Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Plains

We left the beautiful Upper Peninsula on June 19th and moved west into Wisconsin.  We found a great campground in Menomonie, Wisconsin -- it was wooded and very well kept and was right on a river.  We hoped to take a short five mile canoe ride down the river with Poppy, and even got the canoe off the truck and ready to go but then the thunderstorms rolled in and we had to abandon the plan.  We've pretty much had thunderstorms on and off ever since then.  We did manage to get in a bike ride along the river between storms.  In spite of the weather, we really enjoyed our time in Wisconsin.

Irvington Campground, Menomonie Wisconsin

Continuing west, we stopped in Woodbury, Minnesota which is a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul.  This was the most developed area we've camped in -- the campground was really nice but was blocks from incredible shopping, including a Trader Joe's which we really enjoyed visiting.  We had called and had our mail forwarded from our mail service in Morehead City to Woodbury.  We had done this once before, when we were in the Finger Lakes region and it went off without a hitch.  However, this time there was a huge hitch.  First of all the Post Office in Woodbury told us they didn't do "General Delivery", that we would have to go to the main Post Office in St. Paul.  This meant driving into the city, which we did on a Friday afternoon, only to find out they didn't have our mail.  You can't call to find out if your mail is there, you have to show up in person, so we went back on Saturday morning and still no mail.  We had planned to leave the area on Sunday but now felt compelled to stay until Monday morning in hopes that it would arrive by then.

The main reason we stopped in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area was to visit an old friend of ours that we hadn't seen in about 47 years.  Peter Boehm was one of Bob's best friends in high school and was responsible for Bob and me meeting back in 1964.  We all hung out together during our senior year of high school and the summer of '65 after graduation.  After we all went off to college, Bob and I lost touch with Peter.  We re-connected through the magic of Facebook!

Peter and his wife Nancy have done a wonderful thing for the city of St. Paul.  They had a love for old carousels and always enjoyed visiting the beautiful 1914 built carousel that was at the Minnesota State Fair grounds and operated six days a year during the Fair.  Then they heard that the carousel was going to be destroyed and the individual horses sold at auction.  They jumped into action and asked the owner how much it would take to buy the carousel whole -- $1.3 million!  They formed a non-profit and in four weeks,with the help of their community and one very generous donor, raised the money to buy the carousel.  The city of St. Paul got involved and built a building for it in a local park.  Peter and Nancy organized volunteers who restored each of the hand-carved wooden horses to their former glory.  Now the carousel operates daily from May to October and for $2 anyone can have a ride on a piece of history.  It is staffed mostly by volunteers and is self sustaining financially.  It is absolutely beautiful -- a work of art.  The machinery is almost completely original as is the pipe organ that runs on paper tape and loudly plays catchy carousel tunes.

Peter and Nancy took us to the Carousel and we got to ride on it and go in and look at how the machinery works, then went back to their house for a great dinner and a great visit.

Monday morning we drove into St. Paul again only to find our mail hadn't arrived.  Sigh!  We decided we had to move on.  If and when the mail gets to St. Paul, they will hold it for ten days then send it back to our mail service in Morehead City.  By then it ought to be pretty stale news!

We packed up and headed south and west.  We had decided to leave the RV in Nebraska while we go home for July and part of August.  When we get back, we will probably head to the Denver area.  Meanwhile, we drove through some really pretty country in southern Minnesota and western Iowa.

We've had our share of severe thunderstorms while we've been in the mid-west.  Had a couple while we were staying near St. Paul and then on our way from Iowa to Nebraska, we got caught in one while driving.  We pulled off the road (along with most of the other cars) and waited for the thunder, lightning, wind, rain and hail to stop.  Here's a short video -- you can hear the hail on the truck.

 Luckily, Poppy is not at all bothered by storms.  She sleeps right through them.

We picked a great campground in Henderson, Nebraska to spend a few days and then store the R-pod until we come back in July.  It is owned by a very friendly couple and they're letting us store our camper for only $30 a month.  It was really hot while we were in Nebraska (I think most of the country was hot) but we enjoyed the beautiful countryside and took our canoe out on the small lake at the campground.  We visited the Plainsman Museum in Aurora and were really impressed with the displays.  Along with the main building which was full of interesting exhibits about the history of the area, there was a one room schoolhouse and a blacksmith shop which Bob really enjoyed.  Here are a few pictures from the museum:

This car is the same model that Bob's father drove from California to Florida in about 1923. It's a 1914 Model T Ford:

As you would expect, there was a lot of farm equipment in the museum.  This tractor is just like one we used to own when we lived in upstate New York.  Bob used to ride around with little Justin on his lap!

