Elephant Butte, Monument Valley, Navajo Nation (Arizona), USA

Hello traveler! My name is Shehzadi, which means princess—literally, a king’s daughter. I am a Toyota Tundra with a twin-turbo V6 heart wrapped in steel. One June morning in Hyattsville, Maryland, my humans—the ones I call The Vagabond Couple—loaded my bed, patted my dashboard and pointed my grille west.

For almost 9,000 miles, I was their rolling home on a 31-day loop around the United States. My elder brother, Storm Trooper, a desert-bred first-generation Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, had already carried them from Maryland to Banff and Jasper in Canada and back. I eventually closed my own loop in the final homecoming from New Orleans to Hyattsville; this page is the complete 23-episode logbook.

Riding toward Boquillas del Carmen after crossing the Rio Grande from Big Bend National Park.

Roswell had given us UFO museums, alien burgers and Zog, the small gray souvenir passenger from Part 17: Durango to Roswell. By morning, the saucers stayed behind while Shehzadi, our overlanding Toyota Tundra, pointed south on US-285.

This leg carried us into Far West Texas: Pecos for cowboy folklore and rodeo history, Terlingua Ranch for a cabin beneath the Christmas Mountains, Big Bend National Park for desert geology, and the Boquillas Crossing for a rowboat-and-mule hop into Mexico. Texas had apparently decided one border was not enough scenery.

Carnival cruise ship sailing from Miami - the gateway to Caribbean adventures Photo: Carnival Cruises

Fresh off exploring the jungles and canals of Panama, we traded rainforest humidity for a different kind of humidity entirely - flying from our perfectly ordinary Washington, DC suburb to the land of neon, art deco, and tropical heat: Miami, Florida! Florida's famous Magic City sits on what geologists call the Miami Limestone formation, basically a giant hunk of ancient coral reef that decided it wanted to be land instead. How ambitious!

The next day, our Carnival cruise ship, the Carnival Imagination (what a name for a vessel!), sets sail from Miami. Watching that massive floating hotel navigate out of the Port of Miami - which happens to be the world's busiest cruise port - is like watching a ballet, if ballerinas were 100,000-ton steel giants.

Here's a fun geology fact: the Caribbean Sea we're sailing into sits on the Caribbean Plate, which is slowly crashing into the North American Plate. This tectonic drama party created the islands we're visiting and also explains why there are occasional earthquakes in the region. Don't worry, cruise ships are basically earthquake-proof floating resorts!