Chapter 75 - Eastern Visits
Dave and Helen Damouth
www.damouth.org
10/23/2004 to 12/1/2004
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This trip, planned to take about 5 weeks, was primarily for the purpose of visiting relatives, who are scattered through Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. We've left the planning rather loose, hoping to coordinate a visit date with each individual as we get closer to their location.
10/23/04: We got underway at 2:15 pm, after spending a busy day packing. The previous week had been so busy that we'd done almost no packing - what with painting the guest room, etc. Also contributing to the late start, I'd gone out mid-morning to check the tire pressures and discovered the inside dual on the right rear was flat - zero pressure. No telling how long it had been that way - but the tire appears undamaged. I fired up my air compressor, pumped the tire up a bit, and immediately heard air hissing out the valve stem. Tightening the valve core was all that was required, after which it appeared to hold air. After the tedious process of pumping the huge tire up to 87 psi with a small compressor, I loaded the compressor into a basement compartment for insurance, not totally sure I had found the real problem. (In fact, it held this pressure for the rest of the trip).
These big class-A motorhomes do not generally carry a spare tire. No ordinary nail would have the temerity to puncture one of these thick, heavy-duty tires. There's no place to put a spare, and most people wouldn't have the strength to change one of these wheels anyway. A jack capable of lifting this 21,000 pound rig would also be a bulky and heavy item to carry. Therefore, we depend entirely on our Emergency Road Service contract, even for something as simple as a flat tire.
Loading Matilda, our tabby cat, into the RV was uneventful. After two previous, much shorter trips, Tillie is becoming an experienced traveler and made only token complaints.
The day was bright and crisp - a perfect autumn day, except that we had a stiff SE headwind and crosswind. Steering took more effort than usual. The trip across eastern Colorado was a bit dull. The prairie is various shades of brown, except for an occasional field just turning green with winter wheat or a very dark green field of new alfalfa. Quite frequently, we would be in a place where not a single tree was visible in any direction.
As we got close to Kansas, the fields became a bit greener, and trees (pines and junipers), planted as windbreaks along the highway and around ranches, began to be larger and healthier.
Near dark, we stopped at a KOA in Goodland, KS, at about 7 pm central daylight time. Paying $27 with the KOA discount seemed a bit ridiculous, considering that we're using few of the services included in that price other than electricity.
10/24/04: Having enjoyed Wallace Stegner's book "Beyond the 100th Meridian" a few months ago, which is partially about the failure of the Homestead Act west of the 100th meridian because of the lack of rain and the impossibility of a family surviving on 100 acres of semi-desert, it was interesting to drive across this region. The character of the land did indeed change dramatically, with the greatest rate of change at about 100 degrees west longitude. East of this point, we soon began to see greener fields and more frequent stands of larger trees. Unirrigated fields of wheat or hay became more common.
We took a brief detour to drive through WaKeeney, Kansas, almost exactly on the 100th meridian. It is a decaying rural town that must have had a brief affluent period - neatly laid out 10 blocks square, a substantial stone county courthouse (it's the Trego County Seat), and a few blocks of wide, carefully constructed red brick streets. It's on Old Highway 40, which runs roughly parallel to I-70 across several states.
We spent the night in Mill Creek RV Park, somewhat further east in the picturesque decaying village of Paxico, Kansas. The campground is rustic but pleasant - an expansive mowed area with gravel full-hookup pull-through RV sites along the creek, with plenty of room to take a long walk. The campground buildings are decorated with local historic artifacts - old gas pumps, saw blades, license plates and hubcaps, assorted farm equipment, etc.
Within walking distance from the RV Park, the central area of Paxico must have a dozen or more antique shops, where "antique" means early 20th century bric-a-brac from the surrounding area, collected as farm and town families died or moved away. There are only a few other businesses left - a tiny bank, an even smaller restaurant, and little else, with the other decaying business buildings empty or filled with junk for the occasional antique-hunter to buy. The campground is directly adjacent to an active railroad line, and perhaps half a mile from the expressway, so we had the loud but brief roar of a train every couple of hours and a constant background hum from the not-quite-visible expressway.
10/25/04: We continued eastward on I-70 The only real thing of interest today was a detour to stop at the Churchill Memorial, on the Westminster College campus in Fulton, Missouri. "Twice destroyed by fire, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, is part of the Winston Churchill Memorial. The Church, which dates from the 12th century, was redesigned by Sir Christopher Wren in 1677, after the Great Fire of London. Nearly three centuries later a German incendiary bomb left it in ruin. Slated for demolition, Wren's graceful masterpiece was saved by a bold idea. The structure would be rebuilt on the campus of Westminster College as a permanent reminder of Churchill's visit to the college and his prophetic 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech.
We arrived too late to tour the interior of the church or to visit the Undercroft Museum (which contains exhibits dedicated to the life and works of Sir Winston Churchill). But we enjoyed the attractive external architecture and enjoyed walking around the church. We were fortunate to find a parking space long enough for the motorhome and toad (towed car) right on the street in front of the church.
On the way back to I-70 from Fulton just before dusk, we were still undecided whether to backtrack 10 miles to an RV Park or continue 20 miles east on I-70 to a state rest area on the expressway, when we noticed a Wal-Mart, and on the spur of the moment pulled in, deciding to spend the night in their parking lot. We parked, headed into the store for a bit of grocery shopping, and then walked to the adjacent mall and bought burgers at Wendy's to take back to the RV. We spent a peaceful, relatively quiet night, interrupted only by a brief thunderstorm sometime in the middle of the night.
10/26/04: Got on the road fairly late, about 11 AM. Rain began soon after we started to drive, and continued all day, sometimes quite heavy, as we continued on I-70 across the rest of Missouri, taking the northern bypass around St. Louis, then the width of Illinois, and on into Indiana. The overcast was heavy, the rain occasionally very heavy, and the traffic heavy too.
We moved along in a line of big trucks, occasionally passing a slow one or being passed by a truck in a hurry. There were surprisingly few cars. The Illinois speed limit for big trucks, as well as motorhomes, "campers" and vehicles with trailers is 55 mph. The truckers were varying from 55 to 65, depending on construction, road conditions, visibility in the rain, and (presumably - we don't yet have a CB installed), the presence down the road of state police radar.
Few leaves have fallen yet through this region, and we're back into exuberant colorful foliage - red sumac and oak, flaming orange maple, bright yellows of something else. The rivers are all full of water, and small lakes are frequent. What a change from the arid west. We drove straight through to Indianapolis, with only a couple of brief stops at rest areas to stretch and kick the tires.
At 4:30, we were in heavy rush-hour traffic in Indianapolis, looking for the turnoff for the State Fairgrounds - which contain the only RV Park anywhere near the city. The Fairgrounds are right in the middle of the city. We plan to spend tomorrow visiting several tourist spots here, so a close-in parking place is important. It's also probably our last opportunity for several days to dump tanks, take long showers, and replenish fresh water, so a full-hookup RV park seemed like a good idea.
