Days 42 through 50 - Monday, June 23, 2014 to Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Alexandria, Virginia to Littleton, Colorado

I feel like I need to include at least a brief summary of the final eight days of our journey, even though we’ve now been home for a full week.  Russell and Carol had to return to work on Monday morning, so there was no reason for us to stick around Alexandria.  So we departed right after they both left for work. Leaving Alexandria, we drove down the George Washington Parkway past Mount Vernon, then took US 1 down to its merge with I-95.  At Richmond we cut over to US 360 to get away from the Interstate.  We spent Monday night at Staunton River State Park near South Boston, Virginia.  The only notable happening was the failure of our power converter, the device that provides the conversion of 110 volt AC shore power to 12 volt DC for the motorhome lighting and accessories as well as managing the charging of the coach battery (the motorhome has two batteries B the normal battery up under the hood for the truck plus a deep cycle battery under the floor of the coach for the interior lighting and accessories).  This was inconvenient not only because it was hot and muggy and we were hoping to run the air conditioner, but more so because without the controller we couldn=t charge the coach battery, which would soon deplete and make it impossible to run any of the lights, the refrigerator, or the vent fan in the roof .  We survived the night, though, by running a separate extension cord to the shore power outlet to run a portable fan.  Normally this would have been a bigger problem had it occurred out on the road somewhere, but we would be in Columbia, South Carolina the next day and Columbia is the location of our motorhome manufacturer=s factory.  We had already scheduled a visit there to have some other minor maintenance items taken care of, so we simply added the replacement of the power converter to the list.

We spent most of the day Tuesday driving down through Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina on our way to Columbia, where we=d be parking the Tiger in my brother=s driveway and spending the next three nights.  It was the beginning of the afternoon rush hour when we arrived in Columbia, so it was a bit hectic getting though the city on our way out to Irmo, where John and Charlie live.  However, a glass of chilled white wine with them after we settled in relieved the stress of the day=s drive.  It=s been a while since we=d seen them B the last time we were with them was a stopover during our 2010 trip to Florida and the east coast B so we had a lot of catching up to do.

After a big breakfast Wednesday morning, Jeanette and Charlie went off to the local nursery to look at plants while John and I headed over to Best Buy to pick up a video streaming device to get him set up for streaming video on their TV.  The simplest, and least expensive device was a ARoku Streaming Stick,@ a module that was not much bigger than a USB memory stick and which plugged directly into an HDMI  port on the rear of the TV.  It was a very simple and straight forward installation, and we were soon exploring all the options for streaming video sources such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon TV, etc.  Dinner that night was at a wonderful seafood place, the Blue Marlin, in downtown Columbia.

The first order of business on Thursday was getting to the Provan factory, which is located near the Columbia airport.  We had hoped to get the original items on our list done in a couple of hours, but the addition of replacing the power converter took quite a bit longer than I had anticipated.  It was around 2 PM when we finally got away from there and headed back to John and Charlie=s.  Their daughter, Lynn, and granddaughters Mira and Rosemary joined us for dinner.

Friday morning we were off again, up I-26 through Spartanburg toward Asheville, North Carolina.  Just before reaching Asheville we cut across a series of back roads up through the Great Smoky Mountains.  We hit I-40 at Waynesville and headed west into Tennessee.  This portion of I-40 follows a steep gorge down the west slope of the Smokey Mountains, through some spectacular scenery.  We continued through Knoxville in a rain shower, and on to Cumberland Mountain State Park near Crossville, Tennessee for the night.

Saturday was spent driving across central Tennessee to Nashville, then up I-24 into western Kentucky.  At Paducah we cut west across US 60, and crossed the Ohio River just above its confluence with the Mississippi near Cairo, Illinois.  The map showed a park at the confluence of the two great rivers, so we stopped there for a while to get some photos and videos of the actual joining of the waters.  The park was rather decrepit and run-down, overgrown with weeds, and spoiled by a bunch of barges loaded with scrap metal tied directly to the adjacent Ohio River bank.  But it was really neat to stand on the extreme point of land which comprised the final separation of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, with the former by my left foot and the latter by my right.  You could see the actual joining of the waters by the color B the Mississippi is brown and muddy, while the Ohio is noticeably cleaner and bluer.

