One Month of Oliver

Grandparents for only a month but we’re still trying to get used to the idea. We have gotten to baby-sit twice now while Brian and Katherine went out to a lunch and a dinner. Both times, Ollie was peaceful upon exit and on return (we can’t say how he was in between). We’ve gotten to change diapers, take pictures, get our own exercise bouncing him on the exercise ball (his favorite activity). That seems to work magic on him. Each of us has had him fall asleep in our arms while doing this. On our latest visit, he was cooing, pushing off with his legs and arms while being held, and looking around at everything.

Our Wait is Over

In February, we learned our son Brian and his wife, Katherine, were expecting our first Grandchild. They told us on a rare Skype call on which they showed us the ultrasound picture. They said the due date was September 18th. A couple of months later, we found out the gender of the child; a Grandson. So we made our plans for the year. We did not want to do as much driving as we did in the last two summers, so we planned on spending a lot of time in the Northeast in a few key places, and then to finish up the season in the Boston area to be there for the birth and to spend some time with them in the first few weeks of his life.

This worked out pretty well, as you can see from our previous posts, and so we have been getting more and more excited as the 18th approached. On September 15th, after keeping our phones at the ready, we got the call at 7:15 am that they were at the hospital and things were happening. We got to the hospital, a good 45 minutes drive from our campground, about 10:00 am, and started waiting. Brian told us how far along they were and said we probably had time to go get some lunch before there would be any more activity. We did so and, while there, got a text that things had changed and that an emergency C-section was being done (seems the baby was in a occiput posterior position and was getting stuck in the birth canal). When we got back to the hospital, Brian was in the nursery with their son and Katherine was in recovery.

We were able to view them through the glass in the nursery and, although they were still trying to decide on a name, Brian was able to tell us that he was “Oliver”. We already knew the middle name was going to be “Geoffrey” because both of the Grandfathers have that name. It was an emotional moment for both of us.

They we hurried back to the waiting room to do some emailing to our relatives and closest friends. We were instructed to avoid Facebook until Brian and Katherine had broken the news. While we were doing this, Brian came by with Oliver in his bed on his way to take him to Katherine in recovery. It was a wondrous close encounter.

We gave Katherine some space to start recovering from the c-section and for both of them to get used to catering to their new bundle of joy.

The next day, we came back for some snuggle time and to properly congratulate Katherine, although she was still feeling the after-effects.

It was well worth the wait and we are still basking in the glow. Tomorrow, we go back to our lavish lifestyle and head up to the Big-E in Springfield.

A Summer of Lying Low

Our Summer of 2013 has been somewhat less adventurous than the previous one, but that is precisely what we were going for. By this time in 2012, we had logged more than 9,000 miles since leaving Florida; this year, less than 3,000. After 6 weeks in Massachusetts, we headed for Maine, and the Wild Duck Campground in Scarborough. This quiet little campground is on the very edge of the Scarborough Marsh, the largest marsh in Maine, and is an Adults Only park. This doesn’t mean anything risqué (necessarily) goes on there, but rather that there are no little kids running around. I think the youngest person we saw was the guy living in the small fifth-wheel trailer next to us, either late twenties or early thirties, and his friends who were sitting around the campfire one night. The park lived up to its name by having a flock of wild ducks hanging out in the small pond at the entrance every day. They also have a can of corn meal near the office where you can get a handful and feed the ducks whenever you like.

We met up there with our friends, Howard and Helen, who had been at Normandy Farm for the last week we were there. In this location, the trees prevented us from getting a satellite signal, but they provided good cable, so we switched over from our DirectV DVR to our TiVo programmed to receive the cable signal. For some unknown reason, the TiVo was unable to tune the NBC affiliate on the cable, and we missed out on a few weeks of Dexter on Showtime, but otherwise were able to keep up on all our favorite shows. But, of course, we were not there to watch TV, so we headed out to do some sight seeing. The very first evening we went to the local Lobster Pound. It was the first of many seafood meals in the four weeks we were there.

Scarborough was a great location, being close to Portland, where we went for entertainment, good restaurants, and a wonderful boat ride around some of the local islands. There is a mail boat and light car ferry, which goes to five different ports on the islands off the coast, delivering mail, groceries, supplies, people, and cars. Many of the people on the trip were just tourists like us, who went along just for the ride. The day we went was the first nice day after almost a week of rain, so the boat was pretty full.

