement in January, and we celebrated her recovery with a short trip to Lake Tahoe in March, but other than that we have been immersed in downsizing, getting the house ready for sale, meetings, and medical and cognitive tests for The Wisteria, our future home.  It seemed like something was going on every week and we just didn’t have any time to relax.

After a few months of this we were feeling pretty stressed and decided we had to find time to get away.  We looked at our calendar and found an empty ten-day block of time in June and started planning.  We wanted to go to Las Vegas which didn’t require too much planning, but Val had read about a place in the Grand Canyon where you can drive down to the Colorado River.  We added that to our plans and we had a ten-day mini-road trip to look forward to.

The reason I called this the “4Runner’s Last Ride” is because we are only taking one car with us to The Wisteria, and the 4Runner isn’t the car we’re keeping so sometime before we move, we’ll be selling the 4Runner.  That’s very sad for us as it means the end of our off-road adventures, but it just didn’t make sense to keep two cars and have one sit idle except for a few outings every year.

The blog for this trip will be very short as we aren’t covering much new ground, but since it’s probably the only trip we’ll be taking for the rest of the year and there is a unique element to this trip, I wanted to post something, so here it is.