Finally, we went to the blacksmith shop.  Here's Bob fondling an anvil:

Today we put our R-pod in the storage area and started driving for North Carolina.  We hope to be home by Sunday night.  I won't post any more on this blog until late August when we hope to continue our trip to the west coast.

So long for now... 

Upper Peninsula - Michigan

In our last post, we had left our friends in Detroit and headed for the Upper Peninsula -- a place we had never been but everyone says is very beautiful.  They weren't lying!  We were disappointed that the morning we crossed over the Mackinac Bridge onto the UP, although the sun was shining, it was really foggy and we couldn't see much on either side of the bridge.  We traveled a scenic route along the coast of Lake Michigan but, once again, couldn't see much due to fog.

Moving West

Hi all:  Well, lots has happened since my last post.  I will quickly catch you up on our travels and then share a little info about what it's like "land cruising" in an r-pod.  I've had a few requests for more info on that.
My last post was about Lake Keuka in the Finger Lakes region of New York.  On our way down there, we had breakfast with an old friend who lives near Syracuse and she suggested that we visit Letchworth State Park, the "Grand Canyon of the East".  We had never heard of it but did a little research and decided to head there for a day.  It was only a couple of hours from where we were staying in Lake Keuka so we were able to get there early, get our camper set up and spend the rest of the day seeing the park.  So glad we did that!  There is a deep river canyon that runs through the park and three beautiful waterfalls.  All in all, pretty spectacular!  We were able to take Poppy with us and pretty much saw all the sights that day.  Lots of hiking and walking up and down steps.  We were all exhausted by the end of the day.

From there we headed further west, leaving New York State, crossing through a corner of Pennsylvania and entering Ohio.  We bypassed Cleveland (sorry Drew Cary) and stayed at a campground about half way between Cleveland and Toledo.  From there we headed to a visit with friends who live just north of Detroit -- Verne and Carol Felstow.  Bob and Verne were in the army together in 1968-69.  They trained together in Colorado Springs and then went to Viet Nam where they served in the same tank crew until Bob was wounded and sent home.  They hadn't been in touch since that day until we got together with Verne and Carol last year at a reunion of their Army regiment.  We had a great visit with them last weekend -- we parked our camper in their yard, hooked up to their electricity and had a great dinner and lots of good conversation around a bonfire.

We left the Detroit area and headed north in Michigan and are currently in the Upper Peninsula - more about that in my next blog.

So what's it like traveling in a small camper as opposed to cruising in a sailboat?  There are lots of similarities and lots of differences.  Living in a small space is the same:  you have to move 10 things to get under the settee (couch) to get out one thing that you need.  You have to put everything away all the time and you can't accumulate anything (a great money saver).  We travel in the camper like we did on the boat -- we don't like to reserve anything ahead.  We want to be able to stay in places we like and move on if we don't like it.  This can be stressful, especially on the weekends when the campgrounds tend to be pretty booked up.  So far it's working out pretty well for us -- we've always been able to find a place to stay in the area we want to visit.

We like to travel the back roads instead of the highways which takes a lot longer but saves on gas.  We are getting terrible gas mileage - 8-9 mpg -- a lot less than we thought we would get.  But if we were traveling at 70 mph, we would be getting worse gas mileage.  Here's the rig:

We are finding that putting up the r-dome (the screened tent that attaches to the side of the RV) makes a huge difference for us.  It's not worth putting it up when we are only staying one night but if we are staying two or more nights, we put it up and spend most of our time in it.  We set up our comfortable chairs and a little table and eat, drink, plan, work on the computer and relax out there.  This picture was posted before but in case you forgot, this is the R-dome:

The main reason we love the R-dome is that the interior of the R-pod is really small.  We do have a queen size bed which is set up all the time (I really like that although it's harder to make this bed than it was the bed on our boat) but there is very little floor space and Poppy takes up most of it.  We have to constantly step over her - and that's not easy at night when our black dog is lying on her black rug.  Here is the floor plan of the R-pod:

Well, there are lots more things I could talk about but don't want to make this too long.  I'll try to add more info about traveling in the RV in each posting but if you have specific questions, please post them in the comments.  