Another great day was spent in Perkins Cove in Ogunquit. Ellyn and I had been there a coupe of times before, once with our friends Nicole and Pieter from Belgium, when they came for an Autumn tour of New England. Howard and Geoff walked a portion of the Marginal Way and nearly got lost when they left it half way and then tried to find their way back to the cove. Fortunately, Geoff had his GPS on so was able to track their start. We also took a lobster boat trip and got to see them pull up a few traps. Each trap was loaded with lobsters and even a few crabs.

We were also very close to Old Orchard Beach. We went there one evening and ate out on the pier. We walked along the midway and Geoff rode on the Bumper Cars.

We left the Wild Duck Campground for two nights and to Augusta, ME, for a quilt show. Ellyn took a class and even provided an art quilt for the show. The theme of the show was the State Rock of Maine, Tourmaline. We then returned to Scarborough for the final week of our stay in Maine before we moved on to Quebec, Canada for the Newmar Kountry Klub Rally. Howard and Helen left Wild Duck while we were in Augusta and went to another place in Maine for a week before joining up with us in Quebec again.

In Quebec, we toured the city with the Klub and L’ile D’Orleans in the St. Lawrence River. We had several meals with the Klub and lots of socialization time. It was our first Newmar Rally since the national rally in Goshen, IL in 2009 right after we started our travels. Now we are planning to be at the next national rally in Escanaba, MI in 2014.

Continuing along the St. Lawrence River, we went to Montreal, QC next, also with Howard and Helen, and stayed at Camping Allouette, about 40 minutes from downtown Montreal. We were there three nights and enjoyed riding the tour bus around the city, going to the museums and churches, and eating some very tasty food. The weather, as it was in Quebec, was marvelous. Temps in the 25C range and sunny nearly the entire time. The campground featured an RV wash and we availed ourselves of it on the final morning before heading out on the road again. The facilities for clean the outside of the coach are not always available to us in campgrounds, so it is nice to give it a bit of a scrubbing when we can.

From Montreal, we split up with Howard and Helen again, and heading back into the US into Vermont. We spent a couple of nights in the White River Junction area and visited with Mom a couple of times. She is quite happy in her little apartment with her TV, Quiddler games, and weekly sing-a-longs. In February, we are planning to fly up from Florida to celebrate her 90th birthday with her.

Then we drove back north again about 1 1/2 hours to the little (!) town of Peacham, VT, where they were holding their third annual Peacham Acoustics Festival. Musicians from all over came here and there were workshops and jam sessions which Geoff joined in with and lots of music in the evenings inside the “most photographed church in Vermont” and also outside in tents. Again, the weather was excellent and we had a wonderful time. We were able to get hooked up with a couple who had a house on top of one of Vermont’s mountains about 15 minutes from town and we shoe-horned our RV into their front yard. They even provided us with a 20 amp drop and we were able to get satellite reception. When Geoff first turned onto their road, he was not sure about it, since Cow Hill Rd. made the Top of the World Highway in Alaska look like an Interstate.

Now, as our Summer is winding down, we have gotten back to Bethel, CT for a few days, and then we will be heading back to Boston for the blessed event in September. Our next blog post may be a big one.

Since Florida and into Summer

Since we cruised out of Florida in mid-May, we had the following adventures:

• We spent 5 days in Williamsburg, VA touring the Colonial city.
• We met up with our friends Howard and Helen from SNF in Ocean Beach, MD and they showed us around the area where they used to call home.
• We spent a few days in front of our friends’ house in Bethel, CT and visited some of the old stomping grounds in Danbury.
• We landed in Foxboro, MA on Memorial Day for 6 weeks of visiting with our sons.
• We went to New Bedford, MA for a day trip and took a tour of the harbor there.
• We attended a Pawtucket Red Sox game in their stadium on Father’s Day and Geoff played catch with Logan and Brian on the field before the game. Then they had a cook out for us before the game and Ellyn snagged a foul ball during the game, which was won by the Red Sox.
• We attended a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park with our friends Howard and Helen and our sons and the Red Sox won again (no foul balls that time though).

Now we are getting ready to head to Maine for the remainder of the month of July. But first we are heading over to Martha’s Vineyard via fast ferry for the day on Saturday. Then we will head out on Sunday for Wild Duck Campground near Scarborough, ME.

