Showing posts with label RV adventures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RV adventures. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

A letter to Kinikia

Dear Kinikia,

Thanks for visiting my blog. I think you should scroll back to the very beginning of my adventures - July 2008 - and see just how wonderful this adventure has been. To answer your immediate questions: What with the price of gas, the low miles per gallon, the cost of overnight parking in campgrounds and such, living in a motor vehicle is still a cheaper way to go than owning a house, with its attendant taxes, upkeep and mortgage.

Of course if you buy a high end motor home, you may well have a mortgage as we do, and vehicles, as you are undoubtedly aware, decline in value far more quickly than homes.

That being said, there's nothing like the freedom you can have when you are portable. We made it our business to head for all the national parks, but we saw much more than that, too, because anywhere you go in this beautiful country there's something wonderful to see, learn about and experience.

We stayed mostly in campgrounds here and in Canada, mainly because they offer the hookups we needed for electricity, water and sewage. We did however get adventurous from time to time, and ventured off the beaten path, "dry camping" as we went. We had plenty of water in storage, and a generator running off the motor gave us lights and even television if we wanted. Our gas was propane, so cooking wasn't a problem, even in a snowstorm, which we ran into twice. We stayed warm and cozy and thoroughly enjoyed being stranded for a couple of days. Having packed no winter gear to speak of, we layered up, wore two of everything and faced the weather. And this was maybe 50 miles from San Diego!

After three years of turtle living, we decided we needed dirt -- and for me, a pool -- so we bought a home in Florida. We love it here, and are enjoying the equally pleasurable benefits of living in one place and getting to know our neighbors, putting in plants and swimming in our, of course, pool.

Our only conundrum now is the fact that we have this gorgeous coach sitting idle in a storage facility. We've decided to sell our baby, and rent when and if we get the wandering bug again. Two mortgages at our age is just plan silly.

Maybe you should come and take a look at it. Better yet, I've got a whole file of pictures I can email you. It's a real beauty and I'd love to have somebody nice to take it out of lockdown for a while. What do you say?

Best Regards,
Betty

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

That Kind of Day

Cape Hatteras National Seashore
Outer Banks, NC

It’s the kind of day where you put a sweatshirt on over your pajamas for your morning coffee. You take a shower and get dressed, then put your sweatshirt on to walk the dog.

Coming back in for that second cup of coffee, you don’t bother to take your sweatshirt off, and before you know it, you’ve worn that shirt inside, outside, driving, exploring, lunching, shopping and walking the dog again.

It’s a sweatshirt kind of day.

The sky is a riot of kites. The ocean teams with windsurfers and sailboats. Parasailors launch themselves from water to heaven and back again. People with cameras litter the shores, trying to capture the pageantry. Everybody wears sweatshirts except the ones in wetsuits.

It’s useless to comb your hair. The gusts are non-stop. The sun competes with the wind for your soul: one warms you up, the other cools you off. As a result, you are neither hot nor cold. But your nose is almost icy and you find yourself sniffling a little.

It’s not a fall day, at least not the kind of fall I know. No leaves have turned, except for one variety of sea grass, so no fall colors are apparent. You don’t smell fire, or autumn decay anywhere. You smell beach, salty, clean and crisp.

You don’t wear fall clothes. You’re still in flip-flops, although you’ve traded your shorts for jeans. You’ve pulled on the usual tee shirt, but over it you’re wearing a sweatshirt.

It’s that kind of day.

It’s the kind of day you drive 40 miles just to look at a lighthouse. You stop on the way back at a crab shack for lunch and discover that the food is beyond delicious. Then you jump on your bike and look for things to photograph. You buy a new pair of your favorite sandals just because they’re on sale.

You launch your kite, only to have the wind whip it relentlessly about, and watch helplessly as it winds itself around and around the one the only lamp pole within a thousand yards of where you’re standing. And you abandon it there, because it’s kind of pretty and you think others will enjoy it while it lasts.

That’s the kind of day I’ve had. A sweatshirt kind of day.





Camp Hatteras

Monday, October 6, 2008

The Sickie

I’m writing this as much for me as for you. I want to document a miracle.

On September 15, after a season of traveling through deer country, starting in upstate New York and continuing north through eastern Canada, then south through all the East Coast states (we doubled back and caught Vermont after Long Island), John was diagnosed with Lyme Disease.

He had six big red circles, including a row of four on one leg, so we both thought he might have been the target of a nasty spider. But no, it was more like a deer tick. He was given three weeks of doxycycline and told to take Advil if he had pain. If? The aches and soreness kept him up at night, and during the day he would crash. In very short order, I learned to plan for solo afternoons, as John snoozed away the day, recovering his strength in order to eat dinner, watch half a TV show, then crash again and call it a night.

Nevertheless, we continued to travel, even going so far as Nashville to catch the Eagles in Concert. In fact, the concert was only three days after his diagnosis, so that must have been a real effort for him.

But Lyme Disease is certainly not the miracle.

