Its amazing how a retired guy sitting in a motorhome going no place can find so little time to sit and write a blog post. In addition to more committee work to help keep the park a place I want to be there are endless activities. And if none of those are on the agenda for the day there is Bridge most days from 1 PM until 3:30 or so. The other things that are keeping me busy are preparing for our travels to Morocco, Israel and Ethiopia This December and January. 

Carol and I just realized we don’t have any more travel booked after this travel so it is time to plan the return to Panama to complete that trip and  to continue on to Columbia as originally planned. 

Add to that our desire to return to Alaska this coming summer and I will have my hand full with planning. Ordinarily the Alaska trip would be a matter of getting the books and maps out and some minimal prep of the coach and Jeep and done. But we think we want to take the Marine Highway which requires making reservations which requires actual planning. This has not been our strong point in all our years of RV travel. We are more the “wing it” type as anyone who has read these blogs for a while must recognize. 

I have laid out the beginning of the trip using a new, or at least new to me, online package called RV Trip Wizard. My first use of this web site was for traveling from Rochester to Jojoba Hills. This was an easy test since we have driven this several times and could probably do it without a map. It did simplify determining where we would stop each night. This became especially important when our plans were disrupted by the mechanical failure on the Natchez Trace Parkway. Sitting in the coach with the site running I was able to easily reconfigure the trip and plan the visits we still wanted to make.

For Alaska I have put in the big jump from Temecula CA to Prince Rupert Sound, at least a month for us right there, to get us to the initial ferry ride. The Alaska Marine Highway is actually a ferry system in case you didn’t know. Then I started laying out the routes we thought we wanted to take. Oops, can’t book any of that online with a coach over 30 feet long. More oops, they don’e have the schedule online beyond April, yet. That gets us as far as Haines from which we will travel ??? actually haven’t a clue. We know we want to get to Seldovia and Anchorage is an interesting place and so is Fairbanks and Denali NP is between them. But my route planning stops at the last ferry ride to Haines. 

Back to today. The coach and jeep are freshly washed and waxed by Red White & Blue Detailing, I would rather write a check than spend hours pretending I can do as good a job as 2 guys who do it all day long. I have a planning meeting for a project related to Finance Committee and then a meeting to requalify as a tour guide before we go to a Last Friday Dinner being held on the 2nd last Friday of the month because next week is Thanksgiving and we wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity for another reason to get together and eat and dance. 

I have spent altogether too much time listening to hearings, listening to and watching analysis of those hearings, not talking about it with others since we do not necessarily agree and we are a close community. I even read the New York Times mostly “below the fold” to see what else is going on in the country and the world. I doubt our national misery will end any time soon. We are too badly fractured and no one wants to even consider what the other side has to say.