Memorial Day Shakedown Trip

Last weekend we took off in the Sunflower (with our Stargazers friends) for our first summer teardrop getaway. Our shady campsite at Rye Patch Reservoir was only a few hours from our home which makes for a good shakedown trip.

A shakedown trip is an opportunity to get all your camping mistakes out of the way. Having the teardrop trailer tucked away for the winter will make you a little rusty in the camping department—not matter how long you've been camping. During this trip we realized what we are missing, what needs repairing and what supplies we need to stock up on.

The trip was also a nice time to enjoy our teardrops after a long, cold winter. We hiked in flooded canyons and played some late night games. We still sleep like we're dead to the world and have a few new recipes under our belts. We also ran into another teardropper with a simple trailer named the Mini GetAway.

The Sunflower Goes to Death Valley Without her Owner

Sometimes you have to let your teardrop trailer have all the fun. While I was busy working and taking care of my mother, my husband, and our friend Andres, took the Sunflower down to Death Valley for a winter photography trip.

Along the way they stopped at the funky International Car Forest of the Last Church in Goldfield, Nevada for the obligatory shot of a teardrop trailer among junk cars. They also stopped in Rhyolite, a former ghost town that was once owned by Charles Schwab. The town is now home to the Goldwell Open Air Museum and features modern art such as the ghostly "The Last Supper" and the "Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada."

Our intrepid photographers stayed at the Furnace Creek RV Park for a week—a campground that can fill up rather quickly when Death Valley is in the '70s and the rest of California is experiencing rain and snow.

Photos by Andres Leon Photography and Harry Thomas

Friday Teardrop Photo

This summer I was at Great Basin National Park when the Strawberry Fire broke out. My campground, the Lower Lehman campground was fine, but the campground next door was evacuated and during the fire one firefighter lost his life. It was a little unnerving to go to sleep in the trailer with a fire raging just one hill over.

Friday Teardrop Photo

We had so much fun taking photos on our last trip to the Black Rock Desert, so a few more will make an appearance. The desert is so vast that even a vehicle and a tiny trailer can quickly disappear into it. You might be able to see the Sunflower in the distance near Old Razorback Mountain.

So few people go out there that the only vehicle tracks you can see are ours.

Friday Teardrop Photo

This teardrop trailer is currently for sale on Craigslist for $6,800. It's a 4x8 camper built in 2011 and available in Northern Nevada. I love that it has a child size bunk and a Route 66 theme.

Desert Hot Springs and Playa Camping

Before the summer heat sets in, we took off in the teardrop for the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada this weekend. Exploring without a quad or other all terrain vehicle is a challenge, but we still were able to see some beautiful places.

To start off the adventure, we took the Sunflower down a rutted 50 mile dirt road north of the desert to Soldier Meadows, a riparian area that is part of the emigrant California Trail. There's not much out there but mountains, a ranch and some beautiful hot springs. We met up with our Stargazers friends and camped on part of the ranch ($12 per night) and swam in the springs under the stars.

Our trailers took a beating from that 50 mile road and nearly everything on the shelves came flying off. Our galley were already full of dust, so on the way back to the Black Rock Desert we decided to take a "shortcut",  skip the rutted road and fly across the Playa—an ancient lake bed where Burning Man takes place in August. At this time of year, it's empty and perfect for driving on.

Since the desert is public land, you can set up camp wherever you want. We chose a spot right by our favorite mountain (Old Razorback) and spent a quiet night in a very unique spot.

Nevada Teardrop Camping: Virginia City

The Sunflower and the Stargazers teardrop crew took off last weekend and went up to Virginia City in the mountains above Reno, Nev. to attend the High Desert Steam Steampunk Ball and do some ghost hunting. Again we used our teardrops as hotel rooms for a special event.

The ghost hunting was unsuccessful, but we were able to enjoy some camping above the Virginia City Cemetery on a very warm and beautiful night. We stayed at the Virginia City RV Park and didn't even bother to take any food with us — eating instead at the Cafe del Rio for dinner and the Canvas Café for breakfast.

Virginia City is home to the Comstock Lode, the largest silver deposit in the history of the United States. The discovery of these deposits in the late 1850s grew Virginia City into one of the largest and most popular mining towns in the West. The American author, Mark Twain, also called Virginia City home for a time.

Now the small city is a historical monument and tourist area with the original wooden sidewalks, shopping, fun bars and a few restaurants. The residents are really colorful and the cemetery is said to be one of the most haunted in the world.Virginia City's hotels and bars have been featured on the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures show.

Nevada Teardrop Camping: Unionville Gathering

Last week I took off for the middle of the Nevada desert with the Stargazers to attend the Twain and Tears teardrop gathering in the tiny hamlet of Unionville. It was hot, but the area had just received several inches of rain, turning the desert into a green paradise.

Unionville currently has about 20 residents and was the site of a mining boom between 1863 and 1870 and had over 1,500 residents. For a short time Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, tried his luck here. Canyon springs and rushing creeks make this area of the desert lush and full of wildlife. During this trip we saw antelope, wild donkeys, deer, marmots and chukar.

We chatted and ate with other teardroppers, went fossil hunting in the foothills, explored the rugged and muddy backroads, and hiked the canyons around the former mining towns that used to dominate the absolute middle of the middle of nowhere.

Photos by Christina Nellemann

Nevada Teardrop Camping: Fort Churchill

Our year of teardrop camping in Nevada continued last weekend with a trip to Fort Churchill State Historic Park on Highway 50 near the city of Fallon, Nevada. While this area is only about 1.5 hours from our home, it's a really nice getaway into the Nevada desert.

Fort Churchill was once an active U.S. Army fort built in 1861. It housed hundreds of soldiers and other employees of the fort. It was primarily used to protect wagon trains coming across the desert into California from the local Native American tribes during the Pyramid Lake War—which began when three men living at a nearby fort kidnapped several young Paiute girls.

Thousands of dollars were spent building and maintaining the fort and while it also became a Pony Express station and a sight for sore eyes after the 40 Mile Desert, it was abandoned less than 10 years later. Many of the adobe buildings can still be seen up close and the state park has a campground, interpretive center, graveyard, river access and some amazing views.

Out of all the places we've been camping, Fort Churchill might be one of my favorite campgrounds: it's small, but private with massive trees, large sites, fire pits, picnic tables and birds everywhere. It was dead quiet at night except for a few owls.

Nevada Teardrop Camping: Desatoya Range

We live in Northern Nevada, but tend to take the teardrop out to neighboring states: California, Oregon, Utah and Arizona. This year, we've decided to go exploring in our own state and find places we've never been to—or even expected. Nevada is a huge state, so many of these places could take up to a day to get to, but the Sunflower is up to the challenge.

From a tip, we took a few days and headed off into the Nevada desert on the Loneliest Road in America. Highway 50 runs across the central part of the state and was given its desolate name by Life magazine in 1986. It deters a lot of people from driving on it, but many people love the wide open spaces and lack of traffic.

Near the miniature town of Middlegate, we turned onto Highway 722 and down a dirt hunting and cattle track that took us to the beautiful Desatoya Mountain Range and some rustic, but free Bureau of Land Management campsites. On this February weekend, no one was there, and we still saw no other people for the next few days. The place had tons of trees (unusual for this area), a stunning gorge, a creek, wild horses and cactus. We fell in love with the area right away.

We've marked a few more places on our map and will be teardrop camping across our state this year. I would love to hear about how you teardrop camp in your own state, and what new places you've found while exploring your own backyard.