Four nice parks

Chris writes:

I tend to be a less-government-is-better-government sort of guy, but I have to admit that one thing governments often do well is parks. Here are a few pictures and words about three that we visited in the last two weeks, and one hot off the presses today.

1.  At Laura S. Walker State Park in Waycross, GA we had a beautiful lakeside site—picture postcard material (I’m showing my age.)

Only negative was the danger of getting bopped on the head by GIANT pinecones.

2.  Croton Point Park in Croton-on-Hudson, NY is a Westchester County park, and contains one of our favorite campgrounds. It’s a 1.5 mile walk from the campground to the train station, where Metro North Railroad’s Hudson River Line will take you to Grand Central Station in about 50 scenic minutes. The park sits on a peninsula jutting out into the Hudson, and from the top of the hill there are stunning views of the river.

So what if the hill you’re standing on is a former landfill? The vegetation is lush and the birds love it. It’s a physical realization of the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”–multiplied by millions of people and tons of their garbage.

3.  Fishermen’s Memorial State Park in Narragansett, RI, is one of the best manicured and most artfully landscaped campgrounds we’ve encountered. That it’s just a stone’s throw from some of Rhode Island’s nicest beaches is not too shabby either.

The view above is from the top of an old bunker inside the park—not from a landfill.

4.  Number 4 is a municipal park.

This is Millcreek Park in South Portland, ME, where I hung out this morning while Jacky went to an appointment. It’s not a campground, but it’s only 30 minutes from home, so who cares? The beauty of this gorgeous spring day reminded me that, as much fun as the traveling is, we need to keep our eyes open to our everyday environs when we’re home in Maine. That’s the way life should be.

Camp Vertigo

Chris writes:

When is a campground an engineering marvel? When it’s Mama Gertie’s Hideaway Campground in Swannanoa, North Carolina.

This beautifully situated and meticulously maintained little campground is literally carved into the side of a hillside. You can get a cardio workout just walking to the next site to greet your neighbor.

And, much to our astonishment when the campground attendant guided us into our site and told us to stop, we were perfectly level—even though visually it felt like we were about to fall off a cliff.

Yes, we did drive down off the site the next morning, unscathed.

It turns out that the owner is indeed an engineer who designed the campground himself, and it all works beautifully. And speaking of beauty, Mama Gertie’s is expanding further up the hill, hoping to open more sites this fall. The view from the top will look like this.

The street address for the campground is 15 Uphill Road. That’s the truth.

Gray day on the Blue Ridge

Chris writes:

Last Wednesday we decided to drive the southernmost end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, from Cherokee to Asheville in North Carolina. The day started out rainy, but when it comes to getting up to high elevations I always have high hopes that things will clear by the time we reach the summits (ask Jacky about some of our early hiking debacles in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.) Look—the windshield wipers were even between swipes when we entered the Parkway!

It was a long, slow, steep winding climb up to the point where we got some breaks in the drizzle and a chance to check out a few scenic overlooks.

But, as we kept on climbing, up to 6,053 feet above sea level, we drove right into the clouds.

Along much of the ridge line, we saw thick fog and—thankfully—the yellow line in the middle of the road, as we crept along at about 20 mph. Then things started to brighten up a bit as we began descending toward Asheville.

Judging from the occasional glimpses of mountain vistas we did see, I bet it would have been spectacular on a clear day. On the other hand, the rain and fog had a beauty of their own: they added some visual mystery, and some white knuckle miles for the driver—and passenger. The numerous tunnels, especially, made Jacky a bit less relaxed than usual. They were unlighted, narrow, often curved—and not very tall.

 In fact, we came around a bend to one marked 11’ clearance. Our motorhome is 12’5” tall. Do we now have a convertible top RV? No—thanks to the Internet (this is my small addition to Jacky’s recent technology post.) You see, I had found a list of tunnel clearances on-line, and therefore knew that the marked clearance was at the sides of the tunnel arch. So all we had to do was drive down the middle of the tunnel, and hope that no one was coming fast in the opposite direction. It worked, but I think my passenger was happy when we exited the Parkway and headed for Mama Gertie’s Hideaway Campground in Swannanoa, NC. That will be the subject of another post.

Mountaineering in Florida

Chris writes:

Between Zephyrhills (which is neither hilly nor breezy) and New Smyrna Beach (which is neither new nor Greek), we stopped in Mount Dora– a very pretty little town. The Town’s website says: “At an elevation of 184 feet above sea level, Mount Dora is Florida’s equivalent of a mountain top town.”

Well Aspen it isn’t, but it is on a lake, so we decided to take a tour boat into something called the “Dora Canal.” We started the cruise from a charming old inn called, appropriately enough, the Lakeside Inn. Here are the inn and our boat.

After about 15 minutes on the lake, the boat turned into the canal. At least half of the canal is built-up on both sides, mostly with mobile home parks.

 

But even along the developed shoreline, there was bird life to observe.

 

Then we entered the “jungle river” portion, as our captain described it, and we were in a cypress swamp with lots of wildlife.

So the people and the wildlife seem to coexist peacefully in the Dora Canal, as do the several wildlife species. See below:

Is that Great Blue Heron brave, or dumb?

The frugal RV’er

Chris writes:

As retirees, we have to watch our budget. So when the campground store offers a bargain like this, we can’t pass it up:

Beach Boys and Girls

Chris writes:

Here we are with our friends Debbie and Len (the chauffeur) in New Smyrna Beach, Florida last week. We were feeling like teenagers!

Here’s what we needed at the end of the day.

I guess we’re not teenagers anymore.

Technology on the Road

Jacky writes:

Chris loves to drive, and I love to be a passenger. An RVing match made in heaven.

I call myself a “professional passenger,” because I try to be somewhat aware of our surroundings and the traffic around us even though I’m not driving, so that, for example, I don’t lean forward to pick something up off the floor just as Chris is needing to check the passenger side mirror because a vehicle is passing us on the inside lane.

But what makes being a passenger especially fun for me is being able to use technology while we’re on the road. With my iPhone and a few of my favorite apps, I’m able to help navigate our way to almost anything. (I’ll leave it to Chris to comment on how much – or how little – he likes sharing the navigator role with me.)

With the Google Maps app on the iPhone, I can just plug in our destination’s address and tell it to route us from our current location.

It gives me a list of turn by turn directions, just like a GPS, as well as letting me see details of the route plotted on a map.

What’s more, I can also use “street view” and, before we get to a destination, scope out whether a parking lot will be large enough to accommodate the motorhome, as well as how to get into and out of the lot.

(At any time I can tap a symbol on the screen that will immediately cause the app to find our current location anywhere where we are, so it’s not like I have to be watching the map all the time, either.)

Another free app that we’ve found to be very handy is something called Gas Buddy. When you’re filling an 80 gallon gas tank, you want to find the cheapest gas around whenever you need a fill-up. Gas Buddy automatically finds our location and gives us a neat list

(or map view, if I prefer)

of all nearby gas stations and their most recently reported gas prices. (The gas prices are reported by users like me, who submit prices as we go.) This app came in especially handy on this trip when we were just about to cross the state line from Georgia into North Carolina, and we discovered that gas prices in North Carolina were about $.30 a gallon more than they were in Georgia! Made great sense to fill up before we crossed the state line. Thank you Gas Buddy!

When we get hungry, we like to use an app called Urban Spoon to find restaurants. As with the other apps, this one finds our location and tells us what restaurants are nearby. We can see ratings, read customer reviews, see what critics have had to say, look at the menu, map the route to the restaurant, and, when we’re all done eating, add our own rating, review, and pictures.

Sometimes when we’re traveling we like to listen to the radio. While “scan” happens to be my favorite radio station, it kind of drives Chris crazy. So another app that we use is called TuneIn Radio. It allows us to select whatever kind of music or talk we happen to be in the mood for. We can either listen directly from the iPhone (connected by a wire/jack to the cab stereo) if the station is not local, or, if it is local, we can tune the cab radio itself to that station.

But sometimes Chris may want to listen to music and I would like to listen to something spoken. I enjoy listening to podcasts, particularly of Catholic Answers Live (I think of it as “continuing education”). Other times I am more in the mood for “reading” a novel. That’s when the Overdrive Media Console comes in handy. With Overdrive, I am able to browse for and borrow audio books from our local library, and then I can listen to the books whenever I want.

What I like about listening to podcasts and audio books, as opposed to reading, is that I can be kind of simultaneously watching the scenery and listening.