10/27/04: We spent the day visiting several destinations: The Indiana Museum of Art (known locally as the IMA), is currently a mess - with a huge new addition to the building under construction and only portions of the collection on view. We did find several things to enjoy. The grounds are nicely landscaped, but this was not the best time of year to enjoy the flowering shrubs and extensive plantings of annuals.
The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art is an interesting building, with a collection focused on the Indian tribes of the surrounding area, and smaller exhibits about more distant cultures. The Western Art collection was varied. Quite a bit was from early artists who accompanied exploratory expeditions before photography was common, whose primary mission was to record the geological features and the culture, physical characteristics of the people, and life style of the various tribes for posterity. But it also included the more artistic works of Remington and others of that era, and works by the later more romantic landscape painters like Bierstadt.
A large part of the floor space was devoted to a special exhibition about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, featuring the paintings of Ken Holder, a contemporary artist who retraced the expedition's path, recording his impression along the way. These paintings were interleaved with photos and printed interviews with historic and contemporary representatives of the tribes that Lewis and Clark encountered.
The Garfield Park Botanical Conservatory is small, but crammed with interesting plants. We saw an allspice tree and met the head of the Conservatory, who was in a talkative mood, and gave us detailed information about several of the unusual plants, as well as describing some of the unique botanic problems of managing the conservatory. He mentioned that Bay Rum is an extract of the leaves of the allspice tree, and is used primarily as a perfume. He related a story about a local little old lady friend who brought a bottle of bay rum back from the Caribbean as a souvenir and used it to make rum drinks to serve the ladies of her club. All commented on how bad it tasted, drank it anyway, and had upset stomachs. (Allspice leaves are toxic).
10/28/04: We left Indianapolis mid-morning, and drove steadily east on I-70 to Richmond, Indiana, where we exited the expressway and headed for the Richmond Art Museum.
On the way through Richmond, we happened upon Earlham College, which our niece Linda and husband Brian attended. We turned in and drove through the attractive campus. Unfortunately, what appeared to be a circular drive around the perimeter of the campus turned out to dead-end in a small parking lot with no room to turn around - and a motorhome with a small car in tow can not back up for more than a few feet.
So we got our first experience in quickly unhitching the toad (towed car) in the middle of a road, driving it out of the way, backing the motorhome into a driveway to turn around, then driving both separately out to where we could hitch up again. Not a big problem - with practice, we'll probably be able to go through the whole process in 5 to 10 minutes. On this occasion, the museum to which we were headed was only a few miles away, so we didn't hitch up the car again, but drove separately to the museum.
We were initially disappointed to find the place deserted, and with all the galleries closed and locked, except for a few items displayed in the main hallway. We were the first people in three days to sign their guest book. But after a few minutes, a man walking through stopped to talk to us. He was apparently the head honcho, and opened three galleries - one that had just been prepared, wasn't yet open to the public, and was waiting for the judges to arrive to judge a competition of local artists. Another small gallery held the few major paintings of their permanent collection, the centerpiece being a large self-portrait by William Merritt Chase. One small gallery held some very nice ceramics, unfortunately with almost no labels or descriptions.
After the museum, we continued driving separately to the Hayes Arboretum, a 500 acre managed nature reserve to protect native plants of the region. With the jeep, we slowly drove a 4-mile primitive road winding through the preserve, enjoying drifts of colorful fallen leaves and labeled trees and shrubs. It was nice to get a good look at a Pawpaw tree, native to the mid-west but unfamiliar to us. It was too late in the season to see any fruit.
The small Visitor's Center had interpretive materials about the local plants and animals, and a wonderful bird watching room - a tinted plate glass window facing a several bird feeders. Because of the tinted glass, we could move around (slowly and carefully) without disturbing the birds, some of whom were on a feeding tray right against the window. On this pleasant autumn day, the feeders and surrounding trees were full of birds of many varieties. We also walked a special "leaf collecting trail" that had been set up nearby, with labels along the way identifying a wide variety of trees and shrubs each with drifts of its own leaves underneath
We got to Helen's sister Joy's house, in Upper Arlington (a western suburb of Columbus, Ohio) about dark, with just enough light to find our way into the semicircular drive in front of her house - leaving only a few feet of deep tracks in the yard at the beginning where we couldn't quite negotiate the sharp turn from a narrow street into the narrow drive. (Sorry, Joy!) We enjoyed visiting with Joy's family, including a new grandniece.
10/29/04: Started for Michigan at about 11 AM after a quiet night in Joy's driveway. Heavy overcast - not a pleasant day for traveling. Joy is riding with us as far as Flint, Michigan, where she will stay at brother Ron's house while we go on north.
A scenic but slow drive up the Scioto River from Upper Arlington soon turned into the usual boring expressway drive through Findlay, Sandusky, the outskirts of Toledo, Ann Arbor, and on to Flint, where we pulled into Ron's drive at around 4 pm - a considerably slower trip than we expected.
Somewhere in Ohio, the rain began, and soon thereafter, the passenger-side windshield wiper began flopping spastically. I babied it, turning it on for one swipe only when absolutely necessary, until we found a rest area where we could pull off the expressway, then got out to investigate. The pivot bolt on which one of the two halves of the wiper arm turns had come loose. I was really glad I'd brought a fairly complete toolbox, and that I'd stopped before the bolt came completely undone and the parts fell off on the highway. A couple of minutes with wrenches tightened the bolt, and we were on our way again.
After a couple of hours of visiting, we left Joy with Ron and continued north to Clare, Michigan, through steadily worsening weather - rain, thick mist, patches of fog, with approaching nightfall hastened by very heavy low clouds. We were grateful for the GPS, as we drove west from Clare and homed in on our turn from a dark state highway onto a darker small country road. Just as the computer said we were at the corner, the road sign loomed faintly out of the fog.
A few minutes later, we found Merrill waiting with a flashlight in front of his driveway at Eight Point Lake. We scouted the long downhill driveway, pondered the overhanging branches, and then drove in, ignoring the screeching sound of branches on the roof, shutting off the engine at about 8 pm. I then proceeded to drive the leveling jacks about six inches into the mud without significantly leveling the rig (our parking spot is only a couple of feet above lake level and it's been raining here for a couple of days). I wrote myself a reminder note to make some really big jack pads after we're back home.
10/30/04 We hung out at Eight Point Lake, talking to Merrill & Merne and relaxing until about noon, then Merrill drove us all up to Wells Lake, near Leroy, to Mark and Sue Krell's home, where we got re-acquainted with Jessica, their daughter, and met her 2-year-old son Gavin for the first time. Sue and her college-senior son Gabe had visited us in Golden this past summer, but we hadn't been in their home for about 15 years.
Had a great family dinner, watched portions of the Michigan-Michigan State football game (the big event in this part of the country and in this house - alumni of both schools were present), and generally had a good time for hours. Mark showed me his extensive toy collection, including at least half a dozen rifles (one a muzzle-loader used for deer hunting, two with lovely walnut stocks carved and fitted by Todd, Merrill's son), a shotgun or two, and a high-tech bow with a laser sight, also used for deer hunting. Mark gave me an impressive demo of the accuracy of the bow, consistently placing arrows within a fraction of an inch of the bullseye in a target 40 feet or so away.