Two weeks later, he started to have pain in one side, then developed a nasty rash around his torso. Ah, I sagely diagnosed, a reaction to the medicine. I’ve seen this before! So we made another visit to another doctor. He came out of the examining room looking stunned. I pulled away from my People Magazine long enough to catch the look of shock. “What?” I said.

“Shingles,” he mouthed.

Now Shingles hurts. It is a nasty little afterthought, a virus that hides in the body after you’ve had chicken pox. When the immune system is compromised (see above), it can flare up along the nerve pathways, often traveling from one side of the spine, around the torso, and ending in the middle of the belly. Bingo.

John is classic. Ask his friends.

Two nasty things at the same time. The miracle? Wait for it, wait for it.

In all this, John has managed to keep his good humor. He crashes and burns, but apologizes for falling asleep in the middle of … whatever. Use your imagination. He makes fun of his weakness and says he’ll do the dishes, vacuum our tiny rug, wash the buggy windshield. Soon. Not now, but soon.

He’s also gotten behind the wheel of our big rig and driven upwards of three hundred miles at a stretch, then done all the set-up when we arrived. He’s trying to keep up his part of the work. And he’s doing it all with grace and good humor.

Now that’s the miracle. A sick man who makes jokes. Hallelujah.

So I’ve decided we’ll stay longer in Cape Hatteras, spending our days at this heavenly place, sitting in the sun, lying in the shade, reading, resting, watching football and movies and eating out on occasion, until he’s decidedly better.

It’s a sacrifice, but that’s the way I am.

I know. I’m a saint.

Betty

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Go Fly a Kite



Camp Hatteras
Outer Banks, NC

I have never in my life had success flying a kite. The highest kite I ever flew got six feet off the ground and collapsed, dead, four seconds later. But today, I flew a kite.

Not only that, I flew it right into the sun. On a string so long it took me almost ten minutes to reel it in.

When I was little, the kites we had were paper. They came disassembled, with their balsa frames in two pieces. You spent a good fifteen minutes trying to put them together, creating aerodynamic tension by slipping the frame into the string that was glued inside the edges of the paper, and it wasn’t unusual to break either kite or frame before you even tried it out.

More often, however, you crashed on your first or second attempt to get it airborne, and some vital part of the kite’s anatomy was forever damaged. We tried everything – scotch tape, glue, bracing the broken limb with a toothpick, but nothing worked very well and the deceased kite was abandoned to the garbage pail, not to be replaced until the next special occasion.

We were blue-collar kids. There wasn’t extra money for breakables. We shared one kite. Nobody had a personal kite unless it came on a birthday, and even then, there was a lot of wheedling and cajoling. “Please, pleeeeze, let me try. C’mon Rich. You can have half my Popsicle. Puhleeze!” Of course, that’s when you broke the kite and still had to give up half the Popsicle anyway.

The boys were better at getting the kite up. Maybe we girls were dynamically challenged, I don’t know. But my mom couldn’t do it either. My dad, of course, was a major flyer. He could even make a kite out of newspaper. It wasn’t as airworthy, but it was an acceptable substitute when we had nothing. He stopped making them after a while, probably because he was sick of the tears and drama when it would crash, as it inevitably did.

Later when I was into dating mode, a kite-flying date would present itself, and I invariably embarrassed myself with my klutziness. I’d break the kite, or fall while running, or run into the lifeguard’s stand (once) or step into a hole. I couldn’t maneuver and look where I was going at the same time. I was a lost cause.

My kids could fly kites. They never asked me to start a kite on its way. Enough said.

But yesterday I went to the Kitty Hawk Kite Shop and bought an airfoil, a lightweight poly-something kite with a baffle construction that is easy to launch because each baffle traps air and pulls it aloft. All you need is a little breeze.

It’s breezy here in Cape Hatteras – or more correctly, Camp Hatteras in Rodanthe at Cape Hatteras National Seashore. I got my kite up in approximately five seconds, and it would be up there still if I hadn’t gotten the idea to come in and shout my good news to the immediate world.

Look at me! I’m flying!

Betty

Thursday, October 2, 2008

I Used to Be President

Greensboro Campground
Greensboro NC

I am struck by the way retired people refer to themselves, and it occurs to me that one of the quirks of being retired is the loss of one’s identity.

We live in a world where we are defined by the shape of our bodies and the age we project (younger is better), the toys we can accumulate and put on display (diamonds, boats and Jaguars do say something) and not only the work that we do, but the heights we achieve in the work that we do.

What happens when we put one-third of our identity on the shelf? When we are no longer the president of, or the owner of, or the speaker on the dais, or the manager, section head, or whatever grounds us in the social structure?

It’s not easy defining yourself to the world when all your life you’ve been doing that in terms of your work. I find myself telling people that I am a writer before anybody asks the question. Then I think, “Who cares?” It’s as if I can excuse this lack of employment, this extended vacation or whatever it is that I am doing, by letting people think that the only reason I’m sitting in my motor coach and exploring the country is that I intend to write a book about it. I’m not retired. I’m on a mission.

Hoo-hah. I am too retired. I am not 45 anymore. I don’t own an advertising agency anymore. I am not the president of, the owner of, the speaker at. I’m just me and I’d better get used to it. But what is me?