Because Chris likes to plan a day or so ahead where we’re going to stay, we don’t use these next two apps all the time, however we do like knowing that they are available: one is called RVPark Finder and another is Woodall’s. They allow us to look for parks near where we are or near some destination down the road. They give us enough information about the campgrounds so that we could, in a pinch, select a campground right from those apps and not even need to refer to the Internet or paper directories.

I also have an app that will locate YMCAs in case I want to go swimming or Chris wants to work out. And another one called Catholic Mass Times that locates Catholic churches by current location or by destination, and provides Mass times, church websites, phone numbers, and so on.

As you can imagine, all this use of the iPhone would drain the battery down really fast. Well, one option we purchased when we bought the motorhome is a built-in inverter. So next to my “professional passenger office chair” is an outlet powered by the inverter. I can leave my phone, my computer, and our 3G wireless hotspot powered on all the time, and never drain down any of my batteries.

And to think when we first started RVing we used paper maps, paper RV directories, made telephone calls from our pre-paid TracFone, blindly selected restaurants, and were limited to listening only to whatever radio stations happened to be available where we were!

I’m always open to hearing about other travel apps, especially free ones, so if you know of any, feel free to leave a comment, below.

Georgia’s Polynomial Roads

Chris writes:

After spending a lazy day lakeside at Laura Walker State Park in Waycross, GA yesterday, we moved northward through the central part of the Peach State today—not very inspiring (although we did find some very good barbecue at Rick’s, a little hole-in-the wall joint in Dublin). So mostly we entertained ourselves by navigating the maze of overlapping road names that makes you wonder if Georgia road planners just couldn’t make up their minds, or whether Georgia road sign painters like to work a lot of overtime. How’s this for a direction from Google Maps?

Continue onto GA-19 N/GA-27 W/US-23 N/US-341 N/W Coffee St Continue to follow GA-19 N/GA-27 W/US-23 N/US-341 N

Are we on the right road? The odds are one in four.

Raucous ruckus over the campground

Chris writes:  

As I walked back to the RV at dusk last night, after socializing a bit with the alligator lazing in the lake opposite our campsite, I was startled by a sudden squawking/cawing/croaking cry from the sky. I looked up and saw the silhouettes of two large birds flying over the lake. At first I thought they might be ravens, or buzzards or vultures, but then I noticed they had very long, straight tails. One landed at the top of the tallest tree around and dominated the auditory environment with its piercing screams—so loud that Jacky heard them inside the RV with all the windows closed and both air conditioners running.

So what were these fine-feathered fiends? Parrots! A Google search informed me that Florida has lots of feral parrots plying its skies and we were lucky enough to have these two fly into Lake Louisa State Park during our stay. I didn’t have the camera with me, but was able to find this picture on an online forum called Avian Avenue:

For sound you’ll have to use your imagination. Think Edgar Allen Poe or Alfred Hitchcock.

The effects of the sun

Chris writes: 

Are sun and rain yin and yang? Not necessarily. Both can keep you cooped up in your RV. We’re spending the day at Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont, Florida.  Nice campground, but no shade (that is not a complaint; we were forewarned by the park’s website.) With highs predicted to be near 90, the only way to keep the RV from turning into a solar oven is to keep it closed up—shades drawn and air conditioner running. So a hot sunny day in May in central Florida is much like a cold rainy day in October in northern Vermont–a good day to stay indoors. Good thing we have Wi-Fi!

On Y Va Encore

Chris writes: We got the motorhome out of storage this afternoon and are now settled in for our first night in it since November. It feels good to be back in our home on the road.

Man plans, God laughs.

Jacky writes:

As we approach the one-year mark since we left work, we look back and realize that this year has not turned out at all the way we had planned.

First there was the plan that we would buy the motorhome. We hadn’t planned on it needing to spend its first five months at the dealer while the dealer tried to identify our engine-starting problems.

Then there was the plan that we would sell our house. We hadn’t planned on the market being so poor that, in the six months that the house was on the market, we would have had only one showing and no offers. (On the other hand, the fact that it hasn’t sold has given us a whole year to sell many of our belongings and get our clutter under control, both of which are a good thing.)

Then there was the plan that we would travel the country and see everything there is to see. We hadn’t planned on my developing plantar fasciitis in both my feet in the fall, causing me to be unable to tolerate standing/walking for more than just 5 or 10 minutes at a time. (So we canned the plan of traveling for the winter so I could do physical therapy and give my feet a chance to heal.)

We hadn’t planned on Chris’s mother falling and breaking her hip. (If it hadn’t been for our decision to stay home and treat my plantar fasciitis, who knows where in the country we might have been, but because we were home, we were able to go to the emergency room with her, accompany her through the process of surgery to repair the hip, attend to her during her rehab phase, and now begin the process of searching for long-term care for her. So we look at my plantar fasciitis as a mixed blessing.)

So for now we’ve given up planning so much – at least not beyond our next meal – and even that we’re trying to remain flexible about! We’ve taken the house off the market, thinking we really need a home base in Maine for the time being. We’re focusing on my mother-in-law’s needs and on continuing to get my feet healthy again. We’re going to the Y three days a week, and, like old retired people, to the grocery store every couple of days. We’re continuing to sell and otherwise dispose of the contents of our home, keeping only those things that we use regularly and need for living here. We’re sleeping late. We’re spending time goofing off on the Internet. We’re shopping for a new car. And we’re going to fly back to Florida next month and pick up the RV and drive it back here, and maybe take a few short trips from here.

We call it “going straight.” And we’ll keep going straight until it becomes clear that it’s time to make a turn.

There is an old Yiddish expression, Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht, which means “Man plans, God laughs.” I guess with all our planning we gave God too many things to laugh about!

Justice Prevails

Chris writes: 

Six or seven years ago we traveled to Atlantic Canada in our old RV. When we got home and opened our credit card bill, we were unpleasantly surprised to see a “foreign transaction fee” for every time we had used the card in Canada.

Apparently lots of other people were surprised too, because about a year later we got a mailing inviting us to join a class action lawsuit alleging that the banks had failed to give customers adequate notice of those fees. We accepted the invitation, filled out the forms, and then forgot all about it, while the lawyers made millions in fees.  (I say that with the utmost respect and admiration for my erstwhile profession.)

Well last week we were pleasantly surprised to get a check in the mail for $18.40, our share in the settlement. Is America a great country or what?

The TP Challenge

Jacky writes:

What to do in the middle of winter when the RV is in Florida basking in the warmth and sunshine, and we are here in Maine, experiencing subfreezing and even single-digit temperatures? Why, conduct a formal experiment, rigorously designed to follow the scientific method.

1. Ask a Question

A question that plagues all RVers is “What’s the best toilet paper to use in the RV?” Go ahead and laugh, and let me know when you’re done. Done? Okay, now let me say that it’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Remember that whatever goes into the sewer tank (a.k.a. the “black tank”) must come out of the black tank. And because the tank is fairly small, what went in must come out fairly soon after it went in. So RVers need TP that’s going to dissolve fairly quickly and not stick to the innards of the septic system.

2. Do Background Research

Our go-to resource for all things RV is the Open Roads Forum, an online forum for users of recreational vehicles ranging from the smallest of truck campers and camper vans all the way up to the 45 foot million-plus dollar diesel pushers. Many people, over the years that we’ve been following the RV forums, have discussed the important question about disintegrating toilet paper, because, regardless of how expensive their RV is, they all know what I stated previously, i.e. that whatever goes into the black tank must come out of the black tank. Many people on the RV forums recommend Scott tissue, because it’s a brand of TP readily available in all grocery stores. And the packaging says that it’s safe for septic systems and recreational vehicles.

Another resource we used in our research is our good friends at Coastal RV Repair in Topsham (remember the embarrassing incident with the Flush King?) John, the owner, upon seeing our Scott tissue beside the toilet, told us that we were a future flushing accident just waiting to happen. He said that our chosen brand doesn’t break down as fast as the made-for-RV brands of TP.

So with such conflicting information, we had to conduct our own experiment.

3. Construct a Hypothesis

Our hypothesis: specially designed RV toilet paper will break down faster in water than will regular toilet paper.

4. Test the Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment

Method: We placed a single sheet of each of three different brands of toilet paper in glasses of room temperature water and compared how quickly they dissolve.