During the morning, a cold front came through, changing a bright sunny morning to heavy overcast and occasional rain, accompanied by high winds. The temperature dropped 10 degrees, most of the remaining autumn leaves were quickly blown out of the trees, and the small lakes were covered with big waves and whitecaps.
10/31/04: Again spent a lazy morning at Eight Point Lake. Nearly all of the summer population have left, leaving only a handful of year-round occupants, and the lake is very quiet. In the early afternoon, we packed up and drove down to Sanford to visit nephew Todd and wife Sherri, Merrill and Merne's son and daughter-in-law. Their son Gage is a cute and outgoing 4-year-old whom we last saw as a one-year-old. They've also done a major addition to their house and additional remodeling, Shari is an artist and Todd a developing jack-of-all-trades craftsman, and the small run-down bungalow they purchased is now a large, impressively decorated modern home with space for Todd's large workshop and a future artist's studio for Shari.
After a couple of hours of visiting, we continued south back to Ron's, where we spent the night in the driveway.
11/1/04: Next morning, after visiting for a while and hiking the paths through the small forest behind Ron's house, with Joy again aboard, we headed back to Columbus, stopping along the way at Monroe, Michigan, on Lake Erie, to visit niece Sarah, her husband Mike, and high-school-student son Stephen. College-student son James will be arriving back from a semester in Europe later in the afternoon - we missed him by a few hours. Older son Andrew is living in the area, but we didn't get to see him. In spite of a cold blustery day, Helen, Joy, and Sarah spent quite a while wandering around the yard talking about Sarah's flower garden. After a couple of hours of conversation, we got back on the road, arriving in Columbus about 7:30 p.m...
We're not using the jeep much, but getting lots of experience connecting and disconnecting it from the motorhome. Three times now, at Sarah's, Todd's, and Merrill's home, the only place to park the motorhome was in a dead-end driveway, where we had to disconnect the jeep, back out of the drive, then find a place to park on the road to hitch up again. At Sarah's, we discovered that we'd left the ignition key of the jeep in the "on" rather than "unlock" position when we hooked up in the morning, and the battery was already dead. Fortunately, Mike had jumper cables and we were running again in a few minutes.
11/2/04: Election Day. We voted, via absentee ballot, a couple of weeks ago, in the comfort of our own study with piles of campaign literature, newspaper editorials, and other reference material spread out around us. Colorado makes this very easy: one request results in absentee ballots being mailed to us for all future elections.
We each spent some time this morning helping Joy with various household tasks. Then, Helen and Joy spent a while planting a bunch of tulip bulbs in a light rain.
11/3/04: This morning, after Joy and Bob went to work, we visited The Topiary Garden at Old Deaf School Park, a remarkably accurate topiary depiction of Georges Seurat's post impressionist landscape painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The topiary includes 54 people, 8 boats in a pond representing the River Seine, 3 dogs, a monkey, and a cat. This is a remarkable achievement, but still not quite complete, since the yews that are clipped to form the figures grow slowly and haven't quite reached the top of the taller figures, which are 12 foot high.
Then we walked a few blocks to the Columbus Museum of Art. Their current big traveling exhibition is French impressionists, which doesn't particularly interest us. But they also had a special exhibit of Georgia O'Keefe's New Mexico landscape paintings. We've seen much of this before. But the unique element of this exhibit is in placing large photographs of the same scenes, taken from the same distance and angle, next to her paintings.
This gives a fascinating insight into O'Keefe's process of abstraction. She systematically removes all the sharp angles, color transitions, and surface detail, leaving a smooth representation of the underlying large structure and making the landscapes almost as voluptuous as her better-known abstract flower paintings. We don't particularly like these landscapes as art (for me, much of the interest is in the missing textures), but found the exhibition very interesting. The museum also was showing interesting collections of late 19th and early 20th century photography.
We headed back to Joy's to hook up, getting underway around 1 pm. Our next major destination is almost due east at State College, Pennsylvania. There's no direct way east except twisty state highways through semi-mountainous country, so we took the longer but much faster route northeast to Akron and then east on I-80.
In Akron, we stopped at the Akron Museum of American Art, in an attractively restored 1890's Italian Renaissance Post Office. The building is fairly large, and the exclusive focus on American Art results in greater variety than we've seen elsewhere. We saw paintings by many excellent artists of whom we'd previously been unaware. The well-known Americans were also represented, although by their lesser (presumably less expensive) paintings. We had also intended to visit the gardens and landscaped grounds of Stan Hywt Hall in Akron, but the dull misty day with intermittent rain discouraged this.
With the light fading, we decided to stop for the night, and headed for a state park just south of Akron, using information from a somewhat obsolete campground guide. We found the state park and drove through it, but didn't find their campground, which must be at a completely different location. All other campgrounds in the area were listed as having closed for the season. We'd hoped to find a place where we could empty our sewage, refill our fresh water and propane, and be ready for a few days in the parking lot at Dick and Mary's. But it wasn't to be. We settled for the Wal-Mart parking lot, where we were at least able to do a bit of shopping to replenish supplies, and walked across the street to pick up a pizza for Dave's dinner and to freeze for future snacks. We spent a peaceful night, interrupted only by a noisy diesel RV who drove in and parked near us about midnight.
11/4/02: On the road again, with a stop at Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio, an attractive older limestone building, with a contemporary addition that managed to blend fairly well. Unfortunately, this museum is located on the campus of Youngstown State University, which was in session, creating a parking problem for the RV.
After driving past the museum's impossibly tiny parking lot, we turned west up a side street. This turned out to be busy and narrow, where after waiting a while, we barely squeezed past a student's car, parked in the middle of the road waiting for a passenger and refusing to move in spite of some encouragement from our big air horns. On the west edge of campus, we found a large, nearly empty, parking lot labeled "parking by permit only". We parked anyway, hoping that our out-of-state plates and obvious tourist status constituted a permit, and walked the half-mile back to the museum, where we enjoyed several portions of the collections, although seeing nothing particularly memorable.
And on through the rain - a roller coaster ride on I-80 through the foothills of the Alleghenies, trying to match speed with an unending procession of big trucks. Approaching State College, we exited at two of the last three exits looking for propane and diesel fuel, which we eventually found at separate stations (diesel was common, but propane surprisingly rare). Needing a full-hookup RV Park tonight, we had browsed the directories and called for a reservation at Fort Bellefonte RV Park, just a mile off I-80 at the exit for State College. They had plenty of space, but indicated they would be full for the next night because of the Penn State home football game. This is a pleasant place, rustic, with large level pull-through sites terraced up the side of a gentle hill among big trees, with a view out across the valley.
