I arrived safely in Salt Lake City (although not without incident...read on) to begin my summer art festival exhibition schedule.

All packed up and ready to leave Santa Fe.

On Monday, June 18, 2012 I left Santa Fe, NM for what will be 7 to 8 straight weeks on the road. My exhibition schedule takes me to many new fine art festivals this year and it begins with the Utah Arts Festival in Salt Lake City on June 21 - 24.  My trip will bring me to 3 different states with me coming back to Santa Fe in early to mid August.

Even though I have been living full-time in my RV - a Lance truck camper - since May of 2010, my previous longest trip was for 6 weeks back in 2009. I also stayed in Colorado that entire trip. This time out, I will be also going to Wyoming for the first time as well as Utah.

Entering Colorado from New Mexico

I traveled the 625 miles to Salt Lake City in two days. The first day was a 5 hour drive to Cortez, Colorado. Smoke from the 14,000 acre Little Sand fire NW of Pagosa Springs was visible for a good portion of my travels on Monday.

As I mentioned, this trip wasn't without incident. Normally it is the truck breaking down, getting a flat, getting pummeled in a hail storm, etc. Not this time. 

My major incident on this trip so far was my beloved iPhone becoming a brick for 24 hours. 

While looking at diesel prices using Gas Buddy just before I got to Durango, CO the phone decided enough was enough and completely locked up and would not boot back up. I use my iPhone constantly, and while driving I use the excellent Garmin GPS app which has since replaced my stand-alone Garmin Nuvii.

Fortunately my old Garmin was still in the truck and was able to use that GPS to continue on (I have gotten so used to not using maps any more). In order to get the iPhone working again I had to do a restore, which was fine except I had to download a 780MB iPhone update file that my Verizon mifi card on 3G was just not able to handle. 

On Tuesday I had a 5 hour drive to get back to relative civilization and an area 1 hour south of Salt Lake City where I was able to get 4G service and download and restore the phone (which took over 3 hours to complete the whole process) while I was parked in some shopping plaza in Spanish Fork, UT. I arrived in Salt Lake City early Tuesday evening.

Today (Wednesday) will be spent setting up at the Utah Arts Festival followed by 4 days of fun and hopefully lots of sales. Next week I leave Utah for a show in Vail, Colorado the following weekend.