Charmin: our home brand, as a control. The soft kind, not the strong kind. (We prefer softness over strength.)
Scott: the brand most people on the RV net recommended.
Thetford: one of three brands John from Coastal recommended.

Scott vs. Charmin vs. Thetford

5. Analyze the Data and Draw a Conclusion

18 minutes: no change. Maybe we’re rushing this!*

18 minutes

18 hours: can’t really see much difference yet!*

22 hours: still nothing happening. We give each sheet a little stir. After all, things in the black tank get stirred around when we travel, right? But this is science, so, in an effort not to skew the results, we use the same stirring tool for each sample (the handle of a soda spoon), stir in the same direction (clockwise), and stir for the same number of rotations (three). *

24 hours: at last, some of the TP is beginning to break apart!*

24 hours

48 hours (and a couple more highly scientific stirs): our home brand is clearly not dissolving at all. No surprise there. The Scott and Thetford are making some progress.*

64 hours: we haven’t run the dishwasher in a couple of days, and need the glasses for this night’s dinner (hey, the TP was clean, you know!), so we give several more scientific stirs so we can end this experiment.*

64 hours

*High resolution digital images available upon request.

Conclusion: By the end of the experiment, the Charmin hadn’t even begun to break down. Clearly not a good choice for the RV. Both the Scott and the Thetford broke down into small pieces, and it looks like either would be acceptable in the black tank. So, since Scott is much more widely available and is cheaper than Thetford, I guess we’ll be continuing to use the Scott tissue.

6. Communicate Your Results

Done. (You read this blog entry, didn’t you?)

By the way, I think we’ll keep a dummy package of the Thetford TP in the closet next to the RV toilet in case we have to go back to Coastal RV Repair, so John won’t see that we haven’t followed his advice!

Another Day, Another Beach

Chris writes:

Even though we’re back in Maine, we have some catching up to do before we close the blogging book on fall in Florida, so here we go.

After leaving beautiful Hunting Beach State Park in South Carolina, we moved south to a very different kind of beach—New Smyrna Beach, FL (or, as the locals say, New Sah-Myrna Beach). Unlike Hunting Beach, this is a fully developed seaside community, with lots of buildings abutting the beach and even travel lanes for cars to drive on the sand. Still, oh what a beach it is! As far as the eye can see looking either north or south, there is the beach, so long walks (or drives) on the hard-packed sand were the order of the day almost every day we were there. 

The city of about 23,000 residents has a vibrant little downtown area, with plenty of shops, restaurants and clubs. On the west side of town is the Indian River, part of the Intercoastal Waterway. Live oak trees draped with Spanish Moss (which, we have learned, is neither Spanish nor moss) line many of the streets, and the atmosphere feels more old South than contemporary Florida. All-in-all, we were charmed by New Smyrna Beach.

Life in Storage

Chris writes:

Last week we put the RV in storage in Florida and returned to our half empty house surrounded by nearly a foot of snow. Are we doing this backward or what?

It almost feels like it’s us in storage, not the RV. It’s where it should be—in the sunshine and warmth, ready to roll down the highway at the turn of the ignition key. We’re back to scheduling medical appointments, cleaning the house, getting financial things ready for tax time, and taking up (or avoiding) all those chores on our to-do lists we had left behind with a goodbye wave at the end of October.

For all sorts of reasons, we don’t know exactly when we’ll pick up traveling again—we have only a vague sometime-later-in-the-winter horizon. So, as usual, I have an old song running through my head: Joni Mitchell’s Urge for Going (actually my brain is hearing Tom Rush’s great cover):

I’ll ply the fire with kindling now
I’ll pull the blankets to my chin
I’ll lock the vagrant winter out
I’ll bolt my wanderings in

Life in storage.

A home for you and your airplane too

Chris writes:

You may recall that we are hoping to build a home in the Gardens RV Village, a development where every house has its own RV garage. Well here’s a variation on the theme—The Spruce Creek Fly-In, in Port Orange, Florida, near Daytona Beach. On the front the houses look like this:

On the back they look like this:

And the residents like to travel in these:

We stopped in for a delicious pizza at the Downwind Café, where you can watch the planes taxi and take off as you dine on the deck. We enjoyed the visit, but I think we’ll keep our 6 wheels on the ground.

Extreme hospitality

Chris writes:

How’s this for a campground ?

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we stayed with friends who made us our very own campground right in front of their house, fed us lavishly, showed us the local sights and, in general, extended gracious, generous hospitality. We had a wonderful time. THANK YOU D & L!

RV’ing—it’s not just for old folks

We quickly learned on this trip that, no matter what a restaurant’s website says, it’s a good idea to call ahead and make sure they are open. And we’re getting into the habit of asking whether they have a parking lot large enough to accommodate a 34 foot motorhome. Tuesday when we called a nice little restaurant in Beaufort, SC called the Bistro at the Tooting Egret, the person who answered the phone told us he had an RV too, and discussed with us where we could park. 

When we arrived, we were greeted by this 20-something young man, who told us the story of how he and his wife had spent the last four years full-time RV’ing. They had contemplated touring Europe, but instead decided to see the U.S.A. in their 27 foot class C motorhome. O.K, they were probably the youngest people at every campground they inhabited, but—see—it’s not just old geezers like us who enjoy traveling in an RV. Now if we could just restore our 20-year-old energy levels, we’d be all set.

Huh?

Magnificent Campground

 Chris writes:

Hunting Island State Park, just southeast of Beaufort (that’s “Byoo-futt” to the locals), South Carolina is nothing short of magnificent. The campground itself tends toward the primitive side of the spectrum, but there are some sites large enough for an RV up to 40 feet long (with a little maneuvering). Here’s our 34 footer all nestled in.

The real story here is location, location, location. Just a few steps from the campsites lie five miles of pristine sand beach on the open Atlantic. Pictures can’t capture the sweep of it, but here are two attempts (pardon our shadows).

Back from the ocean there are Magnolia forests, towering pines, live oaks draped with Spanish moss, Palmetto palms and other species of lush, subtropical vegetation.  There are also thousands of acres of salt marsh, a tidal lagoon, and an ocean inlet.

There’s a lighthouse in the park, and you can walk along the beach to the lighthouse at low tide and then climb the roughly 160 steps to the top of it.

The walk to the lighthouse was especially intriguing because of the strange landscape left by Hurricane Irene. Parts of the beach were a forest of downed or dead but still-standing trees—all on the sand and in some cases in the water. Take a look.

As you can tell from the pictures, we spent time on the beach from morning until dusk. When I sat there at twilight watching the ocean turn a pale pearlescent  blue, it struck me that this is why we have a motorhome. We’ve been a little worried that, having lived in close proximity to the coast for 30 years, we might miss the ocean too much if we move inland. But—duh!—when we get a yearning for the ocean, we get in the motorhome and go see it. We don’t need a seaside house, we have our home on wheels that we can take to the shore when we feel like it, and stay as long as we want, and then move on when we’re ready for a change of scene. It’s like a timeshare on wheels, with the entire North American continent available to us. Not too shabby!

Interesting Interstate

Chris writes:

I tend to think that the back roads and even the old U.S. Highways are more interesting than the Interstates. Certainly they tend to be better suited to meandering than the 65 or 70 mph multi-lanes, even though they are sometimes cluttered with commercial and industrial strips, and sometimes with the decaying ghosts of such strips killed by an Interstate. But three days ago we drove a stretch of Interstate worthy of mention.

Interstate 40 between Knoxville, TN and Asheville, NC crosses a section of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and does so in
dramatic fashion. It bobs and weaves and curls and cuts through the mountains (there are, if I remember correctly, three tunnels). It’s up and down, and up and down, and then up and down again. There was either snow or frost on the high peaks at noontime, making for glistening summits as the sun reflected off the white moisture.

It’s a slow ride—trucks are limited to 50 mph through the narrowest, curviest and steepest parts. I decided just to get in line with the 18-wheelers  and take in the scenery. Sorry, no pictures—I was driving!

Something fishy on the menu

Lunch at the Catfish Cabin in Crossville, TN was pretty darn good, especially for the $8.95 price–fried catfish, hushpuppies, fried green tomatoes, potato salad, turnip greens. But the menu offered a weird choice:  you could have wild-caught American catfish (billed as “classic”), or imported, farm-raised (and presumably previously frozen) catfish, which actually cost a dollar more. The waitress explained that the imported fish is less fishy tasting and many people are put off by the fact that the native species is a bottom feeder. She recommended the import. We took her advice and became catfish wimps.