11/5/04: After a morning of doing laundry and other chores, we left about noon for Foxdale, Dick and Mary's retirement community on the southeast edge of State College. (Note to anyone heading to State College: there is a new expressway from I-80 exit 161, initially following old route 26, but branching off to go just west of State College, and eventually intended to link to I-99 to the south. This isn't shown on any of our maps, but is the best way to get to State College from the north.) Foxdale welcomes RV's of people visiting tenants (but not the RV's of the tenants themselves), and we had no trouble finding a convenient parking place.
11/6/04: The weather is finally nice, after many days of rain and high winds that made the cool temperatures feel even colder. There's a home football game today, so no hope of parking anywhere on campus. But a city bus stops right here within Foxdale, then drives through the center of campus. It's free for anyone over 65, supported by a Casino tax.
With Dick and Mary, we visited the Palmer Museum of Art, in the middle of the Penn State campus. It's an interesting building, and its collections seem to contain a little bit of everything - perhaps typical for university teaching-oriented museums. Their present exhibits are heavy on contemporary abstract work and also include a big display of surrealism, neither of which interests us very much. The 19th-century American art that we particularly enjoy was rather limited. The sculpture garden was ragged and untended, with only a few uninteresting pieces of sculpture.
When we left the museum, we walked through quite a bit of the campus, killing time until the next bus. It's a huge but attractive campus - an interesting blend of old and new architecture, with lots of open space and huge mature trees.
In the evening, Dick drove us up to Jo Hayes Overlook, on the mountaintop just to the east of State College. A nice view out over the city lights and a chance to look at the stars. These attractive, rounded, forested mountains are full of hiking trails. In the evening, we had an excellent dinner in the attractive and comfortable Foxdale dining room.
Foxdale includes a central community building and 148 "independent living" apartments, small but well-equipped one-story units surrounded by attractive flower-filled landscaping. Mary gave us a tour of the community building. The halls and activity rooms are full of art – some created by the residents and some purchased by a resident’s committee. This central building contains a wide range of services for residents – dining facilities, bank, mail service, barber and beauty shops, health services, several types of craft workshops, meeting rooms, etc.
Also located in this building are twenty-four private personal care rooms and thirty-two private skilled nursing care rooms for those individuals who can no longer live completely independently. Mary seems to know every one of the 200 residents - not just their names, but the names of their cats and their grandchildren, the type of car they drive, what town they came from, etc. Amazing!
11/7/04: Dick drove the four of us through the countryside, past Amish farms and classic old Pennsylvania houses, frequently encountering Amish horse-drawn buggies coming home from church, the horses always at a fast trot except on the steepest hills. We stopped at Greenwood Furnace State Park, where we enjoyed walking around the grounds. A brick blast furnace (for converting iron ore to iron) dating from the late 1800's has been reconstructed, and the ruins of another are nearby, as well as evidence of the sizable community which once surrounded the furnaces.
11/8/04: Got a late start from Dick and Mary's and headed northeast toward the Catskill Mountains. Along the way, we stopped at the Sordoni Art Gallery at Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre. We found parking on a side street about six blocks off campus, but had to feed quarters into three parking meters to cover our full length. The gallery was a big disappointment - a single room in a campus building, currently showing German lithographs from the early 20th C. surrealist movement.
Back on the road, we continued on to Wal-Mart in Scranton, where we spent the night. We were hungry, and after browsing the yellow pages and the AAA restaurant listings in Map-n-Go, we unhitched the jeep and headed out to find a good steak. Of the list of reasonably nearby restaurants we had identified, two or three turned out to be closed on Monday and we couldn't find one. Another, Jim Dandy's Saloon in Clark's Summit, turned out to be primarily a blue-collar sports bar, but we tried it anyway, and their special for the evening turned out to be prime rib. It was inexpensive and very good - a big chunk of tender meat, a baked potato that was actually baked instead of steamed, and a good crisp salad - and we were seated in a quiet corner of the restaurant area, somewhat insulated from the typical sports bar noise.
11/9/04: We woke to find the temperature below freezing and everything (except the warm blacktop) covered with about 1 1/2 inches of snow. After a bit of shopping, (including the purchase of an ice scraper/snow brush) we got a very late start (like 1:30 pm) then took the most direct route to Leon and Ginger Smith's home in the Catskills. This was initially expressway, but the last 30 miles or so became narrow state highways winding through very rural, low gently rounded mountains. We arrived in late afternoon and settled in on a full-hookup RV pad next to their garage.
Their home is spectacular - built on five acres of forest adjoining an inlet of Little Black Lake, in a gated community of similar homes, with restrictions that keep the houses back in the woods away from the water's edge, and prohibiting cutting trees. Leon had been designing his ideal house for many years. They bought the property 10 years ago, and built the house five years ago. Surprisingly, our tastes and theirs are almost identical - had we seen this house in the mountains above Golden while we were house hunting, we'd have bought it instantly.
Every detail - rustic design finished in native stone and pine, huge "great room" occupying most of the second floor, local stone fireplace and chimney in the living room, rising 20 feet or so to the high vaulted ceiling, Leon's office in a small third-floor tower looking out into the treetops, art studio for Ginger, big workroom and family room in the walk-out basement facing the water, beautifully functional kitchen, artistically carved tree trunk rising from the basement up through the middle of the 1st and 2nd floors, porches overlooking the water, were just to our taste. In addition to the large open stairway from first to second floor, there's a spiral steel staircase rising all the way from the basement to the third floor tower, in what can easily become an elevator shaft - looking forward to their old age when an elevator may become necessary.
Ginger cooked a wonderful dinner, and we talked non-stop for hours. Ginger's mother is living with them and joined us for the meal. Leon retired from his full-time job several years ago, but continues to take occasional assignments as an independent consultant as well being involved in several volunteer activities. We enjoyed Ginger’s wax-based art works, hanging on the walls of her studio.
11/10/04 Took a late morning walk with Leon and Ginger, down to the water, then along a trail to a point overlooking Little Black Lake. Overnight, the lake and the inlet in front of their house froze over completely - solid ice about 1/4" thick with a crystal-like pattern in the clear ice. We would have liked to stay longer, but we have many miles to go and many people yet to see. Got on the road about 12:30 pm, and initially took scenic narrow state highways to get out of the Catskills a different way than we arrived.
Then we stayed on expressways all the way to our daughter Leata's, arriving a bit after dark at a Wal-Mart in Elkton, Maryland, discovering then via a phone call that Leata had gotten permission for us to park the motorhome in the parking lot at her condo. Deciding not to move the motorhome so late, we unhooked and drove the jeep to Leata's, talked for a while, and went out to dinner with her at Iron Hill Brewery, a brewpub in downtown Newark just off the University of Delaware campus. Unlike most brewpubs, their beer was very good - particularly the rich hoppy pale ale I ordered, and another cask-conditioned ale that Helen ordered. The food was good too.
11/11/04: First thing in the morning, we moved the motorhome to Apria Healthcare to get Helen's medical oxygen tank filled. The place turned out to be in an industrial park less than a mile down the road from Leata's. That done, we moved the motorhome to the rear parking lot at Leata's, and spent a pleasant day of sitting around talking. We thought about various things to go do - museums, gardens, etc., but never got around to it.