Film and Love Bugs

Our first day out of SNF and it was a good one. The weather was very good. We drove the short distance to Florida Applied Film to get the damaged Diamond Shield removed from the front of our RV. That went very well and the RV looks great. While it was in process, we drove to Lakeland and visited Custom Coach Works where we may get our floor replaced in the fall. They gave us a tour and showed us their work and some of our options. It will take some work to figure out what we want and how it will get done. We had a nice lunch on the patio of a restaurant, Ellyn went to a fabric store, and then we went back and picked up the RV and went to Costco for a few things.

Finally, about 3:00, we got on the road. Immediately we hit a problem...lots of them. Love Bugs they call them. Little black bugs paired up for love, and apparently swarming right in our path. At some points they sounded light rain drops hitting the front of the coach. Eww.

After we stopped for dinner in Citra, FL on US 301, they seemed to let up. Now that we are in Georgia and have them cleaned off, perhaps we have gotten through the worst of it.

The Final Days of Fun in Florida…For Now.

We are now winding down the last few days at Sun’N’Fun before heading North. Our to-do list is getting shorter and we have been shuttling things between the RV and storage so we make sure we have everything on board that we wish to have with us for the next 6 months and leave here the things we will only need when we get back. This past week Ellyn had her last sewing session and Geoff played guitar with one of his friends for the last time this season. The RV’s on Rainbow Rd have dwindled to about the same number that were here when we pulled in last October. On Tuesday, Geoff has a morning Dr. appointment and we are scheduled to drop the RV off at a local shop to get an oil change. Then we will drive just a short distance to Tampa. On Wednesday morning, we will again take the RV to a shop to get the Diamond Shield product removed from the front. It was not apparently applied correctly and has been cracking and peeling for the last couple of years. We will get it removed for now and decide later if we want to have more applied.

From Tampa we have 2 1/2 days to get to Williamsburg, VA. We are also going to spend a few days camping in Delaware to pick up our 47th State. Only Kentucky and West Virginia will be left to fill in on our camping map. Then we can clear it and start all over again. (We count a state as having been visited if we camp within it’s borders at least one day. We have driven through both Delaware and West Virginia, but have never camped there. Some people like to camp in a state more than just one day before counting it on their maps. If we did that, the only state which would fall off our map at this point would be Indiana. All other states we have stayed in 2 days or more.)

Four More Years...?

Possibly, but for now, it has been just four years of full-timer RV living for us. On April 7, 2009, after having closed on our house sale in Danbury, CT, Ellyn and I drove our motor home to Foxboro, MA and checked into the Normandy Farm Campground for our first night as wheel-estate owners. Since then, we have camped in 46 U.S. States and 6 Canadian Provinces. driven about 70,000 miles, upgraded from our first 29-foot Bay Star to our current 40-foot Dutch Star motorhome, become residents of Sarasota, Florida, and carved out a unique life-style for ourselves. Our foreseeable future has us continuing to live on the road, mainly because we have not been able to envision ourselves living a full calendar year in any one location. Florida is wonderful for the Winter months but can be unbearably hot in the Summer. Our kids, and future Grandchild, are in the Boston, MA area, but we do not relish a Winter in the snow belt. Although the motorhome can get cramped with our various hobbies, we now have a storage locker in Sarasota with all our overflow and memorabilia, so we have room for all our stuff.

Home Again, or As Close As We Get

Sun’N’Fun RV Resort, we have arrived! This place has been more our home in the past two years than any other address. For 7 months out of the last 24, we have had Sarasota, Florida as our home base, and starting today, we will be here for the next 6 months (except for a few weeks to visit our sons for Thanksgiving and to take a Caribbean cruise in February). We are in a new site this year, although not that far from our old one; actually, right next to it. Friends, who had it the last two years, sold their RV and moved into a vacation home here, so we inherited it. The advantages are it has more room and several trees (Geoff will put up his hammock as soon as possible). We found out the disadvantage right away; the trees block our automatic satellite dish on the top of the RV, so we will have to set up the manual dish. For now, the cable and antenna connections to our TiVo will have to suffice.

Tomorrow is Monday and our resort experience will start, although many of the activities we are involved in do not start for a few weeks. We need to get set up here. We need to get our high-speed internet, patio chairs out of storage, put a few things into storage, and start exercising. Let the fun begin!