It reminds me of a restaurant in Caraquet, New Brunswick where the waitress asked if we wanted our French Fries fresh or frozen. She said a lot of customers preferred the latter because they tasted more like MacDonald’s. In Canada we were brave and ate the real thing.

Crossville, TN

Why Crossville?

In a word: The Gardens

The history

Jacky writes:

Crossville itself is just your usual nondescript city, and wouldn’t have, by itself, drawn us to live here. But once we knew we wanted to spend a fair amount of time traveling in our RV, we’d started to look online for places we might want to live when we were between trips. Maine is out because of the cold, the cost of living, and the fact that it’s so far away from everyplace else in the country! So we had to figure out where else we might go.

We’d read online about this place called the Gardens RV Village in Crossville. It’s a regular community of homes made unique by the fact that they have attached RV garages. So in 2008 we made Tennessee a destination and came to see the Gardens in person. We spent four days here, and liked it so much that, upon our return home to Maine, we impulsively made an offer on one of the houses in the development. (We were literally one day late – somebody else had made a full price offer on the house just one day before we did. In hindsight we realize that not getting the house then was a good thing, but of course at the time we were very disappointed.) We then considered purchasing a lot in the development, but none of the lots was quite right for us.

The developer, Tim Wilson, reassured us that he would be expanding the development soon, and he was sure there would be something that would appeal to us in the next phase. In 2009 he purchased some land adjacent to where he’d already developed, and opened up Phase 6 of the development. We decided to buy right away. In a way it was sight unseen, because when we were there in 2008 Tim didn’t even own that property. But we (especially Chris) did a tremendous amount of research using city tax maps, Google Maps’ street view, aerial views of the area, and topographical maps, so in that respect we had already “seen” it.

Our lot

It’s one thing to have bought a piece of land without seeing it, to hold our place here, but quite another to plunk down the money to actually build a house. We’re aware that everything looks better when we’re on vacation, so we didn’t want to find out that the reality of the Gardens and Crossville was different from what our memory had been. So this trip to Crossville was both to check out our new property and to see the area again, to confirm that we’d like to build here.

The Gardens development

If you’re interested, you can read more about the Gardens on their website, but here’s just a quick recap. It’s one of the oldest “RV home” communities in the country. Whenever we tell people about the Gardens and refer to an RV home, they immediately picture fiberglass and aluminum RV ports or concrete pads with a little “casita” you can pull up to in your RV. Not at all. The Gardens has over 150 custom-designed homes. These are not manufactured homes, they are traditional stick-built buildings.

A Gardens house

The Gardens’ slogan is “A Home for You … and your RV Too,” because every property has, in addition to the home, an attached, fully enclosed RV garage, with full hookups right in the garage. (No more winterizing the RV every season, we can load, unload, maintain, and clean it in any weather and at any time of day, and we can dump our holding tanks whenever we need to. And we can do all of that in our pajamas if we want!)

Each of the houses is unique, but are all duplexes, with the two tall RV garages side-by-side in the center, car garages on either side of those, and houses on the outside end of each unit.

Duplex layout

They are actually pretty funny looking when there’s only one half of the duplex built…

although some creative people have found a way to “dress up” those big white walls.

Here are the four homes currently under construction in “our” neighborhood.

Here are just a few more pictures from around the development.

Chris writes:

Party time! (or, in reference to something only select family members will understand: Asparagus no more!) Since we arrived here, we’ve gone out to dinner with people four times in five nights. That’s more than we typically do in a year! Here’s why.

We are staying at the little private campground within the Gardens development. The campground area is called “Homeless Hill” (being politically correct is not a high priority in Tennessee.)

It is a stroke of marketing genius on the part of the developer. This is where people live for free in their RVs while their houses are being built (which seems to take a long time—we’re told that “Tennessee time” is a bit slower than time in the rest of the nation). That gives the homeowners-to-be the opportunity to be intimately involved in the construction of their houses, and that’s a plus. Another benefit is the opportunity to share experiences, ideas, trials and tribulations while the construction is going on. But perhaps most beneficial of all is the social consequence. You end up meeting and spending time with your neighbors-to-be before you move into your neighborhood.

On “the Hill” right now are a couple from Missouri whose house is nearing completion, a couple from Alabama whose house is just framed in, and a couple from New Jersey whose lot has not even been cleared yet. They will all live on the street where our lot is located. There’s also a couple from Massachusetts and another New Jersey couple who are building in other, older sections of the development. And then there’s us—just passing through but hoping to build in the future and making some new friends along the way. For a few days we’ve become honorary members of the Homeless Hill gang, and we’ve had a lot of fun. Party hearty!

Jacky writes:

It’s funny being up here on “the Hill.” It feels almost like orientation week at college, where everybody in the dormitory is new and trying to settle in. Everybody wants to make a good impression, everybody is excited about this new adventure, and everybody wants to help everybody else get acclimated.

Tonight we were going to have dinner in their RV with two of our Homeless Hill neighbors. About 45 minutes before dinnertime, they knocked on the door and told us to come instead to the community’s clubhouse — because the guest list had grown to 24 people!

So we said at the beginning of this post that we came here to see whether or not we still like the Gardens. Our conclusion? You bet we do!

The Gardens RV Village

Mass in Crossville

Jacky writes:

Over the weekend we went to an evening Mass at St. Alphonsus Catholic Church here in Crossville, TN.

St. Alphonsus Parish, Crossville TN

There had been a power failure in that section of town moments before, so when we arrived, the church was lit only by candles on the altar. There was a bit of daylight still streaming in, but it was fading fast. And the church was also very, very quiet, although it was fairly crowded. Having it be so dark and quiet, such that we weren’t distracted by much of anything around us, caused us to focus on the altar, which was the only source of light. It made for a very peaceful and moving service.

What’s in a name?

Chris writes:

It always struck me as sadly ironic that residential subdivisions are frequently named after the feature of the landscape they displace—“Smith’s Farm,” “Green Meadow,” etc.  The same is often true for campgrounds. “Farm” is probably one of the most frequently used words in campground names, but most of them are no longer farms. “Former Farm Campground” would be a more honest name.

But then there’s Greenville Farm Family Campground in Haymarket, Virginia. The farm is still real. Here’s the proof.

Comparison shopping

Jacky writes:

When we were waiting around at Flagg RV the other day, we had the opportunity to wander into more than a dozen new RVs, and to do some comparisons with our own. (That’s not to suggest that we hadn’t done plenty of comparisons before we bought!) Every motorhome purchase involves some compromise, things like if it’s too big, it’s hard to maneuver, but if it’s too small it’s not as comfortable to live in. There are “fit and finish” considerations. There’s manufacturer reputation to consider. Then there are options, like whether to choose the booth dinette, which might offer more storage, vs. the table and freestanding chairs which might offer more flexibility. And there’s decor: because motorhomes come fully furnished, the buyer has to like the total package, and the decor ranges from what we considered tasteful all the way to what we considered just plain garish.

I’m happy to say that we walked away from our comparison shopping at Flagg last week very satisfied that we’ve made the right choice for us. If you’d like to see some pictures of our “wheel estate,” we invite you to click on the “Our home” tab at the top of this page.

Urban camping

Chris writes:

We’re inside the Beltway, at a large campground in College Park, Maryland called Cherry Hill Park (not the same place where Mary Hill was such a thrill after dark, for you oldies fans—now try to get that gem out of your heads!) Looking out the windshield from our campsite we can watch the comings and goings at the Metro bus station, so our view at this campground is more wild life than wildlife. On the other hand, I did run across a deer, plenty of squirrels and all kinds of birds when I walked a trail around the perimeter of the park.  At one point on that walk, I had an open view of the adjacent interstate, and realized I was walking faster than the cars and trucks were moving. Maybe the animals have done a better job than the humans at adapting to urban life.

One out of three ain’t bad

Chris writes:

One of my old bus driver pals used to say that, of every three trips, one is great, one is mediocre and one stinks. I guess tomorrow is going to be a corker.

Mother Nature plays a nasty trick on us

Chris writes: 

Thursday night we “camped out” at Flagg RV in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, after they had done some work on the motorhome. When we awoke Friday morning, there was over an inch of snow on the motorhome and the ground was icy. But the sun was out and the dusting of snow on the trees and fields was pretty, so we set out full of optimism for our leisurely late fall drive to warmer climes—we were in no rush.