 

Confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers -- Ohio River to the left, Mississippi River to the right. Note the muddy brown water of the Mississippi.

From Cairo B which itself is a rather rundown and decrepit shadow of the formerly important and historic town that used to be B we drove up the east bank of the Mississippi a few miles before crossing over to Cape Girardeau, Missouri for the night.  We arrived in time to make it to the 4:00 Mass at the downtown cathedral.  We stopped at Fazolli=s after Mass for a spaghetti dinner, then enjoyed a round of miniature golf at the RV park where we were staying.             

It rained most of Saturday night and into Sunday morning, but cleared up by the time we reached St Louis.  We bypassed this city, going around the western loop and picking up the small and winding State Highway 79, which hugs the western bank of the Mississippi River up to Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain.  This road makes its way through the rich farmlands along the river and crosses several of the steeply rolling, heavily wooded limestone hills which define the edge of the Mississippi bottomlands.  We stopped for lunch at the little town of Clarksville, a perfect example of a typical 19^th century steamboat landing city with its main street sloping right down to the river.  After lunch, we walked down to the river bank to see the dam and locks which are part of the Corps of Engineers river navigation system.  The river was quite high with the spring run-off, measuring 29 feet above normal stage at the locks.  There is a monument in the park that marks the highest river level during the great flood of 1973, and I=d estimate that the level was no more than five or six feet below that mark. 

Leaving Hannibal, we headed west on US 36, which we=d be following all the way across the states of Missouri and Kansas back to Colorado.  We spent a very hot and muggy night at Pershing State Park near Leclede, Missouri.  This park is named after General John J Pershing of World War I fame, who spent his boyhood years in the town of Leclede.

Continuing west on US 36, we crossed the Missouri River at St Joseph and entered Kansas, the 25^th state of our long road trip.  The highway heads due west across Kansas in almost a straight line for approximately 475 miles.  It runs through the whole gamut of Kansas geography and geology, making it a much more scenic and interesting drive than the blandness of I-70, only a about 50 or so miles to the south.  After 340 miles of Missouri and Kansas we were ready to stop for the night, so we set up for our last night at Prairie Dog State Park near Norton, Kansas.  This park is situated on a medium-sized lake which is supposedly one of the top bass fishing lakes in the country.  In contrast with the muggy heat and overcast skies of the previous night, this night was cool and the air was clear B almost like being in Colorado.  Well, the elevation here was 2350 feet, which is getting up near Colorado altitude, so that could have something to with it.  To top it off, we were treated to probably the most beautiful sunset of the entire trip.

 

Sunset on our final night -- Prairie Dog State Park, Kansas.

The final 300 miles home were almost anti-climactic.  We crossed the Colorado border a few miles west of St Francis, Kansas, and spent the next hours traversing some of the most boring terrain of the seven-week journey B mile after mile of dryland farm and pasture land, the highway straight as an arrow along the section lines and only occasionally cutting diagonally across one or two square-mile sections to rejoin the due east-west section boundaries a mile or two to the north or south,  This lonesome highway passes through a series of almost ghost towns with names like Joes, Cope, and my favorite, the suitably named Last Chance.  Highway 36 joined I-70 at Byers, Colorado, about 40 miles east of Denver, making it a short hop to home at last.

Here=s the overall trip summary:

Number of Days:  50

Total Miles Driven:  9840

Number of States: 25

Number of Provinces: 7

Day 41 (I think) – Sunday, June 22, 2014

Alexandria, Virginia

I’ve lost track of the days and I left our trip log out in the motorhome, so I’m guessing it’s Day 41.  We’re now at Russell and Carol’s house in Alexandria, enjoying an all-too-brief visit with them.  Just to bring the blog up to date since my last post, here’s a brief recap…

After leaving Freeport, Maine, we spent the next night in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts at a campground in Pittsfield.  It was a pleasant drive across southern New Hampshire and Vermont, re-visiting the area we first visited a few years ago on our first long motorhome adventure after our retirement.  That was in the fall when the colors were at their peak, so it was interesting to see the same countryside in the verdant green of spring.