That’s what we recent retirees have to discover. I suspect it takes a while, and for some of us, it will never be more than what we used to be or do. But I’m trying.

Meanwhile I’m trotting out the bling, telling people that my other car is a Lexus, and mentioning that” I used to be.” And not only that, I still am. I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the place where I can say, “I don’t DO anything. I’m retired.” It sounds too old and useless to me right now. But I sure would love to be loved and respected for who I am, not what I’ve accomplished.

So even in retirement I have a growth goal. Being. Not used-to-being. Now there’s a challenge.

Betty

Monday, July 21, 2008

Simple Folk

Monday, July 21, 2008
We stopped by the garage this morning to see when the Saturn would be ready. " Garage" is a bit of overpromise. It’s a re-purposed small ramshackle barn, with two bays, one lift, and the requisite broken-down trucks parked on the grass on either side. It was raining, so I stayed in the car while John went to talk to Clyde, whichever one of the three workers he was.

The house next to the barn seemed his likely living quarters, a two-story box of early 1900 vintage – maybe even late 1800’s. Like the barn, it was grey and faded, with siding missing here and there, and a patched roof. One window had a plywood fill, and the other had a bedspread tacked over it. Clearly we were Clyde’s biggest customer in some time.

From the garage, a woman with long auburn hair and bare feet blackened with – what, tar? -- sauntered over to me, an old dog at her side. She was clearly Mrs. Clyde, out for a tete-a-tete with husband in the garage, and she looked so much like her daughter, Jeane, pronounced jenay, that I smiled and rolled down the window at her approach. I remarked that she and Jeane could be sisters, so noticeable was the resemblance. She smiled, revealing her missing front teeth and others soon to follow, and said with a slight French-Canadian lilt, “I got another one like her, when she broke her ankle, the doctor asked if they was twins. Ere’s five years between em, huh. That’s how they’s look so much alike.”

Clyde joined her at my window and introduced himself. A foot shorter than she, he was older, rounder and just as pleasant. He reached in and shook my hand, then asked me to do him a favor: follow his hand. He waved his hand in front of my face, told me to follow his movement, then stopped and said, “Now you’re pasteurized.” (Past your eyes, get it?) I howled with laughter as he accepted my reaction with pleased confirmation.

These simple people, with obviously little in the way of wordly goods, have managed to raise a lovely, well-spoken daughter and put her through college, likely will do the same for “the other one like her,” and are obviously loving and happy people. It was a lesson in the value of simplicity and testament to the total uselessness of cynicism.

The car will be ready late today, or failing that, early tomorrow morning. I can wait.
Betty

Friday, July 18, 2008

Tow Car Travails

Last night John said, “Well, I guess all the mishaps are over, and from now on it’s smooth sailing.” I’m not the pessimist in this group of two, but I wished he hadn’t said that.

So we’re driving along Route 81, headed for the Thousand Islands, when this couple in an SUV pulls along side of us, frantically signaling for us to pull over. A young guy in a blue golf shirt – thank you, young guy, wherever you are – and tells us our tow car is smoking something fierce. John jumps out to see what the trouble can be, and before I can trail behind him, he’s back for the fire extinguisher.

Seems our Brake Buddy system has been applying the brake in the car non-stop for over an hour, the brake linings are on fire, the inflator nipples have melted off and two of our brand new tires are likely ruined. We stand there and gaze in wonder. What in god’s name is the universe trying to tell us? Get out while you can? Get thee hence to a WalMart and apply for a job, you slackers? We look at each other and smile. It doesn’t get much more ridiculous than this.

An hour later, we pull into the RV resort, its own island in Lake Ontario. We make a call to Clive the Camel, as he introduces himself over the phone, and arrange for our crippled car to be hauled away and fixed. By Monday. This is Friday. We’ll see. Turns out Clive’s daughter works for the resort, and her boss, Paul, is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. While he regales us with other RV horror stories, his huge belly shaking with laughter, the very definition of jolly, I take note of the strong winds coming off the lake, and seeing a news clipping about the recent rescue of three, no-doubt-strong, men, I mentally decide kayaking is not for me. Not here, not now, no way. It may be a lake, but the damn thing has whitecaps.

Assured by Clive that we need not wait at the gate of the resort for him to pick up our ailing car, we leave the keys in the ignition and marvel at the Honor System of rural America, so missing from our New York lives. We drive the RV to our spot, not exactly on the water, but with a good view, and I settle in to housewifery, making giant sandwiches for lunch.

An hour later it dawns on us. The brand new barbecue we bought yesterday to make those lovely 2” steaks is in the trunk of the car. In fact, the steaks and some hot dogs are all we have to eat between now and Monday. Which is fine, because we have no way to cook them anyway. Looks like it’s going to be Oreos and wine for the weekend. (I’m keeping it a secret, but there’s a doggy bag full of broiled salmon in the refrigerator from my dinner last night, which hopefully, John has forgotten about. I’ll be sneaking out of bed at two in the morning to feed my grumbling stomach.)

(Unplanned Cost of Retirement so far: $15,102 + TBD by Clive the Camel.)
Betty