Dinner in the evening at La Casa Pasta - just a few hundred yards from Leata's condo. It turned out to be one of the nicest Italian restaurants we can remember - a pleasant ambience, a large and innovative menu, a large wine list of entirely Italian wines in all price ranges, and attentive, competent service. We weren't hungry enough to do the menu justice, but we each ordered a different entrée and all were very good. We heartily recommend this place to anyone in the area. Right next door was a large grocery store, where we replenished supplies, so we're ready for an "early" morning departure.
11/12/04: Rain began during the night and continued all day. We suited up in foul weather gear to hook up the toad, and left at 10 AM, intending to make many miles. Unfortunately, the drive through the Baltimore/Washington urban corridor was slow - rarely up to the speed limit and sometimes just crawling. The low clouds made the day quite dark; rain was occasionally heavy, and mist thrown up from the wheels of thousands of vehicles made visibility poor.
For part of the way, we made the mistake of taking the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (SR 295), which Street Atlas indicated as the shortest route. Parkway traffic was heavy and slow, and hampered by slowdowns at the very short and awkward entrance and exit ramps. In some places, the speed limit was 45 mph. We finally bailed out, jogged over to another expressway, and then back to I-95. After Richmond, the number of big trucks diminished rapidly and traffic overall was quite light. But the rain continued!
At 5 pm, after seven hours of almost continuous driving, it was getting dark, still raining, and we pulled into a Wal-Mart at Rocky Mount, North Carolina, happy that there was no need to get out of the rig at all - just shut off the ignition, relax, and eat dinner. We only covered 338 miles, less than 50 mph average, almost 100% of it on limited-access expressways.
11/13/04: Another full day of driving down I-95 - this time with relatively pleasant weather - partly cloudy and pleasant temperature. As it began to get dark, we searched the Street Atlas phone book for a Wal-Mart, and pulled into a convenient one in Walterboro, South Carolina. A few blocks from the Wal-Mart, we saw a good price for diesel and pulled in to fill up.
We've been noticing that smaller gas stations that are well away from expressways often have prices comparable to the big truckstops at the expressway exits. The truckstops, which advertise unusually low prices often, have a gimmick that makes our cost up to a nickel a gallon more than the advertised price - sometimes the price is only available with a particular credit card, only for cash, or only on commercial accounts. And these big places often have a long waiting line of big trucks. A few days ago, we spent 40 minutes refueling at such a place. So we'll happily pay a penny or two per gallon more for a convenient, nearly empty, small station. We've been warned about poor fuel quality in small, low-turnover, diesel stations. But in over 150,000 miles of driving diesel vehicles, we haven't yet had a fuel-related problem.
11/14/04: We got underway early, expecting to make a couple of stops at gardens or viewpoints along the beach south of Jacksonville. But dark clouds closed in gradually as we drove, and a light rain began. So we drove straight on through - down I-95 to Saint Augustine and then SW across state highways through Ocala National Forrest (noticing recent hurricane or tornado damage to trees) to Lynne, FL, just east of Silver Springs. At 4 pm, we pulled into a nice campsite at Lake Waldena Resort, just a few miles from Helen's brother Merrill's home. We'll use the full hookups to drain waste tanks, take long showers, and fill up our fresh water tank.
11/15/04: Nice, although short, visit with Merrill and Merne, since we had to check out of the RV Park by noon (and we had just seen them in Michigan.) His new house is very pleasant - large lot, with an expansive view of the small lake bordering the back of his property and many semi-tropical plantings that we envy - huge elephant ears, magnolia trees, big live oaks, etc. Their daughter-in-law Linda, who lives across the street, came over for a brief visit.
We took the "scenic" route for the first part of the trip to Bradenton - small county highways southwest from Merrill's home through Ocala National Forest until we joined US 27 near Lady Lake, then down 27 to Fruitland Park, and then another country highway west to I-75. This is a different Florida than one sees from the Interstates or along the coast: small towns, orange groves, cattle ranches, patches of oak/pine forest or palmetto scrub, and many lakes. Poverty alternating with expensive new upscale housing developments.
Once on I-75, we followed it all the way to SR-70 in Bradenton, where we went half a mile west to Lake Pleasant RV Resort, just a few miles from Helen's sister-in-law Betty's home, checking in about 4 pm. We have a pleasant site overlooking a small lake. But we're in the fringes of the high-rent district: The off-season rate, with Good Sam discount, is $30 per day. This will jump to $39 on December 15.
Yesterday, our GPS cable died - apparently a broken wire from years of abuse on the dashboard of the truck, and now in the motorhome. It was frustrating to have to go back to navigating the old-fashioned way, hunting for tiny road signs hidden in the foliage instead of waiting for our computer to say, "Turn right in 30 seconds".
Betty is still fixing up from the hurricane - she is directly on the Manatee River, facing down the wide river to the Gulf of Mexico, seven miles west. She had 6 inches of water in the house, from a storm surge - the second time in 10 years that this has happened. Interestingly, it's also only the second time in the 50 years the house has existed.
Helen's computer also died a few days ago. Some system files are damaged, so there seems to be no hope of reviving it without the WinXP installation CD, which I didn't bring with me - another mistake. Fortunately, most of the software is duplicated on my computer, and her data files are all backed up on CD, allowing me to bring up any of her files on my machine. But Map'n'Go, with its AAA travel book information, wasn't on my computer. Another mistake!
11/16/04: We spent part of the morning visiting with Betty and Rich, her son who is currently living with her. Helen and Betty went off to so some shopping and Dave went separately to shop for some electronic equipment. I didn't bring much in the way of electronic tools on this trip - a mistake - so I had to buy a small soldering tool, some solder, and a roll of small stranded hookup wire. Back at the motorhome and suitably, although minimally, armed, I cut into the cable which connects the GPS to the computer, found the broken wire (near the connector at the GPS end, where it gets flexed every time the connector gets attached or detached), and made the repair. This is the third time that this has happened in the eight years I've owned the GPS, so I'm getting experienced with this particular procedure and it didn't take long.
In the evening, we all went to Leverock's, on Anna Maria Island, for a good seafood dinner and more conversation.
11/17/04: Helen spent part of the day visiting with Betty and Rich, interspersed with a bit of shopping for new-crop grapefruit, and stops at a plant nursery and flea market. Dave stayed at the RV to catch up on chores.
The RV Park has a crew trimming the Queen Palms along their drives. Helen spent quite a while following them around, salvaging the 5-foot-long, richly colored, spathes for sharing with her flower arranging friends. The pass-through storage under the center portion of our motorhome was big enough to hold a large armful of these objects.
11/18/04: Packed up and got on the road at 10:30, bound for the Florida Panhandle to spend some time on the beach. We'll stay on I-75 and then I-10 most of the way, hoping to get to a campsite by dark. A construction delay on I-75, just 15 miles before I-10, canceled any hope of that. We sat for over half an hour, barely moving, as three lanes of heavy traffic funneled down into one very slow, narrow, lane to squeeze around several miles of highway that was being paved.