We headed out for a campground in the, as it turned out, inaptly named town of Florida, New York.  About an hour away from our destination, I decided to look at the updated weather forecast. I could hardly believe it. NOAA was predicting over a foot of snow on Saturday and Saturday night! Now, for a lot of technical reasons which I’ll not recite, exposing the RV to over a foot of snow is not a good idea—not to mention that we did not pack boots, shovels, or even heavy winter coats. It’s October, after all!

So we did an about face and headed back toward the coast, where the temps were expected to be warmer and the precipitation mostly rain.  After enduring traffic jams on the Tappan Zee Bridge, Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike (remember Simon and Garfunkel “counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike?), we settled into a campground in Clarksboro, New Jersey, down near Philly.

Our re-routing to fool Mother Nature turned out to be fairly successful. Right now we’re listening to a mixture of rain and sleet on the roof, but not seeing much accumulation. On the other hand, it hasn’t gotten as warm as the forecasts suggested.  The test will be tonight. The slide-out rooms which make this RV so livable aren’t intended to hold the weight of a lot of snow and ice. So, depending on what Mother Nature does later (which we are monitoring closely), we might decide to close the slides for the night. Not to get too technical (again) but to get a little personal (sorry), that means I would have to climb over sleeping Jacky every time I need to visit the toilet in the middle of the night (I’m 63, you know). We both hope it stays above freezing.

We had originally thought we might head to Florida (the real Florida, not the town in New York) via the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Smokies, but now we’re thinking that hugging the coast and aiming due south might be the better plan. Let’s see if Mother Nature likes that idea.

Luxury campsite

Jacky writes:

Today we started what is essentially our third trip since we left our jobs. This trip will take us from Maine to Florida.

And here we are, “camped” for our first night – in the parking lot at Flagg RV in Rhode Island! Flagg was our first planned stop, as we needed to have them work on a couple of what we thought were going to be fairly minor warranty items. Well, could it ever be that simple? So instead of just stopping here for the warranty work and then moving on, we’re spending the night outside one of their work bays so they can continue their work in the morning. They start work at – *gulp* – 7 a.m., which means we have to get up practically in the middle of the night to be ready to clear out of the motorhome so they can get back to work.

We can’t complain too much, though – the “site” is free, it’s level,  it has 50 amp electrical service, and we’re pretty sure the neighbors, since they are all vacant RVs, won’t be noisy!

That's us on the left.

Vermont revisited

Jacky writes:

Last fall we went to Vermont in our old Coachmen, right before we sold it. It was kind of our “farewell-to-the-Coachmen” trip.

Our old Coachmen at Champlain Adult CG, Grand Isle

While it was a nice little vacation, we realized before we even left the state that there were a lot of things we didn’t get to see, so this year we decided to go back and see more of the state. At the end of this September and early this October, we traveled through parts of Vermont that we hadn’t gotten to see last fall. We’ve blogged about some of the trip already, so here’s a recap of some of the other things we did, some of the places we ate, and some of the places we stayed.

Probably the most unique attraction we went to was the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Derby Line, Vermont and Stanstead, Québec. You read that right, it’s located in both the US and Québec, and was built on the international line intentionally.

Haskell Free Library and Opera House, Derby Line

In the library there is a line painted on the floor to indicate where the border is between the two countries.

Jacky in USA

Chris in Canada

It’s the only library in the United States that has no books in it – all the books are in Canada, and the circulation desk is in the US. Similarly, the opera house, which is above the library, has a line between the US and Canadian sections of the house. The performers perform in Canada, the audience in the balcony is all sitting in the US, and part of the audience seated on the main floor is in Québec and part in the States. The staffs of both the library and the opera house are split between Canadians and Americans; the Canadians get paid in Canadian money and the Americans get paid in American money. An interesting story the tour guide told us was of the time that there was a fire in the opera house. The two insurance companies, one Canadian and one American, refused to pay for the damages because they claimed that it was impossible to know in which country the fire started.

The stage from the balcony

This border crossing between Stanstead and Derby Line uses a kind of an honor system, and a person can walk freely back and forth from one country to the other.

Chris straddles the international line

Canadians need to leave their cars parked in Canada and can walk across the border to enter the library and opera house via the entrance, which is in the US.

We also enjoyed our tour of the Cabot Cheese Factory in Cabot. They had a tasting table with about 10 or 15 varieties of sharp cheddars out for tasting. It was good to try the different varieties side-by-side, and it’s great marketing – even though we can get Cabot cheeses here in Maine, after identifying our favorites we bought several blocks of cheese to bring home with us. An interesting thing we found out is another example of Cabot’s great marketing: they have a kind of cheese they call “Seriously Sharp.” The tour guide said it’s their best selling cheese. So what does “Seriously Sharp” mean? Well it turns out that when they do their quality control on the cheeses, any cheese that doesn’t fit their strict criteria for their “Extra Sharp” label gets called “Seriously Sharp.” Turns out it’s just kind of a catchall label for Extra Sharp gone awry! Seriously Sharp used to be called “Hunter’s Cheese,” and the packaging still sports the red and black hunter’s plaid wrapping.

Another attraction we enjoyed was Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son.

Hildene, home of Robert Todd Lincoln

It was your usual period museum, with one item in it that neither of us had ever seen before: a 1,000 pipe Aeolian player organ. While they no longer routinely play the organ using actual paper rolls, through the magic of computers they now play it using floppy disks.

As always, our favorite thing to do when we travel is eat out (although we’re thinking that when we camp for longer stretches our pocketbook – and our waistlines – will require that we not eat out so often).

Chris says his favorite restaurant was Rattlesnake Café in Bennington. (He blogged while we were in Bennington, and showed pictures of some of the moose we saw as we wandered around the city.) My favorite restaurant was probably Ramunto’s in St. Johnsbury. I ordered half a calzone, and still had enough of it left over to bring two thirds of it home!

We stayed in some beautiful campgrounds and also in a couple of – how to say this delicately – dumps. We prefer to blog about the beautiful ones. Probably my favorite was the one in Jay, Peaks View Campground at Cedarview Lodge. It’s a new campground on the grounds of an already established ski lodge. Because of the time of year, we were the only campers (not counting the parents of the lodge’s owner). It made us feel like we had the entire grounds to ourselves.

The lodge had a nice restaurant where we had dinner one night, and we even stopped in at their bar (not a usual hangout for us) and got to visit with the locals and guests who were staying at the lodge.

We also enjoyed Sugar RidgeRV Park and Campground in Danville. This place had nice terraced, well-spaced sites.

Sugar Ridge RV Village and Campground, Danville

They had a well equipped camp store, too, which served us well because it happened that the couple of days we were staying there it poured rain almost all day, and, since we weren’t planning on leaving the campground during our stay there, we were glad to be able to just jog on up to the store to replenish our ice cream supply.

Another nice campground we stayed at was Greenwood Lodge and Campsites in Woodford. It’s at the base of Prospect Mountain, which is a cross-country skiing area. Again, because it was off-season at the campground, there were very few other campers and the area felt really spacious.

Pond at Greenwood Lodge and Campsites, Woodford

We really enjoy camping during the off-season. Call us antisocial if you will, but we like having the extra room between campers that not having the campground be full affords. That being said, though, the downside is that during the off season the campground store shelves are generally pretty bare, the pools typically are closed up, and lots of the other amenities the campground might be known for often aren’t available. So we do look forward to trying out camping at a time and place when the campgrounds are in their main season.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa

Chris writes:

No, I’m not running for president, but I feel I must engage in full disclosure.  In yesterday’s “Robin Williams moment” post, Jacky was much too kind when she said that “we” turned the water valve the wrong way. I was the perpetrator. It was a solo crime. It was not a Robin Williams moment: it was a senior moment. (What the heck, we’re headed for the shuffleboard courts in the Sunshine State soon.)

Fortunately, I didn’t do any damage, except a little to our pocketbooks. Coastal RV Repair in Topsham, Maine examined the system today and found nothing broken. So we paid the price of a few hours of labor for the peace of mind that we can take our next trip with a functioning sewer system. A toilet on wheels is a central feature of the RVing lifestyle.

By the way, for any RVers who might be following this, the folks at Coastal RV Repair are terrific. They are reasonably priced, competent and helpful and understand good customer service.

Well, time to read the rules of shuffleboard and think about heading south.

