We got back to the Pacific Northwest in mid-March, and since then we've been visiting family off and on, and also spending (killing?) time at the coast. We rented a little beach cottage on the Oregon coast for a while, and are currently staying on the Washington coast. While we've been "home" we've been busy applying for and interviewing for jobs. Part of our mission while on our year of funemployment was to determine what we wanted to do with our lives and where we wanted to do it. We came to the conclusion, after much soul searching and enough "finding ourselves" to be college students on a gap year, that the expat lifestyle was calling us again. We've mostly lived abroad as adults, with a few periods of living in the US between locations, and we've grown pretty comfortable with the abroad part of that equation. We have accepted jobs at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman, and are looking forward to starting work there. Our jobs start in August, so we still have a bit of time to get everything wrapped up and arranged for the move. In the meantime, we'll take advantage of the cool cloudy weather here on the coast.
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We love red rock countryOn our way back to the Pacific Northwest, we spent a couple of weeks in the Southwest. It's an area we've been to many times before, but we found things to see that we hadn't seen before. New MexicoUtahSo we skipped some stuffAfter the great trailer debacle, we were feeling a bit... depressed, let's say, so our blog entries for the two months while we were waiting on word from the insurance company just didn't happen. I think that's maybe a good thing, in retrospect, because any writing I would have done would have been tinged with melancholy, I'm sure. So, now, several months have gone by and everything is going OK. I'm just going to post photos for now, and move on. South Carolina, Georgia, and bit of FloridaMississippi and ArkansasLouisianaThis was the windiest day we spent on the island. The wind was so powerful that it flattened out the waves. We were pretty glad we weren't camping right then. We spent something like six weeks in Texas, not because we are so enamored with the state, but because it has beaches with pretty nice weather in the winter. After several months of moving around a lot, we thought staying in one place for a while would be good for morale, and being able to do that about a block from the beach was nice. In retrospect, not knowing anything about weather systems around the Gulf of Mexico, we made a pretty great choice as to destinations. We stayed on the northern tip of North Padre Island, near Corpus Christi, and during the time we were there, the weather was mostly great. Lots of warm, sunny days, a few cloudy days, no cold days, and only a few instances of rain. Apparently there is some sort of meteorological line between Corpus Christi and everything to the north: we watched on the news all month as tornadoes and record flooding swept through Galveston, Houston, New Orleans, the Florida panhandle, and all the way down to Orlando, in central Florida. Meanwhile, we flew kites and walked on the beach. North Padre Island stretches something like 80-90 miles along the coast of Texas, less than a mile offshore, and around a mile wide. At the southern tip, there’s a artificial channel, and then South Padre Island starts and runs another 20-30 miles almost to the Mexican border. And then, to the north, there’s another artificial channel and Mustang Island and San Jose Island stretch 60-70 miles northward. Basically, these are an artificially broken up barrier island that runs nearly the whole length of the Texas coast - it’s the world’s longest barrier island, according to Wikipedia. The islands are, in the winter, mostly populated by “winter Texans” - retired people from frigid northern states. Most of the license plates were from states directly north: Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Iowa, Indiana, etc. These were a much more sedate group of retirees than the ones I’ve seen on trips to visit my parents (now just my Mom) in Mazatlan, Mexico. The ones in Texas seemed to be spending their time walking their dogs on the beach and quietly taking advantage of early bird senior specials at local restaurants rather than singing karaoke and drinking tropical drinks in parties at seaside bars and restaurants. The Texas retirees all seemed to be having a fine time, but if I were 70, I’d definitely rather spend my time with the livelier group in Mazatlan. North Padre Island is mostly taken up by the Padre Island National Seashore, which is protected in a similar way to a national park. The PINS runs 70 miles from just south of where we stayed to the end of North Padre Island. There isn’t much to do there except spend time on the beach, but it’s an interesting park because you can camp on the beach - anywhere you like. We drove maybe 20 miles down the beach one day and passed RVs and old renovated school buses and camper vans and all kinds of other vehicles, spread out down the beach. You are allowed to drive on the beach (there are no actual roads, so you have to), so you can go as far as you want to and just set up camp wherever you please. It was pretty windy the day we did that, so we weren’t particularly envious of the people camped there, but it would be a great location on a non-windy day. We did nothing of any sort of tourist importance during our time in Texas. We didn’t go to any of the big cities. We didn’t go to any museums or zoos or aquariums. Partly this is because Texas is enormous, and driving several hours to go to Austin or San Antonio for the day didn’t seem that tempting. We hear Austin is nice, and I’ve been to San Antonio before and it’s a nice city, too, but we were