Be A Better You - Treat Yourself — nature

We started out the Retailer Tour going through areas most people probably don't strongly associate with having tons of health food stores, co-ops, and all the stuff we've been seeking out on this trip. Obviously there's plenty of healthy awesomeness in Arizona, Utah, and Nevada to discredit those assumptions, but those states are just better known for other things. At this point in our route however, things change. We're in the Health Belt now: California, Oregon, and Washington. These are the states most notorious for their populations of hippies and hikers, their sprawling wilderness areas (spanned by the Pacific Crest Trail), the 'birth...

Apologies Las Vegas, but we had to get back on schedule after spending too many days in St. George and blew right through town in a single afternoon. We were so glad to see so many independent health food stores and herb shops keeping their game up though. One of them, Stay Healthy, is the oldest independent nutrition shop in all of Las Vegas, and one of the few health food stores in the country to still broadcast a live radio show (hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Burke). They even knew about one of our biggest Arizona retailers Healthy Habit Health Foods and...

Many great US cities are surrounded by or neighbor great mountain ranges: Los Angeles and the San Gabriels, Phoenix and its many ranges, Albuquerque and the Sandia range, and there's so many more - but nothing quite beats the Wasatch mountains that stretch from North of the greater Salt Lake City area all the way down past Provo. These are massive peaks, many of them well over 11K feet, and they literally rub right up against the major metropolitan areas they tower over. As one of the owners of the cozy Orem Herb Shop told us on our first day in the...

The Retailer Tour has reached its second state, Utah, leaving behind Simply by Nature's home territory with a comfortable transition from one beautiful desert to another. Nevada is soon to follow, and California soon after that.  We crossed the border into Utah via the 191, which is just East of Mexican Water, AZ (part of the Navajo Nation that straddles the AZ/UT divide), and less than 50 miles from the four corners. We've been to Utah many times before, usually entering it via the 15 or Monument Valley, but figured we should try something new. It might not be the showiest border crossing ever, but...

Following up our Retailer Tour prequel set in Southern Arizona, we've finally begun the proper tour and set off to the North - Prescott and Sedona specifically. It feels great knowing that our next six months will be spent visiting amazing health food stores, natural lifestyle boutiques, and co-ops, all while camping at amazing places in-between. We sped through Prescott to make sure we could grab a camp spot in Sedona (they fill up quick on weekends, especially the free ones), but not before checking out Cosmetics Without Synthetics, the new physical manifestation of longstanding online natural body product boutique 'allnaturalcosmetics.com'. They've got a small...