A Robin Williams moment

Jacky writes:

We have this device called a “Flush King” for the RV. It’s a device that allows us to backfill the black (sewer) tank with fresh water to flush the tank out and clean it. We usually do the Flush King at the end of any trip when we won’t be using the RV again for several weeks or longer. We used it at the end of this month’s Vermont trip.

All didn’t go well, though. You see, as we were back-filling the tank using the Flush King, we accidentally turned the fresh water valve on when we were supposed to turn it off. The water continued to flow into the black tank even though the tank was full; the pressure then built up too much in the RV’s sewer system and had to escape somewhere. We heard a loud bang, and saw water (yes, it was dirty, poopy water) come spurting out inside the bathoom from somewhere behind the toilet’s base.

Kind of reminds me of this Robin Williams RV movie scene.

Well, anyway, now we’re pretty sure we must have broken something. We’re hoping it may be just the gasket around the base of the toilet, but it could be something worse, like it may be that the black tank itself is cracked somewhere. So we’ve made an appointment with our new best friends at Coastal RV Repair in Topsham to have them inspect it. If nothing big is broken we’ll only be out a few hundred dollars, but if it’s the tank that’s cracked, we could be looking at thousands of dollars to repair it.

All so we could have a clean sewer tank!!!!

Smart Phone, Dumb Carrier

Chris writes:

How is it that a “smart phone” can pinpoint your location within a few hundred feet, but bring that phone within 5 miles of the Canadian border and Verizon says “welcome to Canada” and, by the way, we’re going to charge you outrageous “international” roaming and data fees?

Great Smoky Mountains?

Chris writes:

This might look like scenes from the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, but we are looking at the Green Mountains of Vermont, seen from the summit of Jay Peak on a beautiful October afternoon.

Here I am on the very top.

Looks impressive? Not really. Here’s how we got there.

Staying connected – mostly

Jacky writes:

As we’ve been traveling around Vermont, we’ve been finding that being able to stay connected, whether by cell phone or by e-mail, has been an unreliable thing. The campground we stayed at earlier this weekend, for example, had no cell phone coverage, no 3G, and, while the campground had Wi-Fi, it was $2.95 an hour – and there’s nothing I want or need to do online enough to pay $2.95 an hour!

So what is our plan, generally, for staying connected while we travel? Well, in terms of telephone, this spring when we bought our first real cell phones, we chose to go with Verizon as our carrier because Verizon is reputed to have broader availability than do the other carriers. We understood that AT&T is great in cities, but how many campgrounds are located in cities?

And how’s that working out for us? Just so-so here in Vermont. What we don’t know is how much of the variability here is due to continuing problems from Hurricane Irene, or if maybe we were a little too optimistic about the availability of cell phone towers around campgrounds in general.

And what about Internet and E-mail? Many campgrounds (an ever increasing number) have Wi-Fi, and our experience over the past several years has been that more and more of them make it available to campers for free. But of course Wi-Fi hotspots are not secure, so we would have to be careful doing any banking or other sensitive transactions online. Furthermore, they might not always be available. So we also got a Verizon hotspot, a device that allows us to get 3G/4G data transmission. It requires a password to access it, so it’s much more secure than relying on the free Wi-Fi. But our hotspot wasn’t able to get a signal at the campground we were staying at earlier this weekend, either.

We also have a data plan for our cell phones, meaning we can access the Internet and our e-mail directly from our phones. We were really lucky when we signed up for our plan because it allows us unlimited data; Verizon recently announced that they would no longer be doing unlimited data plans. We got on board just in the nick of time. Like the Verizon hotspot, though, the cell phone data comes over Verizon’s towers. So if there’s no Verizon tower nearby, we’re out of luck until we get in range of the next tower.

All in all, while it’s a little inconvenient on those occasions when we aren’t connected, it forces us to do something other than sit in front of our computers. And I suppose that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

Stalking Moose in Bennington

Chris writes:

Here’s a sampling of the public art in Bennington, the town in the very southwest corner of Vermont. Aside from some of the Bennington College students, this is the only wildlife we saw.

There is also some more serious public art—the Bennington Battle Monument, built in 1889 to commemorate a Revolutionary War battle.  At 306 feet high, it’s the tallest structure in Vermont. Good thing it was built in 1889, because I’m sure current zoning would prohibit it.

We also have a picture of a plaster cow’s rump, but we’ll spare you. That’s quirky Bennington.

Out with the old…

Jacky writes:

I’m a packrat. I raised two packrats. And I married a packrat (although he probably would deny being one if you asked him). So in anticipation of selling our current house and moving into the RV for some undetermined amount of time, we had to get rid of most of our 32 years’ worth of accumulated stuff. For all of July and August we spent from 10 o’clock in the morning until close to midnight almost every day going through rooms, closets, the cellar, the garage, boxes, bags, nooks, and crannies. We considered holding a yard sale, but neither of us felt up to that. So instead we created a “virtual yard sale,” a blog on which we posted things that we were selling. At the same time as we were posting things on the blog, we posted them on craigslist (and learned a lot about the ins and outs of craigslist in the process – see below). Friends who came to visit and strangers who came to buy things often left with more than they had expected.

The hardest thing was that we were determined to match up our belongings with people who want them, and to waste as little as possible. It probably would’ve been a lot easier if we’d either just donated everything or if we’d just called the junkman. Doing it the way we did it, though, we did find buyers for things ranging from one of our cars, to a Lionel model train set, to a 30 year old (broken) food processor (we provided full disclosure, and a printout of the cost for replacement parts), to furniture, to 25 year old Commodore computer equipment and software, to tires, to CPR manikins, to “vintage” toys. We discovered that there’s a buyer for almost everything.

In the process, we learned a lot about selling on craigslist. We share the following information in case you’ve ever wondered about using that resource:

• Craigslist is a free website which just requires a short free registration before you can list items for sale.
• There’s no limit on the value of the items you can sell – you could sell a mansion for $5,000,000 or a bauble for $.50.
• Each state has its own craigslist, and you’re not supposed to advertise in more than one locale.
• You can choose to remain anonymous when you post. If you use the annonymizer when you post your ad, a person who responds to your ad responds to you through craigslist, and doesn’t see your e-mail address, street address or telephone number. It’s up to you to decide when and if to give those out.
• You need to watch out for scams. As for our experience, we might have missed some legitimate inquiries by being overly cautious, but we felt that, as a general rule, the “real” inquiries were as obviously real as the fake inquiries were fake, so we went with our gut.
• One scam that we saw a lot on our more expensive items was a money laundering operation. The “buyer” expresses interest in “the item” (never mentioning it by name). He then offers to give an additional sum of money if you’ll remove the posting from craigslist immediately. He says he’ll send you a check, and tells you that he’ll send his driver over in a couple of weeks to pick the item up. As we understand it, once you would have received, and presumably cashed, the check, the buyer would say he’d changed his mind and would request that you write him a check back since he never got the item. Voilà, clean money!
• Another scam we saw is what we believe was just an effort to collect e-mail addresses and/or telephone numbers. These were usually very short e-mails, very badly written. We learned to look for clues before we responded to inquiries:
• a nonsense e-mail address
• a sender’s e-mail address that didn’t match up with the writer’s supposed name (e-mail address jdoe@yahoo.com and signature “Jane Smith.”)
• Another clue was that legitimate craigslist e-mails had a subject line that contained the name of the item, the name of our town, and the price of the item. Fake e-mails were missing at least one of those.
• And last, legitimate craigslist e-mails had, highlighted yellow at the top of the e-mail, a warning about scams. The fake e-mails generally did have the warning, but usually it wasn’t in yellow.
• You’ll want to have a separate e-mail address that you use only for craigslist, both to protect your identity and to make sure that if you accidentally do respond to a scam e-mail the purpose of which was to get your e-mail address for further scamming/spamming, you won’t have compromised your real e-mail address. (You can get free e-mail addresses from G-mail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and probably many others.)

Many people were as cautious about us as we were about them, which was reassuring. For example, we arranged to meet one lady in the parking lot of the YMCA. When we arrived we noticed a sheriff parked in the lot. As soon as our buyer drove away, we noticed that the sheriff also left.

We did take a few precautions ourselves, like making sure we were both going to be home, and not letting anybody into the house unattended. We only accepted cash. And we generally had the buyer pick up at our house rather than have to worry about where we’d have to go to meet they buyer.