perfectly happy at the beach. As our time at the beach came to an end, we decided to travel the smaller highways to make our way west instead of the big I-10 that crosses the state. We headed for Laredo, with visions of a dusty border town from a spaghetti western in our minds. In retrospect, we maybe should have checked that out on the internet. Laredo is a dusty border town, but not too exciting. It just seems like a small northern Mexican town. It did not seem much like an “American” town, but the beauty of America is that this is exactly as American as a small town in Vermont or California. The political line between the United States and Mexico may been easily seen on a map, but the cultural line is a long fuzzy swath stretching hundreds of miles north of the border and, from what we have seen previously in Mexico, hundreds of miles south of the border as well. From Laredo, we drove about halfway to El Paso. Did I mention that Texas is really really big? We stopped in Del Rio, another border town, and it looked about like Laredo. We didn’t stop there for any reason other than it had a La Quinta hotel, which is the national chain that is coolest about pets (serious plug for La Quinta here: no pet fee. Other chains charge $10-$30 PER DAY for pets. We have stayed in a lot of La Quintas and some are nicer than others. A few have been a bit run down, but several have been quite nice. In the most run down one, we could get the sense in our room that there had been pets in there, but that was the only time. They’re normally very clean even though they’re pet friendly. This message brought to you by La Quinta.) Our last two days in Texas we spent in El Paso. Before traveling there, I really only knew that El Paso was a city in west Texas and had a brand of salsa named after it. Turns out, El Paso is actually a big city (the 20th biggest in the US), and one of the top three safest cities in the US. This is odd because it’s just across the river from Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, which I also don’t know a ton about except that it has been plagued by drug gang violence - although that has been much reduced in the past couple of years. El Paso is also somewhat picturesquely built around a bunch of fairly good sized mountains - I had thought it might be flat, like most of the rest of Texas we’ve seen. (Again, some more internet time might be a good idea) El Paso is actually much nearer Phoenix and Albuquerque than Dallas or San Antonio, so it really feels like we’re back in the west now. Our only full day in El Paso we actually spent at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, an hour and a half drive north of the city. We have to plan out the places we want to stop fairly carefully because we can’t really visit places while we’re on the way somewhere - leaving the Princess in a hot car is not something I’m going to do. Poor thing. She’s been such a trooper about traveling that I don’t want to make it any harder by taking longer on driving days, either. So, we never stop to see places. If we want to see them, we stay there. Anyway, White Sands was amazing. It’s a big area covered in dunes of gypsum, which is bright white and sparklier than normal sand. It packs firmer, so it’s easier to walk on, but otherwise behaves like normal sand. It’s so bright there that the park service has signs everywhere reminding visitors to put on hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen. There’s a road you can drive out and back on inside the park, but otherwise no driving on the sand (SAD!). It’s really otherworldly looking. The white sand made our white truck look grey, and by the end of our couple of hours there, our brain’s color receptors had accommodated, making the sand start to look sort of a normal sandy beige - until we compared it with a frame of reference (white paper, white car). Strange. White Sands is also the name of the Missile Range that surrounds the National Monument. That’s where the US government has done a lot of its weapons testing over the years, including the first nuclear test site (Trinity) and the first V2 rocket launches. It is still a very much active test range, and the highway that leads to the National Monument is regularly closed a couple of times per week because of missile testing. We’ve just arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico and have yet to go see anything, but are excited to get going. There are a lot of native heritage sites around here to visit, and although we’ve been to NM before, we haven’t been in this area, so it’s all new to us. We’re looking at the last few weeks of our trip, as we have to be back in Washington/Oregon for job fairs soon, but we really love the southwest, so we wish we could spend longer here. We’re hoping we don’t get caught in any big snowstorms (our warm winter is now behind us), but since we haven’t seen the SW in winter before, I guess that could be a good experience. Well, we thought we’d wait until we had some clearer information about our situation before posting about it, so there's been a long delay since our last post. We've got the information we were waiting for, and alas, our trailering days are behind us. And that is because our trailer is no longer behind us. We bumped it in a very non-dramatic, 5mph parking lot accident in November, and it has been waiting since then in Asheville, NC for the insurance to decide what to do about it. The damage was really minimal looking but involved some stuff under the trailer, where the more delicate systems live. The service department people and insurance company people assured us that the repairs would happen, but that it would take… a long time. They weren't even cagey about it. They just said it would take a long time. This is apparently normal for RVs - like