From western Mass. we crossed over into New York and followed the Hudson River down past West Point, then cut across a winding road to northwestern New Jersey, where we spent Thursday night at Swartswood State Park, near the town of Newton.  The next day we drove south through the center of New Jersey, mostly on Highway 206, avoiding the freeways and toll roads that most travelers use to zip across this state without a second glance.  The countryside was very pastoral, not at all like the usual picture in our minds when we think of New Jersey.  It was slow going, however, as the small towns along back roads such as this are frequent, and as we drew nearer and nearer to Trenton, the traffic increased dramatically.  We took advantage of the six-line superslab to get around Trenton, and were soon in the New Jersey Pinelands, heading toward Cape May.  Our second night in the Garden State was spent at a campground in Belle Plains State Forest, near the town of Woodbine.

The next morning it was a short hop over to the southern Jersey shore, where we plodded our way through the beach traffic for several miles.  We stopped at Stone Harbor for a stroll on the beach – a mile or so – to break up the morning’s drive, then proceeded to the Cape May - Lewes ferry to the Delaware shoreline.  This was the sixth ferry ride of our journey, the others being 1 & 2 - Madeline Island in Wisconsin (two ways, there and back), 3 &4 - Mackanac Island in Michigan (again two ways, there and back), 5 - Prince Edward Island to Nova Scotia, and finally 6 - Cape May to Lewes.  Our plan was to spend the night at Cape Henlopen State Park just outside of Lewes, Delaware, but for the first time on this long trip we were met by a “Campground Full” sign.  The gentleman at the state park entrance gate was kind enough to give us a sheet listing all the commercial campgrounds in the area, so we ended up at one of these.  Commercial campgrounds, especially those near resort areas, and more especially in this part of the country, are not our favorite places to stay since they always turn out to be about 90 percent semi-permanent or “seasonal” travel trailers and 5^th wheels to 10 percent overnighters or short-termers like us.  That is not what we’d consider the most pleasant atmosphere and the main reason we much prefer state parks, national parks, Corps of Engineers campgrounds, and, when in Canada, provincial parks.  Needless to say, we were up and out of there as quickly as possible this morning, making a beeline for the 130 or so miles to Alexandria to spend a few hours with Russell and Carol before moving on down the road tomorrow morning to spend a couple of days with my brother John and sister-in-law Charlie in Columbia, South Carolina, our final stop before heading home to Colorado.

Day 35 – Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Bar Harbor, Maine to Freeport, Maine – 147 miles

Note:  Sorry for the long delay in getting this posted, but we've been staying in a lot of state parks that didn't have wifi.  We're now in Alexandria at Russell and Carol's house, so I'm using his network.

I have no excuse for not writing the past few nights other than I simply haven’t felt like it.  After a while, it becomes a chore, and chores are not what this trip is about.  But here’s a quick recap since I last posted:

When we left Amherst on the 13^th, we entered New Brunswick for the second time.  The first town we came to was Moncton, the site of the shooting of the RCMP officers a couple of weeks ago.  We stopped long enough to watch an interesting tidal phenomenon in the river there, the tidal “bore” as the rising tide comes up the river from the Bay of Fundy, creating a surf-like wave as it advances.  The wave is only a couple of feet high, but there were four surfers out in the river, hoping to catch the wave and ride it up the river.  We saw the wave come around the bend in the river a half-mile or so downstream from where we stood, and watched as the surfers caught the wave and started their ride.  Two of them fell almost immediately, but the other two stayed on the curl until they were abreast of us, then first one then the other lost the wave and fell into the muddy waters – the river is quite muddy, as it was over on the Nova Scotia side the day before.  The land here is red dirt, and the bottom of the bay and the rivers are the same red dirt.  With all the mixing caused by the rise and fall of the extreme tides, it creates a dirty reddish-brown mud that colors the water well-out into the bay.

Leaving Moncton, we drove down the estuary a few miles to the Hopewell Rocks, an interesting collection of standing rock columns that are famous for the stark difference in their appearance at low tide and at high tide.  We arrived at near high tide, so we only saw the rocks as small islets.  Not wanting to wait around six or seven hours for the tide to fall, we were content to let the images in countless photos by others show us what the rock columns look like at low tide when they stand like sentinels off from the cliffs of the nearby headlands.