All in all, we are having a great time.  I miss my family, my friends, my church, my volunteer activities and my house but I am so glad we are having this experience.  And by the way, Poppy is enjoying the heck out of this trip.  Until next time.....

Keuka Lake and the 2nd Coolest Small Town in America

We've just spent four heavenly days at a campground near Keuka Lake, in the Finger Lakes region of New York.  The weather wasn't ideal -- it rained all but one day -- but there was lots to do, even on a rainy day.

A Blitz through New England and Upstate New York

I know....it's been a long time since I posted on this blog -- which I had promised would chronicle our cross country camping trip -- but I have two good excuses:  first, we've been having lots of fun with family and friends which left little time for getting on the computer; and second, even when I did have time to get on the computer, I have had little or no access to internet -- and what I've had has been extremely slow.  It seems that mountainous New England and upstate New York, while beautiful to look at, are not the best places for Verizon wireless signals.  So while I sometimes had enough phone signal to make calls, check email, etc., it was not enough to connect my "hot spot" to my computer.  Enough with the excuses -- here is what we've been doing the last couple of weeks.

My last post was about our camping in Virginia near Jamestown.  From there we went up to Justin and Terri's house in St. Leonard, MD for Memorial Day weekend.  Mattie and her family came down and we had our usual Thomas/Wynne family "Staycation" fun.  The first day of the weekend was cool and cloudy so we played yard games (and ate and drank).

By Sunday, though, it had warmed up enough for water sports.  There were an abundance of water toys available, including our 23 foot skipjack which we had trailered up to Justin's a couple of weeks before.  We are leaving it at his dock for the summer.

We left Justin and Terri's on Tuesday and headed up to Greenwich, New York where we lived from 1971 to 1980.  On the way, we stopped for a night in the Poconos in Pennsylvania at a beautiful state campground called "Promised Land".  In Greenwich, we stayed with good friends Annie and Dave Townsend who live on the dead end dirt road where we built our house many years ago.  Our friends Kate and Sally came up from Connecticut to join the fun (Kate's son lives just down the road from Dave and Annie) and we had a great dinner with them and other old Greenwich friends.  Our visit there was rather brief and there was so much fun and laughter that I forgot to take any pictures -- the only picture I have was taken on a driving tour of the area.  This is the farm house we rented when we first moved up there from Long Island in 1971, when I was pregnant with Justin.  The house is right on a nice size pond and I think we paid $115/month rent.

We left Greenwich on Friday, May 31st and headed northeast (doesn't seem like the right direction for a cross country trip does it?) to Newport, Maine to visit with our good friends Rick and Gayle Perlmutter who have a beautiful house in the country, right on a big lake.  We met Rick and Gayle in 1981 when we were sailing south to the Bahamas for the first time on our schooner, Lanakai.  They were living on their boat, Big Otter, with their two girls and we were traveling with our kids.  We both stopped in the same anchorage and the rest is history.  They are now into skiing and love living in Maine and we love visiting them there -- in the summer!

We had several lovely days with them.  Rick is a gourmet cook and we ate some incredible meals and drank delicious wines from their well-stocked wine cellar.  We canoed on their lake.  We had worried about whether Poppy would behave in the canoe but she is great -- she just lies on the bottom and looks around:

We spent a day at Acadia National Park on the Maine coast which was really spectacular.

We left Rick and Gayle on Wednesday, June 5th and headed west again, stopping overnight in Vermont near Lake Champlain, and then continuing on to Saranac Lake, NY to visit Bob's brother Ronnie and his wife Josie who live near there.  We stayed at a state campground that was primitive -- we didn't mind having no electricity but the cold showers on a cold, rainy day were a little hard to take.

When we left Saranac, we headed south west toward the Finger Lakes where we planned to spend a few days.  It was raining in Saranac and for the next few days, and though driving through the Adirondack Park was beautiful, even in the rain, the lack of sunshine and being confined in our tiny RV in the evenings was starting to get to us and the mountainous terrain was causing our truck, pulling the camper, to guzzle gas like crazy.  We were looking forward to getting to the Finger Lakes, setting up our camper with the R-dome (tent) and spending a few days, relaxing, drinking wine and seeing the sights.

All about our Finger Lakes visit in the next installment!  Also, by popular request, more about the R-pod camper and the logistics of life in a tiny teardrop with a very big dog.