months and months. So, we decided to keep going, just without a trailer - we went to Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi with Rob and Judy, who were kind enough to put us up at their house in Jackson for a LONG TIME (thanks, guys! and thanks also to the dog-sitters, Debbie and Lea). We also took a trip to Charleston, SC, Savannah, GA, and New Orleans. We’ve just been staying in hotels and Airbnbs and the Princess has adapted remarkably well to her new status quo of not having a home territory. Or maybe many, many home territories? Is this her plan for world domination? Rubbing her cheeks on every available object across the USA? After a long time of waiting and pestering the insurance people, we got sick of the waiting and drove to the Gulf Coast in Texas, where we’re staying for a month in a condo near the beach on an island near Corpus Christi. Of course, the day after we drove ourselves even further from our trailer, the insurance people finally had an answer for us: they’re totaling out the trailer and cutting us a check. What?! Apparently since it’s new, they can get a lot for salvage, and organizing the repairs between several different service departments would be a pain not worth their effort. (Notice a pattern? RV repairs take a long time and are a pain.) So, Bruce is off to Asheville today to go get the rest of our stuff out of the trailer. We didn’t leave a whole lot in it, but it has some things we want, so there you go. It’s a two day drive each way, no quick trip. He’s got audiobooks. I’m staying here at the beach because the Princess is not a fan of back to back really long car days. She’s been a real trooper, but that’s a big ask. Anyway, we’re enjoying the warmer weather here in the south of Texas while we decide how to proceed. New trailer? Hmm. Keep going with just the truck? Maybe. Still deciding. Until we do, we’re at the beach in a warm location. Not so bad. From West Virginia to North CarolinaAfter visiting our nation’s capital, we set out for the hinterlands: Appalachia. We started with Harpers Ferry and Antietam, both important Civil War sites in a little pocket of the country where Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland come together. Harpers Ferry is a cute little town situated on the peninsula at the confluence of the Potomac River and Shenandoah River. The whole area is a National Park - the town included - and you can tour the remaining buildings as part of your visit. Antietam is a short drive away, and it is set up as a self-driving site. After an orientation in the visitor center with the rangers, you can take off in your car and drive around the battlefield (it’s big), listening to the park’s audio tour or any of several other tours people have set up. While we were there, it was just moving into serious autumn, with a little color left on the trees, but cool, cloudy weather. It wasn’t crowded since we were there in the off season, which is nice - we could go as slowly or as fast as we wanted, which is probably not the case in summer. The ranger talk and the museum give a very comprehensive look at the battle, and there are many artifacts from the battle itself, providing a lot of background for the driving tour. While driving around the area, we also listened to NPR's American Chronicles: The Civil War, which helped us remember some of that US history background we seem to have forgotten since high school. War tourism is not usually my favorite, but Antietam is well done. From there, we headed for the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. The park was apparently a land grab by wealthy hotel owners who hired a sociologist to study the local Appalachian folk with the eye to proving to the federal government that these people did not deserve to either keep their land or continue living there. The sociologist put together a report based on all the negative stereotypes of “hill folk” (lazy, dirty, couldn’t support themselves, uneducated, uninterested in and unaware of current events, dishonest, etc, etc, etc), which although disputed and later discredited, led to the appropriation of their land in order to form the park. Some were allowed to stay until they died, but most were moved out. Interestingly, the visitor center museum focuses mostly on all the graft and scandal that led to the founding of the park. The park itself is very pretty, though, and the Skyline Drive is a nice way to travel (when it’s not tourist season - I imagine it’s a madhouse in the summer and during fall foliage time). It’s a nicely paved, wide road that cruises along the top of the ridge of the mountains, designed with the idea of maximizing views. From the road, you can see down into the farming valleys on both sides of the mountain range. Then, at the southern terminus of the drive, it just changes names and becomes the Blue Ridge Parkway, which goes all way past Asheville, NC, almost to Tennessee - 570+ miles altogether, 40mph the whole way. We camped in a National Park campground, which was extremely full because the weather had been so nice, even though it was the beginning of November. There are lots of nice hikes to do, and the Appalachian Trail (the big long trail all the way from Georgia to Maine) runs right through the park, too. This is the most visited National Park in the US, partly due to its proximity to so many heavily populated areas. We kept driving on the Skyline and then continued south on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a strange way to see Virginia and North Carolina: we didn’t see any towns or cities for miles and miles unless we exited the parkway. Beautiful views of the mountains and valleys, but no towns. There are several museums and activity centers to see on the parkway, and we particularly wanted to go to the Music