We changed our mind several times about destination, discussing pros and cons of St. Anthony State Park, near Panama City, Camping on the Gulf Holiday Travel Park at Destin, and a few other spots. We finally decided on Destin and called for a reservation. Quite a few sites were available. But no pets allowed in the front row, which is right on the beach. We settled for site 702, one row back from the beach.
We were getting worried about time (the park office and gate closes at 8 pm), when we were surprised to see an "Entering Central Time Zone" sign, gaining us an hour of leeway. Although we've driven this route several times, it's always a surprise to realize that Florida extends so far west (Destin is due south of Chicago.) By the time we turned south off I-10, it was dark, and we were very glad the GPS was working again as we negotiated the narrow state highway and then tried to spot the RV Park sign among the clutter of other signs in the eastern outskirts of Destin. We pulled into the RV park about 7:15 pm - almost 10 hours on the road, covering 470 miles.
11/19/04: I was up before sunrise, my body still on Eastern time, but clouds prevent me from seeing the sunrise. It rained lightly during the night, and this morning there's a stiff southeast breeze, with the surf about two feet high and building. The continuous background roar of the surf covers up all other external noises so we feel quite isolated, even in this densely populated urban setting. Our big front windows provide a panoramic view of the Gulf of Mexico and of the continuous parade of seabirds patrolling the surf and sand.
The center of Hurricane Ivan hit Ft. Walton, just a few miles west, but a walk down the beach in that direction revealed relatively minor damage here. I saw strips of vinyl fascia or soffit missing on some of the newer houses facing the beach, and shingles or roof tiles missing from older houses. A swimming pool fairly close to the beach had been partially demolished by waves. Many of the long spindly wood walkways over the dunes and stairways down to the beach have been stripped of their decking, leaving only the support pilings. But these are designed to be "disposable" and many have already been rebuilt.
The beach in front of the RV park is still wide - about 125 feet - and I can't remember if it was wider than that when we were here five years ago. East of our RV Park, the beach is narrower and buildings are closer to the water with no intervening dunes. Some of these houses and older condominium buildings have broken windows, lower levels flooded, and siding, porch decks, or skirting stripped away by the waves. One three-story building had nearly all of its windows blown out and boarded up. The RV Park itself shows no damage.
11/20/04: A beautiful walk in the beach this morning, between rain showers. The waves are bigger and better organized today - up to 4 feet high and breaking in smooth progressive curls. I ought to be out there body surfing. We packed up and got on the road at 11 AM, heading for Texas. Misled by Street Atlas, we headed north to I-10 almost immediately - probably a mistake in retrospect. A long causeway across Choctawhatchee Bay cost us $7.50 in tolls, and it increased our total distance by at least 20 miles, compared to following the beach highway west to Pensacola, where I-10 dips south. Highway SR-98 along the beach can be crowded and slow, but still probably a better choice. Better yet, we could have avoided the damaged bridge on I-10 north of Pensacola, where we sat almost unmoving for 30 minutes waiting to funnel across on one narrow lane.
It's a four-state day, covering the last bit of Florida, the southern tips of Alabama and Mississippi, and about a third of Louisiana, stopping for the night at 5:30 pm in a Wal-Mart in the eastern outskirts of Baton Rouge. Along I-10, the damage from hurricane Ivan was obvious, but mostly limited to downed trees, shingles stripped from many roofs, and large road signs dismantled and dropped back in the trees. In one small community, nearly every roof was completely covered with blue plastic sheets.
Today’s weather forecast was horrible, but the actual weather turned out much better - roads dry most of the way, with only a few short intervals of rain. We had intended to go out to dinner tonight, but discovered we were tired, lazy, and generally un-ambitious. So after a brief shopping expedition to Wal-Mart, we stayed "home" and ate our own food.
It's always interesting to see how the chain grocery stores accommodate local ethnic preferences. In this Wal-Mart SuperCenter, the meat department contained a long section labeled "dinner sausage", containing dozens of varieties of sausage and sausage-like products that we've rarely seen - many kinds of smoked and hot creole and cajun sausages (quite a few from local Louisiana manufacturers), boudin, andouille, souse, hogshead cheese, and others.
11/21/04: Stopped at Zigler Museum in the small town of Jennings - a nicely remodeled turn-of-the-century mansion. The old lady staffing the place talked our ears off whenever she got a chance, and seemed to know the details about every work of art in the collection. This is a pleasant small town. We walked through the neighborhood surrounding the museum, finding other mansions alternating with relative small old shabby homes, all shaded by huge oaks hundreds of years old.
Looked for the Brimstone Museum in Sulphur - home of one of the first "modern" sulphur mines and refinery. The museum seems to be gone. Phone calls to the museum and to the Brimstone historical society number yielded only a message that the phone was not in service. The address had nothing there except a town park. Backtracked a bit to find a Wal-Mart for the night - at Moss Bluff, just north of Lake Charles.
Here, and all through these southern states, we've been enjoying the ancient live oak trees. The trees have wide spreading branches, sometimes much wider than they are tall. Along the roads, the branches reach out so far that they turn the roads into dark tunnels, with the oak canopy close overhead. On residential streets, we have to watch the height carefully when in the motorhome - we’ve scraped many branches, but so far have escaped damage.
11/22/04: Got underway at 9:30. Started raining soon after, and rained all day. Stopped at Hodges Gardens to check it out. They have a 16-site full-hookup RV park that looked quite nice. We chose not to tour the gardens - not a whole lot of interest at this season, particularly in the rain. It's the site of an old rock quarry, with a 225-acre lake in the middle.
Continued on to Shreveport, pulling in to a Wal-Mart SuperCenter in the SE part of the metro area at about 3 pm. We took US 171 most of the way, cutting over to I-49 for the last 27 miles. We initially drove past extensive swamps and rice fields. Then, as the elevation rose, through tree farms, intermingled with cattle ranches. We saw several logging trucks along the highway.
The small towns along 171 were picturesque, although many appeared economically depressed. This Wal-Mart turned out to be an excellent spot to overnight. There is a usable free WiFi signal - no idea who owns it. And there are about a dozen restaurants within walking distance. We chose Copeland's, an upscale "New Orleans" place with an extensive menu of Louisiana ethnic items, plus prime steaks and seafood. It was quite good. The rain stopped around 4 pm, so we stayed dry while walking to and from the restaurant.
11/23/04: Spent the morning at the R.W. Norton Art Gallery. What a wonderful find! The pleasant contemporary building is set in a 40-acre grove of huge old pine trees, with 10,000 azalea plants nestled in the shade of the pines. At this time of year, the azaleas were just an attractive drift of dense evergreen shrubs, but we can imagine what it looks like in the spring. The art collection is dominated by 19th century American artists, with the central gallery devoted to Albert Bierstadt paintings and Frederic Remington sculptures. Surrounding this were large paintings by George Innes, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and many others. These, as readers of our travelogues will know, are among our favorite artists.