Our favorite craigslist story is about the woman who bought our car – without ever even checking to see that the engine would run! But it gets even better: her father, who owns a small fleet of trucks and so you’d think would know better, came with her on her second visit to see the car, and he, also, never even ran the engine! Lucky for them we’re honest people and we were selling a good car!

Overall, we’ve really enjoyed selling on craigslist. We met some really nice people, all of whom had interesting stories to tell (and many had the desire to tell us the entire life’s story!), and all of whom wanted or needed something that we no longer wanted.

In addition to selling, we also donated several very full carloads of stuff. We were on a first name basis with the guy at the Catholic Charities Thrift Store in Portland, and whenever we drove by the Goodwill store in Falmouth the car wanted to pull into their lot on its own. We also donated bags and bags to Ruth’s Reusable Resources (a local organization that collects donations of school supplies so local schoolteachers will have a resource for low-cost items for their classrooms.)

So we were able to find good homes for everything. And now our own home looks really, really empty!

Big Rig, Little State

Chris writes:

In the RV world, our motor home isn’t really big; it’s kind of midsized. Motor homes tend to run between 22 feet and 45 feet in length, so at 34 feet we are about in the middle. In the Green Mountain state, however, we feel huge. The un-built landscape of mountains, forests and fields is large enough, but the manmade infrastructure is mostly designed for smaller vehicles. The quaint little Vermont villages with quaint little shops also tend to have quaint little parking areas.  And you’d better not miss your turn, because it might be another 10 miles of narrow serpentine asphalt (or gravel) before you get a spot to turn around when you’re 34 feet long and 12.5 feet tall.

Still, we’ve gotten everywhere we want to go so far. And we can’t complain too much about the roads in a state that is recovering from real devastation inflicted by Hurricane Irene. Last night we stayed in a campground where the host showed me pictures of RVs with water up to their windows and campground roads torn apart by the torrents of rushing water. And that was high up on hill! It’s as if every little stream in the state turned into a river for few hours—just enough time to do enormous damage. We’ve seen buildings with the foundations washed out from under them. But we’ve also seen signs of remarkably quick reconstruction and repairs, and encountered Vermonters who are really glad to see tourists coming back—they need us visitors.

Now back to that size and space thing. I found myself thinking over the past few days, as we maneuvered around tight corners and navigated old Main streets in Vermont’s little towns, that New England feels close, and that, after 63 years of living here, I’m starting to hear the voice of Horace Greeley and am yearning to visit the wide open spaces of the West. That will be something to aspire to in 2012.  

You don’t need to remind me that what Greeley wrote was “Go West young man …” To that I say, “Better late than never!”

Breaking the Rules

Chris writes:

The  list of rules at last night’s campground included this one: “Alcoholic beverages must be consumed at campsites.” I’m glad I didn’t get caught drinking Diet Pepsi!

Raindrops

Chris writes:

For the first time since early June, our motorhome is where it belongs—in a campground. Finally, we had an uneventful and completely enjoyable day. (Well, we had a little leak at the top of the driver’s side window, but I’m not going to let that dampen my enthusiasm.)

After a delicious meal at Horsefeathers in North Conway, NH (a mainstay restaurant in that town for over 30 years) we drove up through Crawford Notch, which was enshrouded by low clouds and very dark feeling. There was lots of construction as a result of the flooding from Hurricane Irene, which added to the feeling that Crawford Notch is a rugged and wild place. When we got to the top of the notch, the sky brightened somewhat and we could see some of the lower hills, but no sign that Mount Washington actually exists.

Now we are at a nice wooded campsite at Beach Hill Campground in Twin Mountain, NH, and the rain is pouring down, but we are comfortably settled in for the night and enjoying the sound of rain on the roof. The forecast for the next few days has us wondering who’ll stop the rain, but we say let it rain. We’re happy to be on the road again. And in a few days we’ll follow the sun.

For those of you who are as old as I am, there are a few “golden oldie” song titles embedded in this post. If you get one of the songs stuck in your head, tell it to the rain.

Vermont – A rocky start

Jacky writes:

38.8 miles from home. That’s how far we had gotten Tuesday when something — a rock, a piece of metal, maybe a shot from a pellet gun?—put an inch and a half bull’s-eye in our windshield. All we know is that we heard a loud bang and there it was.

Ugh!

What a great way to start our second first trip (it’s our first trip since Flagg fixed our engine-starting problems)! So, after we called our insurance company and Safelite AutoGlass and arranged an appointment for yesterday, we spent the first night of our first trip right back in our own driveway.

What we were most afraid of is that the Safelite technician would tell us that he couldn’t repair the damage and must replace the windshield. Have you seen the size of that windshield?! Imagine what must be involved in replacing it! As it turned out, Bob, the Safelite tech, was able to repair rather than replace. (Sorry if that brought their annoying radio jingle into your mind, where it will drive you crazy all day!) And Safelite guarantees the repair for as long as we own the vehicle, so they must be pretty confident in their work.

It was still fairly early in the day yesterday when the tech left, but we decided to stay put one more night here in our driveway. After all, we had a water connection, we had electricity, we had wi-fi – what more could we want? And yes, what that means is that we slept in the motorhome both nights, rather than unpack everything and bring it all back into the house! And last night we unpackaged our new camp stove and cooked a lovely dinner outside.

Spacious sites at this campground!

This morning we hit the road again, and are just keeping our fingers crossed that this time the road won’t hit us back!

The maiden voyage — Maine

Jacky writes:

In spite of our RV woes thus far, we have been able to take one trip. It was in early June, our “maiden voyage,” so to speak, our time to get to know how everything in the RV works and to find any glitches (see Jacky’s previous post for an example of a doozy) that needed to be fixed.

When people asked where we were going to go on our first trip and we responded, “Maine,” we got the sense they were disappointed. I think they were hoping our first trip would be somewhere extravagant like Alaska, or maybe a wilderness adventure, like the Nunavut territory in Canada! And when we were only gone for a week and a half, I think, again, they were a little disappointed. Even now, five months after we left work, when we run into people they say, “oh, you’re back already?” I think people envisioned us taking off for months immediately. We will eventually do Alaska (although we probably won’t do the Nunavut!), and we will eventually take off for months at a time – we just didn’t want to do that for our first trip.

Because Maine is where we have lived and worked for nearly 30 years, we really haven’t seen our state the way people visiting “from away” do. So our maiden voyage was also our opportunity to see Maine as tourists. It was a nice trip. We went up the coast basically as far as we could go without crossing into Canada, then we headed inland to spend a few days in Aroostook County visiting some old college friends, before taking our time wending south through more interior sections of the state, and then back home.

Three campgrounds really stood out for us. The first was Shore Hills Campground, which is right on a tidal river in Boothbay. The place is nicely wooded, rolling hills, spacious sites. While there we also had the unexpected surprise of being invited to a country-western dance one night. So what if country-western isn’t our thing, it was still something different and it was fun!

Shore Hills Campground, Boothbay ME

The next truly spectacular site was the Bar Harbor Oceanside KOA. We had a two-nights-for-the-price-of-one coupon. Because it was still off-season, the campground was uncrowded enough that the staff put us at a site right on the ocean. We had been thinking we might like to take a run up into Acadia National Park, but why bother, we had the same scenery right outside our door.

Bar Harbor Oceanside KOA, Bar Harbor ME

And one night while we were there we got a takeout pizza from the Parkadia Exxon Grocery. Now anyone who knows Chris knows that he is very particular about his pizza, and he generally turns his nose up at eating pizza from convenience stores, especially those in gas stations. But we didn’t have much of anything in the RV to eat for supper, and desperate times called for desperate measures, so we took our chances. One of the best pizzas we’ve ever had.

The third beautiful campground on this trip was very different from the two waterfront places I just mentioned. This one was called Arndt’s Aroostook River Lodge and Campground, and was in Presque Isle. It’s a former potato farm, up a hillside, all the sites are grassy and terraced, so every single one of them has a view down to the valley where the Aroostook River runs. And the sites are huge. No trees between the campsites, but because they’re so spacious we didn’t miss them. It has beautiful grassy walking paths all over the place. We were originally going to stay just two nights, then added a third, then a fourth. Such a beautiful campground – and it was only $28 a night, including electric and water! (Do I sound like an ad?)