Center, which is devoted to the music of the Appalachians, but alas, all of those places are closed by the end of October. We love traveling at times when there aren’t crowds, but we aren’t always able to see or do all the stuff we want to in the off season. On Election Day, we drove to the hometown of Andy Griffith, Mount Airy. It’s the town that Mayberry is based on, with an idyllic little main street, and it has a little museum of Andy Griffith memorabilia, with costumes and sets from The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock (plus an awesome exhibit on Cheng and Eng, the original Siamese Twins, who lived out their days near Mount Airy, but I digress…). It seemed a fitting place to try to understand what the heck was going on in the heads of Trump supporters. We’re supposing that “Make America Great Again” is hearkening back to the fictional setting of Mayberry. When problems could be solved with gentle humor in 30 minutes, including commercial breaks. Where the baddest bad guy could count on a stern talking to from Sheriff Andy and maybe a night in the jail cell with a hot breakfast cooked by Aunt Bea the next morning. Anyway, it did seem to be full of Trump supporters. We spent all day smugly imagining their impending disappointment and hoping there wouldn’t be violence in the streets when the results came in. Oh, innocent and misguided optimism. The next day, we started off with our trailer, but did not end up with it. Back on the Blue Ridge Parkway, we spent several hours enjoying the views out over the mountains, planning to stop for the night just past Asheville. We stopped at the highest overlook on this part of the parkway, at about 5500 feet, and from the nearly empty parking lot took in the view. The smoke from the horrendous forest fires in the area made for a hazy but picturesque view. It was really cold and windy out. Got back in the truck and started to exit the parking lot. Coming around a corner, a car was pulling out in front of us and distracted Bruce. He bumped the trailer into the retaining wall, going all of about 5mph, maybe less. Just enough to cause some damage. It pulled the front wheel off the front axle (it’s a double axle trailer), so it was untowable. Where’s the best place to smash your trailer? Not sure, but not at the top of a mountain in a cell phone dead zone. In the freezing cold. With 50mph winds. We had to unhook and drive a ways to where we could call AAA and try to arrange for towing. We had to leave the trailer there overnight, waiting for someone to come and fix the axle, which couldn’t happen until the next day. It was a bad end to a bad day. This was the beginning of the waiting game that would go on for two months. BTW, AAA was awesome. If you don't have AAA, get AAA. George Washington's House!While we were in Washington DC, we took one day to visit Mount Vernon, George Washington’s plantation just south of the city on the banks of the Potomac. It was a really worthwhile visit as the grounds were beautiful, the original structures well preserved and cared for, the recreated structures thoughtfully done, and the museum and tour extremely well presented to teach visitors about the history of the place. It’s on protected land, owned by a private trust that takes care of restoration and education, and even the land across the Potomac from the plantation is protected - everything in view is protected from development, so the feeling when you’re on the grounds is of historical timelessness. We’ve just been reading David McCullough’s 1776, and from Washington’s correspondence during the war, you can see that he loved this place A LOT. Like in the hours leading up to major battles, he would take time out to write home to his caretaker (who was also his cousin) all about how he wants the fireplace in the sitting room re-done, or what types of trees should be planted, and how, in the orchard. Forty percent of the furnishings in the house are original, and the others are period, and even the wall paint and paper are accurate to the period, so if George or Martha walked in, they would feel right at home. Visitors are taken on a tour through the mansion, which is pretty small and down to earth as far as mansions go. The views from the back portico across the Potomac are sweeping. The grounds are extensive (500 acres currently, 4000 acres historically) and included five separate farms where the enslaved farmers worked and lived. One of the farms has been recreated in a historical fashion, showing visitors how crop rotation and other farming practices worked at that time. There is a working distillery, a gristmill, and a blacksmith shop that makes all of the iron fixtures necessary on the grounds. There are historical re-enactors in period clothes that work around the plantation and that you can talk to. The museum very large and has a strong focus on conveying to visitors the central role of the enslaved people on the estate and the reality of their lives. Washington had more than 300 slaves at the time of his death, when he freed the ones that were personally owned by him (about half). He hoped that this would set a precedent for other founding fathers, but alas, it did not. The museum seems torn between a mission of educating visitors about the reality of slavery while at the same time focusing on the great man that Washington was - hard to reconcile these two aspects of a complicated person in a time with very different values and morals. Each of the people who worked as a slave on the plantation for whom there is well documented evidence in journals, letters, paintings, etc. have exhibits dedicated to them, making their stories more personal and real to the visitors. Our later experience visiting plantation houses showed us that not all plantation museums/tours pay this much (or any) attention to the people who made the whole system possible: the slaves. The other WashingtonUnless you’re from Washington State, you do not realize how confusing it is to have a state and the nation’s capital named the same, despite the fact that they are on opposite coasts. Who was in charge of this decision?
