Month: October 2022

3rd quarter 2022: WheRVe we been?

Remember that time we left Maine in August and drove all the way to southern California for our pumpkin patch jobs that started in September? That was in 2019, and although the line on the map below makes it look like we’d perhaps forgotten that 3-week endurance test, we most definitely had not.

This year we made a similar diagonal, from Nova Scotia to New Mexico, but took closer to 6 weeks to do it.

We is smarter.

Being a little more pressed for time than usual, I’ll jump right into the maps and a quick sampler of our 3rd quarter travels. We’re currently in Albuquerque for the 50th Annual International Balloon Fiesta, volunteering with the Escapees Boomers, and our training/crewing schedule is going to have us keeping unusual hours. Hello to 4:00 a.m. wake-ups, afternoon naps, evening glows, and the sights & camaraderie that will make it all worthwhile.
From July to September, we racked up 8 US states, 5 Canadian provinces, and 6019 miles — only as measured directly between overnight stops, not all of which are on the map — on a jaunt that took us from MA, NH, ME to NB, NS, PEI, QC, ON to MI, WI, OK, NM.
We put way more miles than that on the truck, sometimes with the camper on, sometimes without, as we ran errands and visited people at each location.
(Map does not reflect actual routing.)
Just for giggles, I also made this very rough map of the counterclockwise loop we’ll have completed by the time we get back to San Antonio next month. We took off in Road Island in late April, and will return almost exactly 6 months later. It’s been a lot — in a good way.

Slide Show 1: NH & ME

  • In NH, we spent a night at the base of Mount Washington …
  • … visited Littleton, home of Pollyanna (I didn’t know either) …
  • … and hiked up to the Galehead Hut on the Appalachian Trail. Tough climb! (But not as tough as Mt. Washington, which is why I said no to that one.)
  • In ME, we spent a night on a horse farm …
  • … went on a hike with an old friend from our Norfolk days …
  • … ate lobster in many mouth-watering forms …
  • … and visited The WoodenBoat School in Brooklin. Tim was one happy guy, and I think a flame’s been rekindled.

Slide Show 2: NS-PEI-ON Canada

  • In Nova Scotia, we spent our 30th anniversary on a whale watching tour …
  • … wearing the same size full-body flotation suits we could have worn the year we were married. #brag
  • There were no bad water views in Nova Scotia.
  • See?
  • See again?
  • And of course we ate Digby scallops in many mouth-watering forms.
  • The Confederation Bridge took us to & from Prince Edward Island, which now ranks amongst my favorite destinations.
  • Again, no bad views, and we lucked out at two different waterside provincial parks.
  • Arch 1
  • Arch 2
  • Incredible skies…
  • … and sea life sightings …
  • … and an hour with Beach Goats (worth every one of my 10 Loonies) …
  • … and a Harvest Hosts farm with the best hosts ever!
  • Before crossing back into the US, we swung through Ottawa and visited Maman …
  • … and PM Trudeau. (Okay, he wasn’t there, but I definitely looked.)

Slide Show 3: MI-WI-OK

  • On Michigan’s UP, a friend let us stay on her family’s lakeside slice of heaven — so nice, we stayed twice!
  • We visited Kitch-iti-kipi, the miraculously clear Big Spring …
  • … and went for swims in both Lake Superior & Lake Michigan.
  • We went on a boat tour of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore …
  • … and spent a week camping in The Porkies (Porcupine Wilderness SP).
  • Labor Day brought a picture perfect weekend with friends in WI …
  • … followed by 2 weeks helping a cousin kick the ball forward on finishing the interior of his pole barn.
  • You know it’s a big job when a scissor lift is delivered.
  • Oh, and look who came over to read our flag one morning. Own less, do more, Bambi!
  • Last stop before Albuquerque: Tulsa, for a weekend with Andrea & Shawn, friends who’ve come off the road to live in a real house for a while.

Where to next?

After our gig here at Balloon Fiesta, we’ll head toward Sedona, AZ, for a week of volunteer preservation work with HistoriCorps at Crescent Moon Ranch. We’d first heard about this organization last summer, and immediately signed on for an October 2021 project in Oregon, but it was canceled on short notice due to excessive wildfire smoke. When the Sedona project popped up for this fall, it took all of two minutes to decide that the detour would be worth delaying our return to Home Base San Antonio by another week.

So yes, after that, we’re back in central Texas for the winter, for the usual visits with family & friends, all the winter holidays, and the doctor-and-dentist-go-round. We’ll also move out of Road Island (~150sf) and back into Tex (~320sf), and won’t that feel all kinds of extravagantly spacious!

We started full-timing in August of 2015, but I didn’t think to do an annual review until the end of 2016, and it was just a listing on Facebook of places we’d visited. After that, I started using a quarterly format.