Another gallery featured a large collection of western paintings and sculpture by Charles Russell. We also discovered some new-to-us artists that we liked a lot. In particular, the 20th C. British artists Peter Ellenshaw (1913 - ) and Felix Kelly (1914-1994). Kelly painted a series of slightly whimsical and surreal impressions of the old south - pillared mansions, paddlewheel steamers, etc. A new gallery features whimsical sculptures inspired by fairy tales, constructed ruggedly enough so that children can play on them. The kids (and adults) loved it. Admission to the museum is free! I wish we lived closer to this place! There is no parking lot - just a very wide circular drive through the pines in front, where visitors park along the curb on either side - easy parking for our RV.
Then we hit the road for Dallas/Ft. Worth. It began raining soon after we started driving and continued all afternoon, stopping only as a cold front moved through as we approached Dallas. We parked in a Wal-Mart in the eastern outskirts of Dallas, and spent a quiet evening "at home". A line of storms with high winds moved through behind the cold front, bringing down trees and power lines and stalling traffic in portions of Dallas - not in our area fortunately. But we did get heavy rain with thunder and lightning, after we were comfortably tucked into our "campground".
11/24/04: We hoped to do the Dallas Botanical Garden before the museums opened. But it was locked up tight - even though the Texas tourist directory said "open daily". So we headed to the museums. The Dallas Art Museum is an odd building where one is continually climbing short flights of stairs from one level to another. The collection tries to cover all periods of history and all parts of the world, but seems a bit patchy compared to some of the larger art museums we've visited. Relatively small parts of the collections attracted us, but within those areas were some nice things. In particular, Frederic Church's monumental "The Icebergs" captured us for quite a while.
The Nasher Sculpture Center has both an indoor and outdoor section, including a wide range of American and European sculpture - much of it modern. Interesting, but nothing really grabbed us enough to be memorable.
The Crow Collection of Asian Art, in the Trammel Crow Center, is a high quality small collection, in an interesting small building designed especially to show off Mr. Crow's private collection. The large collection of ancient jade carvings was particularly interesting.
11/25/04: After some shopping, we hooked up and started toward Ft. Worth at 11 a.m. A few days ago, I searched for an RV Park that would provide a convenient base for our Ft. Worth explorations, and we were pleased to find that there is one very close to the museums and botanic garden that we wanted to visit. Ft. Worth Midtown RV Park is small (17 sites), but had a couple of spaces available for Thanksgiving and several days following. The sites are narrow, but it's otherwise a very nice place - neat, clean, and reasonably quiet, with small businesses on the street in front and a residential neighborhood behind. The park has free WiFi Internet as well as a modem connection in the laundry, open 24 hours a day. We recommend this place highly. We relaxed and caught up on chores for the rest of the day.
11/26/04: The Kimball Art Museum is Mr. Kimball’s small and quirky eclectic collection, housed in a "world-acclaimed" building designed by Louis I Kahn. We found a few things we liked in the collection - which for the most part is not to our taste. We weren't impressed with the building.
In contrast to the Kimball, we found the Amon Carter museum - both the Phillip Johnson-designed building and the collection of American art it contains - to be wonderful. There is a huge collection of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell paintings and sculpture, as well as a broad representation of other 19th C. American artists. Remington's "A Dash for the Timber" and Thomas Moran's "Cliffs of Green River" were particularly memorable.
In the evening, we had dinner at Hoffbrau Steaks, just south of the Texas Christian University campus, a couple of miles south of our RV Park. My T-bone was very good. Helen didn't think her prime rib was quite up to snuff. The trimmings were good, although basic, the wine selection extremely limited, and the cost was moderate - good value for the dollar. The atmosphere was noisy and the service abrupt - more like a neighborhood bar than a restaurant .The place was recommended by the manager of the RV Park, who claimed the steaks were as good as the famous places in the old stockyards district, and far less expensive. Perhaps we'll also try one of the stockyards places and compare.
On the way back through campus, we were amused by the numerous signs featuring the TCU mascot and promoting the athletic teams - the Texas Horned Toads! It's hard to imagine sitting in a stadium yelling "Go Toads".
11/27/04: Today, we spent a long time at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. The Japanese Garden is very large, and quite attractive in a slightly shaggy way. The landscaped hills, dense stands of bamboo, numerous unfamiliar evergreen trees and shrubs, and a long meandering series of small lakes connected by waterfalls created a very peaceful setting.
The Botanic Gardens also contained a large and well-maintained tropical conservatory whose warm humidity was a nice respite from the chilly winds outside. Scattered through the park, there is a traveling exhibition of thirteen wonderful bronze sculptures by Robert Wick - fanciful depictions of weathered dead trees suggesting human shapes, many with live plants in cavities. In the central building adjacent to the conservatory, we stumbled upon a sale by the Texas Pottery Guild - particularly interesting to Helen, who has been taking pottery classes for the past year. We saw some interesting and unfamiliar techniques and some items we really liked, and couldn't resist buying two pots.
At the rose garden, there was a bit of a traffic jam as three large wedding parties had stopped, all with limousines, to get pictures taken in the gardens. One limo was huge; it appeared to be 40 feet long, and was based on the big Ford Excursion SUV rather than the usual Cadillac or Lincoln sedan.
11/28/04: Today was Zoo Day - and it took most of the day and all of our walking energy. This is a very good zoo, ranked among the top zoos in the country. The day was cold and overcast, so there weren't as many animals active as we would have liked. We happened to be near the white Bengal tiger when he woke up, walked to the front of the enclosure, and practiced his roar for a while. The meerkats were lazy. Of the few that were active, not one was doing the usual sentry duty.
A large screened aviary was packed with several varieties free-flying lorikeets, cockatiels, and parakeets. Visitors can buy small twists of cardboard with one end coated with small birdseed. The birds, accustomed to this, swarm around every new visitor, looking for the food. One 3-year-old girl was frightened out of her wits, and demanded loudly and tearfully to leave at once. Her even younger little brother loved it. Dave had a parrot perched on his hat for a while, even though we did not have any food displayed. A man next to me had a bird perched on his bald head - it looked uncomfortable. The lorikeets are adapted to drink nectar, not eat seeds, and cups of sugar water are also sold - but I didn't see any in use, so these birds must have been getting hungry.
We left the zoo in late afternoon, quite tired, and drove immediately to the historic Stockyard District. There are still a few decrepit remains of the old stock pens, but most of the area has been, or is in the process of being developed into tourist facilities. A few blocks of old storefronts have been preserved, with various degrees of restoration. While we were wandering on foot, we were stopped for a few minutes by the daily cattle drive - a dozen or so lazy and bored-looking longhorn cattle herded up the middle of the street by several equally bored cowboys, dressed in traditional battered hats and worn leather chaps.