We found a campground on the outskirts of DC, in Maryland, and near a metro line so we could get into the city easily. This is the largest and fanciest campground we have stayed at to date. It has hundreds of sites, a conference center, several pools (OK, closed for the season), a movie room, computer centers, minigolf, a couple of laundry facilities, awesome wifi, a shuttle service to the metro, a large store, a restaurant, etc, etc, etc. It’s also full of trees and large grassy areas, so it seems weirdly nature-y even though it’s in the city. It was certainly not the normal weather for Halloween. Our first day in the city was so hot and humid that we were totally exhausted and sweaty after walking around up and down the Mall all day. We were there on the day of the Marine Corps Marathon, so the Mall was about 50% tourists, 25% marathon support teams, and 25% runners - a fairly odd way to see the National Mall for the first time. We went to the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Memorial, which were both powerful places, full of people looking around and speaking softly and solemnly, with parents explaining to their kids why they should act respectfully. The Washington Monument is closed for repair, so we couldn’t go in. The length of the Mall is more apparent on the ground than in photos or on a map, and the number of massive Smithsonian museums is impressive. The newest one, the African American History and Culture Museum, was jam packed with visitors, and we found out that the tickets are sold out until March. We visited the American History Museum and the Natural History Museum. The American History Museum has all of those objects you see in the news as being in a Smithsonian museum - Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, Bert and Ernie and Miss Piggy, Archie and Edith Bunkers chairs, etc. It’s not much of a teaching museum - there’s very little written text that would explain the arc of history or each item’s significance in it - but it does a good job of getting across a feeling of history. The war wing goes from the Revolution through to the Iraq War, and walking through it, the music and sound effects change, giving an idea of the march of history. I wasn’t very excited to see the First Ladies’ dresses exhibit, but then we got there, and it was really fascinating to see not just how fashion changed, but how the statures of women have changed and the idea of how fashionable the First Lady ought to be has changed. Calvin Coolidge’s wife Grace was in the White House in the 1920’s, and her dresses look like they would be right at home for dinner at Downton Abbey. The Natural History Museum had a bit stronger focus, at least in some exhibits, on teaching. This was particularly true of the Human Origins exhibit, which had interactive features helping the visitor to understand how physical artifacts can lead to understanding of the environment and events of a long-distant past. We also watched an IMAX film on the National Parks, which was beautiful. Otherwise, both of the museums suffer a bit from the current need to entertain rather than educate in a museum environment, a shortcoming addressed in this article from Aeon magazine: Give natural history museums back to the grown-ups. As it is, the primary mission of these huge, broadly popular museums that cover so much territory under one roof is probably entertainment and I shouldn’t complain, but at the same time, I do like to learn at a museum, which is probably why smaller more focused museums usually appeal to me more. All in all, not bad for free museum visits (the Smithsonian Museums are all free). Of course the highlight of our trip to DC was spending time with our friends from Dubai, Jamie and Ramez, who moved to DC a few years ago and seem to have really landed on their feet. They’re both working at jobs they enjoy and living in a lovely condo in a great and lively neighborhood, with tons of shops and restaurants nearby. It made us reconsider our idea that we might not really be city people. Spending some time in a big, diverse, multicultural city with all the cultural opportunities that provides reminds us of what we miss when we’re living in a smaller city. Back to some states with lots of peopleAfter quite a long time in states with populations smaller than a good sized city, we left Maine and headed for Massachusetts (which I apparently still can’t spell, as I notice the red squiggly line on my spell check - only four s’s, not five). We’ve really spent the bulk of our time in the sparsely populated regions of the country, which has meant easy driving and getting around in general. This stops just short of the Massachusetts state line (there, correct number of s’s - I guess I can learn it). We left Maine on a Very Windy Day, which is not so good for trailer pulling, so we abandoned the big highways for little backroads where the slower speeds make for easier pulling, and where we could move away from the coast, where the winds were coming from. In this part of the country, however, driving on little backroads can mean driving three times as far, since the little backroads not only don’t go in a straight line, but actually just meander from tiny hamlet to tiny hamlet. They aren’t really alternate routes to the highways, like where we’re from. These roads also can go single lane with no warning, or over bridges with tiny weight limits (our trailer is really not very heavy, but still too much for some of these tiny