Continuing further south, we spent the night at a campground on the beach at the small town of St Martins, a few miles north of St John, a large town just north of the US border.  It started raining soon after we went to bed and rained heavily most of the night.  We were, however, able to get a brief glimpse of the full moon rising over the water before the rain started, although it was just through a narrow gap in the clouds.  The next morning we drove down into town and had a real Tex-Mex breakfast of huevos rancheros for me and an egg-and-chorizo burrito for Jeanette.  The restaurant was owned and run by a former Denver police officer and his wife, a native of El Paso.  She, of course, was the source of the recipes for the authentic Tex-Mex fare.  It turned out that Mike, the owner, and we have a mutual friend in Tom Richey, who is also a former Denver police officer.  Tom and his wife Diane were some of the first people we met when we moved to Denver back in 1989.

We crossed the border on Saturday morning, returning to a land where we no longer had to convert kilometers to miles and litres to gallons, making our compliance with speed limits and stress over watching the gas pump climb up to 70, 80, 90 or more litres every time we filled up much less a source of anxiety.  We made it as far as Mt Desert Island, better known as the location of the town of Bar Harbor, Maine, and Acadia National Park, before we put down stakes for three nights and two days.  We were enthralled with the park, its geology, and especially some wonderful gardens, but less so with the town of Bar Harbor, which is a typical gateway town to a popular national park, filled with T-shirt and trinket shops and countless eateries.  Think Estes Park on the seashore, with a cruise ship or two added to the mix, and the wildlife theme being moose and lobster rather than elk and bear.  Ho hum.

The highlight of today was a stop in Freeport, Maine, the home of L.L. Bean of mail order catalog fame.  After an hour in the big factory store, we bought enough stuff to fill up the remaining extra space in our motorhome, so at least we know we won’t be doing much more shopping for the rest of this trip.  

That’s it for now.  I’ll post this when we have wifi, and hopefully will post more regularly for the rest of the trip.  By the way, we’re at 6747 miles now,

June 17, 2014

Lovely evening at Winslow State Park! Jim will write a blog later but will have to wait for WiFi to send it. Temperature is perfect -- only the mosquitoes will send us indoors to our camper for the rest of the evening.

Day 31 – Thursday, June 12, 2014

Gran Pre, Nova Scotia to Amherst, Nova Scotia – 167 miles

We started the day with a visit to the Museum of Acadian Culture, located just down the road from our campsite.  As mentioned yesterday, this was the center of Acadia, which is what the Maritime Provinces were known as before the mid-1700s.  The site of the museum is at the location of the original village of Grand Pre, on a broad tidal flat that was reclaimed by the French settlers by building a series of dikes, much like those in Holland.  I won’t go into the details of the sad history of the Acadians, but briefly, this thriving culture was uprooted by the British during the French and Indian War of the1750s, with the people being forcefully removed and relocated to various locations in the American colonies and back to France.  Eventually, many of these people made their way back to Acadia after many years, and a large number of them ended up in the Mississippi delta region where they’re known today as Cajuns (a contraction of the word Acadian).

Robert Louis Stephenson wrote a story about an Acadian woman named Evangeline who was separated from her husband during this period and never reunited, and the statue of her on the grounds of the history center is a famous landmark.

After leaving the history center, we returned to the river at Port William to observe the high tide coming in.  We arrived about two hours before the peak, and stationed ourselves at a viewpoint on the east side of the river, right by the highway bridge and across from the old wooden wharf structure I mentioned yesterday.  The tide was scheduled to max out at 42 feet plus today, and when we got to our viewpoint the river was flowing rapidly upstream – a very interesting phenomenon.  We noted several landmarks to gauge the progress of the tide – watermarks on the piers supporting the highway bridge, cross-beams on the wharf pilings and other structures on the far side of the river, plus a small gully leading down to the river on our side.  As we watched, the tide-driven river rose probably 10 feet in the two hours we were there, covering first one of our landmarks then another.  As it approached the actual high mark, the upstream flow slowed noticeably and the turbulence around the bridge piers ceased, until finally the only movement on the river were the wind driven ripples blowing across the water’s surface.  We would have liked to stay to watch the tide begin flowing outward, but it was now one o’clock and we had to get moving.

We made it as far as Amherst, Nova Scotia this evening, and are now camped in a very nice campground situated on a small lake.  Amherst is right on the border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, so tomorrow we’ll cross back over into the latter, and will probably be back in the US by Saturday, or Sunday at the latest.  And speaking of late, it’s now 10:00pm and I haven’t downloaded the last two day’s photos, so that will have to wait.