Arndt's Aroostook River Lodge and Campground, Presque Isle ME

One of our favorite things to do when we travel is to eat out. On this trip we did a fair amount of that. There was the pizza at the Parkadia Exxon station in Bar Harbor, of course. But I would have to say that my favorite meal was at Dysart’s Truck Stop in Hermon. So good, in fact, that I bought their cookbook (at a time when I’m trying to get rid of, not acquire, stuff). A third great restaurant was Gram Russo’s Italian Restaurant in Presque Isle.

Another big pleasure on this trip was spending time with my college friends, Kathy and Eileen, and their family. They live near Presque Isle, which is directly on the way to almost nowhere, so going to see them was a destination, not just a side trip on the way to someplace else. It was great to catch up with them. Even though it had been several years since we last saw them, it felt like just yesterday. Which is the way it is with good friends.

Good friends!

A new beginning (with a few glitches)

Jacky writes:

Chris retired from his job in March, and I left mine in April. At the end of April we bought our new motorhome, an Itasca Sunova 33c (more about that in future posts). We bought it from Flagg RV in North Smithfield, Rhode Island.

Our new motorhome: 2011 Itasca Sunova 33c

As all new vehicles do (especially new vehicles with an entire house built onto them!), it had a few glitches that needed to be worked out before we could feel confident about traveling too far from home.

For us, the big thing was that, while it would start about 99% of the time, it was that little 1% of the time that it wouldn’t start which we found disconcerting. We first recognized that there was a problem a mere 45 minutes after we signed the papers and became the owners. Can you imagine how upsetting it was to leave the dealership in our brand-new RV, full of excitement, pull into a campground office to register, go to re-start the RV to move it to its campsite, and have nothing happen?! Fifteen minutes later, and it started fine. And so it went — sometimes it would start, and sometimes it wouldn’t.

Anyway, it took months and months (and two Ford warranty places and three trips back to Flagg RV) before Winnebago finally figured out what the problem was. Seems there was a “design flaw,” something to do with the wiring between the battery disconnect switch and the engine. As of this writing, Winnebago has only identified two other units besides ours that have actually reported the starting problems, but they have built hundreds of units with the same design flaw, so they anticipate that they’ll be seeing more. And they told us they’d actually halted production on the 2012s until they could rework how these units are built.

We were impressed with Winnebago Industry’s customer service and the care they took to explain everything to us once they realized how huge the problem is, however we’ve been very frustrated with how long it took from the time we noted that there was a problem until our dealer finally got it fixed –which was just yesterday!

We also had a couple of other, smaller problems: the water heater wouldn’t heat water (which renders a water heater useless, doesn’t it?) and our backup camera stopped working. Thanks to a good experience at Coastal RV Repair in Topsham, both of these problems seem to be fixed now. Or at least we hope they’re fixed — we won’t be sure until we get to use the motorhome again and try the systems out.

Anyway, now we’re looking forward to getting our RV back and being able to start using it for what it was meant to be used for: traveling!

What does it mean?

Chris writes:

On y va is one of those French phrases—ah, the beauty of the French language!—that has several  different meanings, probably best understood by the inflection of the spoken word and the gesticulations of the speaker. A Google search (the methodology of all serious research in the 21st Century) suggests that “Here we go” and “Let’s go” are the top two contenders in the translation contest. 

So which meaning did we intend when we named our blog On Y Va?  Now that I think about it, I suppose the answer is both. “Here we go” is our announcement that we are about to start our travels. “Let’s go” invites you to come along with us as we blog our way across the USA.

 On y va!

In the beginning…

Jacky writes:

Well, I have to start somewhere. I wish I’d had the foresight (and the time) to start blogging way back when we first started planning for this RVing life. But I didn’t, so instead I’ll just summarize a little bit about what led us to this point in our lives.

Way Back

Going way back, our first RV camping experience was in a very tiny motorhome we rented from some friends of my parents. At that time our oldest child was about two years old, and I was just pregnant with our youngest. We’d planned to take a couple of weeks and travel through Vermont and New Hampshire. We knew absolutely nothing about using an RV. When I look back I’m amazed that these people actually let us borrow their camper!

1970's Toyota Mini-Cruiser

It was the end of summer, so I wanted to bring warm clothing in case the weather was cool and cool clothing in case the weather was warm. For all of us. And I brought both maternity and regular clothes for both seasons for myself. I think we brought all of our son’s toys. And stuffed animals. And a TV. And pots. And pans. And dishes. I’m sure we were way overweight, although we knew nothing about the concept of weighing the RV. We had so much stuff with us that we couldn’t even move without moving something out of our way first. The camper also had one of those dinettes which sits on a center post right smack dab in the middle of the camper, and which has to be removed to allow passage from the front of the vehicle to the back, and which has to be made up as a bed each night and disassembled during the day, further cramping us in the camper.

We stayed in that camper one night (or maybe two). We hooked it up to campground electricity and water, and I remember washing the dishes in the little tiny kitchen sink, leaving the water running just the way I would have back then at home (that was at a time before we gave all that much thought to water conservation). It never occurred to me that the water has to go somewhere after it leaves the sink. Then at some point (probably very soon thereafter) we noticed that water had started backing up into the bathroom floor. (It was one of those units with the commode built into the shower stall itself.) We were convinced there was something wrong with the shower floor (now I know that we’d just over-filled the waste tanks) and we were so alarmed that we terminated our vacation right then and there. We scrubbed every inch of the camper, inside and out (and probably got it as clean as the day the owners had bought it!) and called the owners to arrange returning the RV. The owners were completely nonplussed by our whole story – which amazed us perhaps even more than the fact of their having let us borrow the unit in the first place.

For years Chris insisted we would never go RVing again, ever.

Well, never say never, right?

Slightly more recent history

Then several years ago on a whim (and with a fair amount of begging from me) we went to a camper show, and Chris’s “never, ever” became “probably not.” It was a time when we were starting to think about our future life together, as our son was moving away to college and our daughter was only a few years behind, so we were open to all possibilities.

We realized that we both love to travel, but we each like different things about it. Chris likes to travel light; I like to have all kinds of stuff around me. Chris likes to look, for a really, really, really long time, at things like scenery and sunrises; I like to glance at them for approximately 12 seconds before I get bored silly. Chris loves the outdoors; I love the outdoors as long as there’s a screen between me and it. RVing, we decided, would allow each of us to travel the way we like, and still do it together.

What to do? Well, what we did was probably the only impulsive thing we’ve ever done in our lives. After shopping for just a couple of months, we found our “forever” RV, a two model-year-old but otherwise brand-new unit just begging to be bought to clear the dealer’s lot space for newer inventory.

Our 2002 Coachmen Catalina Sport 285QB

“We’re Hooked!” Already?

Our first big trip was to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, just me, Chris, and our cat, Hinky. We knew right away that our gamble (buying a camper before we even knew if we liked camping) had paid off. This was definitely the life for us. We liked entirely different things about it – but we both liked it. No, we both loved it! Over the next six years, we enjoyed about two trips each year, one in the spring and one in the fall. We and our Coachmen made trips to the following destinations: North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Connecticut, Rhode Island, PEI, South Carolina, the Gaspe Peninsula, Florida, the Charlevois region of Québec, the Maryland shore, New Brunswick and the Fundy Coast, Cape Cod, Nova Scotia, and Vermont.

A couple of happy – campers?

I still don’t see us as “campers,” though. I am still not an outdoors-lover. And Chris likes the “big outdoors,” not the cramped outdoors of a rented campsite. Neither of us can imagine staying at a campground for weeks or months, just so we can be “back to nature.” We have enough nature in our back yard at home. Instead we see ourselves more as travelers than as campers. We use the RV more as a traveling hotel.

While our Coachmen was ideal for the kind of traveling we were able to do in two short vacations each year, we knew fairly early on that, in spite of what we thought when we bought it, it wasn’t, after all, going to be our “forever” RV. It was too small for any extended traveling, which we’d already realized we both wanted to do. The Coachmen didn’t have any slide rooms, sections of RV walls that extend out laterally, vastly increasing the interior dimensions of an RV when it’s parked. It had very limited and inconvenient storage.

So for the next several years we entertained ourselves between RV trips by going to RV shows, reading online discussion groups about RVing, and visiting RV dealer websites, all the while narrowing down what features were most important to us for our future home. We quickly came to realize that every RV is a compromise between perfection and reality, but we also realized fairly early on that some units come closer to perfection than others. And so when, with their 2011 model lineup, Itasca (a Winnebago company) came out with its Sunova 33c floorplan, we knew we’d found the unit for us. More on our new RV later…