one lane bridges), or under underpasses or through tunnels with too low clearance for us (supposedly 10’6”, but we haven’t put it to the test out of an overabundance of caution). We managed to turn our potentially two and a half hour drive into a five and a half hour drive, but we also saw a lot of pretty little towns and countryside that would not be visible from the highway, including Concord, MA (beautiful little town) and Walden Pond (pretty big for a pond). We had managed to find one of the only remaining campgrounds in Massachusetts that is still open at this time of year (I think I’ve got it down now - correct number of s’s without hesitation), and luckily it was near the terminus of a commuter train line into Boston. Oh, actually luck has nothing to do with it. On this trip we have learned all about the housing options of poor people as they relate to RV parks - basically, living in an RV is apparently even cheaper than living in a mobile home, and lots and lots of people without the means to secure more permanent housing seem to opt for living in RV parks full time. You can tell these parks from the road: the RVs have “yard decorations” - think plastic animals on spikes, but not kitchy cute like flamingoes, more like cartoon bears and birds and sports team mascots - and also more semi-permanent structures, like plastic sheds, makeshift porches, skirts covering the gap between the ground and the bottom of the RVs, pots of flowers (real and plastic) and large propane tanks. The park we pulled up to near the terminus to the commuter line was exactly this kind of park. There appeared to be about 10 spaces for traveling people (us) and about 80 spaces for semi-permanent residents. It leads to an altogether different feeling, as you might imagine. There was actually a rush hour in the morning and evening of people going to and coming from work. As much as I like traveling around with a trailer, it’s really the moving around part I like, not so much the trailer part. For staying in one place, I’d much prefer another option - one that is completely level (we’re getting better at this, but it’s never COMPLETELY level) and doesn’t rock back and forth when you walk in it. For $500 a month, though, you can’t really beat the price. Especially since Boston rents are very expensive - probably three times that for a one bedroom. We took advantage of our location to go into Boston for the day. It felt pretty weird to be in an urban environment after so long out in the country, and we probably looked like country bumpkins in for a day in the city, mouths agape, wallets unprotected, fumbling with public transportation, and walking too slow. We were surprised on the train into the city to hear that yes, people from Boston actually talk like that. We are actually continually surprised to hear how differently people talk all over the country. This is something you don’t hear on TV or in movies, except when characters are required to be caricatures of a region or city, and then it’s often done by actors who are just doing an accent. You actually don’t even hear this on regional TV news, because, as far as we can tell, the news presenters are always putting on a “non-specific, general American accent” rather than talking how the people of that region actually talk. So we’ve been delighted to find that people talk very differently in every corner we’ve been in, and the gradation from the Rocky Mountains, across the plains, through the Great Lakes, into upstate New York, and across New England has been fascinating to listen to. So, yes, many people in Boston talk what we’ve always thought of as a caricature of a Boston accent. Boston itself was a great city to visit. We have been reading up a bit on our colonial and revolutionary history (1776 by David McCullough, The Wordy Shipmates and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell), so we were happy to walk the Freedom Trail through the city to see some of the things we’d been reading about: Boston Common, Paul Revere’s house, the Old South Meeting House, the Old North Church, the Boston Massacre site, Faneuil Hall, Bunker Hill, etc. We actually walked about half of the 2.5 mile trail with our phone maps, very carefully figuring out turns and where to walk, even taking a few wrong turns, before we noticed (duh!) that there was a special colored brick path the whole way, like the yellow brick road. OK, that made it easier. The old cemeteries were especially interesting to see for me, as an avid cemetery tourist - morbid, I suppose, but I’ve always enjoyed walking through cemeteries and checking out tomb art. I suppose I have my childhood babysitter to thank for that (thanks, Ilene!). She would take us little kiddos on walks through the cemetery near her house pretty regularly, which probably made cemeteries seem less morose and more like an interesting place to spend an afternoon to me. The cemeteries in Boston go back right to the early settlement, but most of the grave markers have been moved around a lot, and the bodies were buried many deep, or some taken out to make room for others over the years, so it’s hard to tell who might be where in many cases. The headstones themselves are pretty fantastic. Lots of death’s heads with wings coming out of them - very metal. Those Puritans were serious about their death imagery. Anyway, we were glad we had been doing our reading up on US history, since that’s not really our forté, but it made it a lot more interesting to see places we knew a little bit about. It was also a gorgeous, sunny fall day, which made the walk very pleasant. The Pacific Northwest has very few gorgeous fall days, and we’re not sure if it’s just this year or if it’s normal, but New England has had some lovely weather while we’ve been here. Cape Cod We spent one day