(Times like this remind me of things my Mother would always say; when we would get back home after a trip, usually to Lansing to visit Grandma and our Cousins, she would frequently recite this ditty…”To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jigitty jig.”)

32 States, 3 Canadian Provinces, 195 Days, 15,115 Miles Later…

We are back in our “home” state of Florida! We traveled south from Dothan, Alabama this afternoon and are on St. George Island near Apalachicola, FL. We’ll be here 4 nights enjoying the beaches and maybe even getting in some kayaking on St. George Sound.

Our Fall Synagogue Tour

Fall is a big holiday time for Jews and we have been trying our best to take it in, even with our traveling. We celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, in San Francisco, at Beth Israel Judea, where a camp friend of Ellyn’s is the Cantor. We got to Salt Lake City for Yom Kippur, and Ellyn was able to find Congregation Kol Ami, where they did not require a fee or even reciprocation from our own synagogue. We only did Kol Nidre as we were on the road the next day. We will have to atone for that next year.

We arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, where our good friends the Davidson’s live, and Joe was our Rabbi in Rochester, Miinesota. Now he is a part-time Rabbi there at Congregation B’nai Amoona and we were there for their celebration of Simcha Torah, when the reading of the Torah reaches its end and then restarts for the “Beginning”. Now, we are in Dothan, Alabama, where our own synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, with our good friend, Rabbi Lynn Goldsmith, was celebrating Shabbat, and a belated Simcha Torah. Ellyn got to light the Shabbat candles and Geoff got an Aliyah to the Torah.

From here, we finally get to Florida, although we have two more stops before we get to Sun’N’Fun.

Winter Approaching?

We’ve been parked for a few days in Des Moines, Iowa, while Ellyn is attending a quilting show and taking some classes (and buying some stuff). When we arrived here, the weather was quite warm, with highs reaching into the mid-80s. Nice shorts weather for Geoff. After two days of that, a cold front moved in from the North and the daily highs had dipped into the 50s. This morning we saw on the news that northern Minnesota had gotten its earliest snow on record. Getting too close for comfort. Time to head South.

On Saturday we head for Hannibal, Missouri, then on to St. Louis. Hopefully the cold weather will stay behind us.

The Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska

This is a wonderful place to spend an exhausting day. This zoo has hundreds of animals to see in a very nice facility, and the price was very reasonable for a full day of touring the grounds and a terrific IMAX video on butterflies. We went on a Monday and avoided the weekend crowds, even though there were lots of school groups there and Mothers with their little ones in tow. A couple of the large aviaries were closed on a week day but we still got to see a lot. They have a huge desert environment dome with lots of free flying birds and three separate desert environments inside. Then below the dome they have a whole nocturnal environment with animals which would not be active in the light of day.

Even while we ate lunch, we were able to observe animals in the jungle exhibit next door and a female White Handed Gibbon with twin babies. We wandered through a huge reptile exhibit and a wonderful aquarium before going to the IMAX show. After the show we went through the butterfly exhibit and Geoff ended up with one landing on this hat. We saw some animals we had already seen in Alaska in the wild but it was still a nice trip to the zoo.

This zoo has had a lot of births in the past two years. It seemed nearly every exhibit we visited had a sign indicating there had been a birth in 2012 or 2011.

We have actually been camped in Council Bluffs, Iowa while we were here and will be heading next to Des Moines, Iowa for a few days before heading toward St’ Louis, Missouri.

The Snowy Range of Wyoming

From Rawlins, Wyoming, we took a drive into the mountains, along the “Snowy Range Loop”. This is a 400+ mile loop which goes through Saratoga, Laramie and Medicine Bow. We only did about 1/3 of it, going only as far as an overlook of the Snowy Range and the Libby Flats. This took us up to 10,800 ft., a height we did not reach while in Alaska. Our highest heights in AK were below the 4000 ft. mark. We could definitely feel it when we exerted ourselves even a little bit to walk from the car to the overlooks. The Snowy Range itself was quite spectacular once the sun decided to come out. Part of our trip was accompanied by rain but, we did have some moments of sun, which we were able to take advantage of and get some nice photos. The Aspen trees in the mountains were quite a bright shade of yellow. We even ran into real cowboys doing a real cattle drive. They were moving the cows from their Summer to Winter pastures and they were moving right along the road.

It was a nice break from the driving to take a day and do a little sight seeing again.