We had an early dinner at Cattlemen's - advertised as having exceptional steaks. The menu is limited to steaks and a few seafood items, with an extensive wine list. The atmosphere is pleasantly rustic - the walls covered with oil paintings of grand prize bulls from years past. Apparently, we're not connoisseurs of steak. Our steaks were ok, but nothing special. The trimmings were good, except that the bread was 1940's style soft, character-free dinner rolls, a close relative of Wonder Bread. Service was competent and professional. The desserts sounded interesting, but we were too full to partake. On the way out, I picked up a form for mail ordering these steaks. The 1-pound T-bone I ate tonight can be mail-ordered (in boxes of 4) for $33.95 per steak, including shipping. Why wasn't I more impressed while eating it? I think I'll stick with steaks from my local Safeway, at about a quarter of that price.
11/29/04: It rained during the night, is still overcast this morning, and is getting colder. We're running out of time, and now need to rush home on the most direct path. Unfortunately, there is no straight path from here to there - we can go west on I-40, then north on I-25, or north to I-70, then west. A snowstorm with high winds has been moving through north and west of us, with the Front Range getting up to a foot of new snow. It wasn't clear which way would be better from a weather standpoint. The northern route is a bit shorter, and there's a couple interesting things to stop at along that route - so we made a last minute decision to head straight north. We drove through intermittent rain, very heavy at times, gusty crosswinds, and steadily dropping temperatures, wondering if heading north was a mistake.
We got to Oklahoma City by 3 p.m., and decided to quit for the day, so we could visit Myriad Gardens and the Crystal Bridge conservatory in the morning - we'd hoped it would be possible to do it today, but the conservatory and museums close at 4 pm. A Wal-Mart at I-44 exit 126 seems to be the stopping place closest to our morning destination, so we headed there. It was surprisingly difficult to find, somewhat hidden down a side street and behind another large mall. Too tired to brave the weather and hunt for a good restaurant, so we stayed in and snacked.
11/30/04: We had visited Crystal Bridge when we came through this area in 1998, and liked it a lot. We liked it again this time, but won't repeat the description - see Chapter 37. We got back to the motorhome, hooked up, and underway in late morning in near-freezing temperatures, and headed north. I had spent a while in Oklahoma City searching the yellow pages for a convenient place to buy propane. We're nearly out, and heading into potentially very cold weather. We left without finding anything, deciding to watch along the road.
The drive north on I-35 to Wichita, Kansas, was initially unpleasant - more rain, colder, threatening to snow. Watching for a small town fairly near our route in which to hunt for propane, we found Perry, Oklahoma, and were delighted to see from the expressway that there was a large old grain elevator in the middle of town out on the horizon a few miles away - a good sign. The town is about 10 blocks square - a typical settlement that grew up around the railroad stop and the grain elevator. Sure enough, the elevator turned out to be the Farmer's Co-op, and as we hoped, they sold propane at a good price, and from a pump that is easy to access with a big rig. The co-op has been sold to a private for-profit company, but still seems to be operating in the same old way, with local employees who have been there a long time.
While the tank was filling, I chatted with the employee - a middle-aged guy who told me he'd never been outside Oklahoma. He knew about Golden, though - every beer drinker seems to have absorbed the Coors ads from TV. This stop also gave us the opportunity to ask about the unfamiliar grain we've been along the road occasionally. It's milo, also called grain sorghum. Kansas produces 40% of the nation's crop, and 80% of this crop is used as livestock feed. The other 20% (with this percentage growing annually) is used for ethanol production, with the residue after the ethanol extraction also used as livestock feed.
We continued on to Wichita, with the clouds beginning to break up, the sun appearing, and the temperature dropping. We arrived in early afternoon and realized that if we went directly to the Wichita Art Museum with the motorhome, gambling that parking would be possible, we would have adequate time to see the museum before its 5 pm closing time. Parking turned out to be no problem at all - the museum is one of several culture-oriented buildings in a broad expanse of parkland, with hardly anyone else there. We could have parked along the curb, but pulled into a huge empty, free city parking lot right across the street from the museum.
Although not large, the museum is in an attractive modern building and had quite a few things that interested us. One rather novel item is the lobby ceiling - transparent glass covered with many brightly colored, fantastically shaped, pieces of Dale Chihuly blown glass - looking like the mistakes and leftovers from all his other projects. Over this exhibit, the floor of the upper level is also transparent glass, allowing visitors (sans shoes) to walk on top of the exhibit, enjoying it from a different perspective. While we were there, the glass was lit by the late afternoon sun, enhancing the colors.
We left at dusk as they were closing, and got back on the road, driving for half an hour or so to Newton, Kansas, hoping that the Wal-Mart there would be quieter and more peaceful than the ones in the big city. Indeed, we spent a peaceful night.
12/1/04: Got underway about 9 AM. Weather clear and cold. After heading north for an hour on I-135, we turned west on I-70. We've closed the circle and are now retracing our earlier route on familiar road. Our first hint of home was Pike's Peak, which came into view while we were still far out on the prairie, long before we saw any of the other peaks. We arrived in Denver about 5:00 P.M., just at dusk, and just in time for the Denver rush hour - which is often listed among the half-dozen worst traffic situations in the country. We've not experienced much of it, since there's almost never a reason for us to drive the congested routes at that time of day. So the drive across Denver was slow and painful - dense, very slow, traffic in the dusk. It took about 40 minutes to get home to Golden.
Afterthoughts: This was our first extended trip since we bought the house and stopped full-timing. It seemed a bit stressful, partly because we had limited time available and too many things we wanted to do in that time. While full-timing, we rarely had a schedule, other than the loose annual schedule imposed by following the good weather north and south as the seasons changed. Nevertheless, everything went well. The motorhome performed almost flawlessly, and we're still happy with our choice.
This was also our first extended travel experience with our new cell phone, and we're now sold on this means of communications, both for voice and for Internet connections. We had voice cell phone available every time we checked (every evening in camp, and occasionally during the day). We did have trouble maintaining a connection once while driving through the edge of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania. We had Internet connectivity all but one night. A few statistics: we were gone for 39 nights. We had Internet via high-speed cell phone (up to 144 kbps) for 26 nights, low-speed cell phone (14.4 kbps) for 5 nights, WiFi for 7 nights, and no Internet at all on 1 night. Most, perhaps all, of the WiFi nights also had high-speed cell phone. This is with Verizon's America's Choice plan. We incurred no roaming charges during the trip.
Our cat was so happy to get home that she raced around, ricocheting off the walls, for an hour. Perhaps the trip was harder on her than we thought. While driving, she would sleep for hours on the passenger’s lap. She was interested in the scenery only when we were stopped or moving at less than 35 mph – above that speed, she ignored everything outside. We took her outside on a leash several times, and she tolerated the leash fairly well. In one highway rest area, we took her out on the leash and she led us to the edge of the forest behind the rest area, found a path into the woods, and took us for a long walk along the path. Although she’s an outdoor cat at home, going out frequently through her own cat door, she showed little interest in escaping from the RV.
The motorhome covered 6363 miles in 40 days of travel, averaging 8.83 mpg. We also put about 300 miles on the jeep in local travel separate from the motorhome.