driving from our campground out to the tip of Cape Cod - Provincetown. The Cape has long, lovely beaches, and is packed with vacation homes of the Cape Cod style, no surprise. Since we were there in mid October, it was nearly a ghost town, although I imagine in the season it must be jam packed with beach goers. Provincetown is a cute little tourist town with a very strong gay-friendly vibe. It seemed like a fun place to spend some time in the summer, but again, during our visit, it was tumbleweeds and crickets, not to mention pretty cold and windy. On our way back, we stopped by Plymouth, which is a lovely little old beach town. The replica of the Mayflower was closed that day (it’s the off season, things are closed a lot). We also popped by Plimoth Plantation, which is a re-creation of a 17th century Pilgrim village, complete with historical reenactors, but since it was a school day, the parking lot was chock full of school buses, so we gave it a miss. Historical sites knee deep in school children are not my favorite. So, back to the campground. Rhode Island We also spent one day driving around Rhode Island. Literally driving around Rhode Island. Our campground was about five miles from the border, and we drove around the entire state, clockwise. It’s not big. It has a bit more empty forest sort of area than I had imagined, but lots of lovely little old beach towns. Narragansett Bay runs right up the middle of the state, and the cities and towns all ring the bay, so there’s a lot of coast line. We stopped in Newport to walk along the Cliff Walk, a walking path along the shore right in front of all the Gilded Age mansions build along the cliffs along the shore. It’s where the rich and fabulous used to walk along between the mansions to gawk at each other, and then later it was made into a public walking path (against the wishes of those who lived in the fancy mansions) with public right-of-way over private property, a National Recreation Trail in a National Historic District. The shore there is beautiful: rocky cliffs and little sandy beaches with views across the water to other little beach towns. The mansions are pretty amazing, too. They were built for the Astors, the Vanderbilts, etc. Actually a lot of them were for the Vanderbilts. As opulent as they are (and many are now have been turned into either museums or buildings for a small college there, rather than private houses), it’s hard to remember that in our time, the ultra-wealthy have an even larger slice of the pie than the Gilded Age tycoons and magnates. I guess they must hide their houses away a bit better. We ended our stay in Massachusetts, and New England in general, just in time. We knew the cold weather was coming, and so many campgrounds were shutting down for the season that it was getting hard to find places to stay. We woke up on our last morning to frost on the ground and below freezing temperatures - thank goodness for a our very effective propane heater. The Princess has been sleeping under the covers with us every night due to the cold. Poor kitty, she has such thin fur! We packed up the trailer and got on the road to Pennsylvania, planning a quick drive through Connecticut and giving New York City a wide berth to get as far south as possible in the face of weather forecasts predicting cold temperatures. Then, as we got into Connecticut and the elevation rose a bit, we got snow. It wasn’t too bad on the road, but about an inch accumulated on the trees and ground we were driving by. We were happy to be moving toward warmer weather. National Parks are a bit thin on the ground here in the eastern part of the United States. I think this is mainly because it’s harder to snatch up hundreds of thousands of contiguous acres of wilderness to turn into a park here - white people have lived here for longer than in the west, so of course the land is owned by lots of people and there are already towns and things on it. Not so easy to grab up and make off limits to development. So, the only National Park in the northeast is Acadia, and it’s pretty surprising that people in one of the foremost tourist destinations on the east coast have decided to hand over their land to the government to make it available to the public. Acadia National Park is (mostly) on a big island on just off the coast of Maine, and this island, Mount Desert Island, has been drawing wealthy families to its shores for summer vacations for over 100 years. Much of the island around the town of Bar Harbor (which is on the island) is full of “cottages” (mansions) built by such mega-affluent families as the Rockefellers, Astors, Morgans, and Vanderbilts so they could engage in yachting and other fancy rich people activities. A few influential people started convincing rich summer residents to donate land to make it park, and they did so. John D. Rockefeller Jr. took a particular interest in the park and actually designed and funded a lot of the road building, and eventually donated around a third of the land that makes up the park. A big fire burned much of the island to the ground in 1947, including many of the mansions, and some owners donated the land their ruined houses were on, expanding the park further. Now the National Park Service owns all of Mount Desert Island, but there are still a lot of private homes, some towns, and even a small liberal arts college on it. So, unlike in many National Parks out west, the park has quite a lot of residents. Bar Harbor is a very touristy town, and it was full of leaf peepers while we were there. There were even leaf peeper cruise ships in and out of the town every day. The park is big enough that we could find some quiet spots while we were there, but I imagine this must be a lot harder during summer season. Pretty much everything here shut down after Columbus Day (mid October), so I suppose that when it’s all up and running, it must be a bit of a madhouse. We had planned to camp at the NP campground on the island, and came rolling across the bridge in the middle of the afternoon, trailer in tow. It had been a couple of weeks since we’d seen many campers, so we assumed the NP campground, with its 250 sites, would have space for us. We drove onto the island and mistakenly got onto the loop road scenic drive instead of cutting through Bar Harbor to get to the campground, so Bruce got to experience driving the trailer along fifteen miles of the narrow windy scenic road with heavy traffic. I caught sight of a sign warning low clearance (10 feet) just in time to make a hasty exit from the loop road and drive down a secret road only for residents in order to bypass the covered bridge that would have taken our AC unit out if we’d tried to cross it. Back onto the loop road, pull into the campground, very ready to unhitch and get the trailer/albatross off the back of the truck. The nice ranger at the check in booth looked at us like we were crazy when we didn’t have a reservation. Booked solid. The Mount Desert Island Marathon was the next day, so no room at the inn. We had purposely picked the NP campground because basically nothing else in the area was open at this late date in the season. The ranger gave us the name of a place that turned out to still be open, but only until the next morning, when it would close for the season. We took it. It was a super fancy RV park chain place. There are quite a lot of small regional RV park chains in the east - most with tons of amenities, like 50 channels of cable, multiple pools and hot tubs, game rooms, activity centers, and prices to match. The lady at the desk told me that the sites near the water go for $130 in the summer. Wow. We are generally over-planners when it comes to traveling, but we also hate to commit to something before we see it, so we don’t really love to make reservations. At this season, we’re on a balancing point between a) the season’s over, so there aren’t many other campers to compete for spots with, and b) the season’s over, so everything is closed. We may start to step up our reservation game. Before checkout the next morning, we managed to find a small family run place, MainStay Cottages and RV Park, about an hour from Acadia NP, right on the water and with views of the park. They were closing the next day, but said that if we didn’t mind having the water shut off, we could stay a few days. This place turned out to be a great find. Our trailer is backed up to a hill overlooking the water with our big view window looking out at an inlet of the bay, with colorful trees on the rocky shores and boats anchored in the middle. It’s really lovely, and of course there’s no one else staying here because it’s closed! The Princess has been enjoying watching the tide go in and out, with all the seagulls swirling around the rocks in the inlet at low tide. There was also a flock of turkeys eating fallen apples in the spot next to ours, and she was well impressed with them. Also, it turns out that we are just down the road from a non-contiguous part of the NP. The Schoodic Peninsula runs out into the sea, a few miles away from the main body of the park. It used to be a radio listening site for secret spy stuff until the early 2000s, when it was shuttered and turned over to the park. The point at the end of the peninsula is beautiful pink granite slabs running out into the sea. We did a little bit of hiking in this part of the park. Yesterday we went for a boat tour of the bay around Acadia NP. It was a glorious autumn day, the kind of day that makes me understand why people make a fuss about autumn in New England: bright blue skies and warm 70 degree temperatures, perfect for a boat trip. The boat took us out around many of the smaller islands around Mount Desert Island, and the guy doing the narration told us all about the fancy-schmancy mansions you can see on the shore. Many of the privately owned islands are held in trusts that don’t allow any development or that have the island being deeded to the park upon the owner’s death. We made a little circle around an island with a lighthouse on it and saw a bunch of seals. The bay is full of colorful lobster pot buoys, giving us a good idea of where Maine’s money comes from - or $300,000,000 a year, anyway. People do like their lobster. It was a beautiful day for a boat tour, and we couldn’t have planned it better, since it was rainy the day before and the day after. After the boat tour, we also drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain, the tallest peak in the park. It also turns out to be the tallest peak within 25 miles of the coast on the whole east coast of the US. Yeah, I guess now that I think of it, there’s a lot of low lying land on the east coast of the US. Anyway, Cadillac Mountain is about 1500 feet high, and it juts out into the ocean, so the views of the surrounding island and all of the outlying islands are really impressive. The slopes of the islands are covered in a mix of pine trees and deciduous trees that are still bright beautiful colors. We think the end of leaf season is coming soon :( Overall, Acadia NP turned out to be a really beautiful park, and much more wild looking than we had thought it would be. The ocean waves crashing on granite shores is really different from the sandy or pebbly beaches that we’re used to - it makes the sea look more violent somehow, but in a beautiful way. The stony islands around the bay are picturesque, and with the fall colors, it was lovely. Thank goodness the mega-affluent families of the early 20th century had a philanthropic bent and wanted this area to be available to the public. Noblesse oblige I guess. |