I have a word problem. I saw “Olm” used to describe something or the name of something and have been unable to track it down. We have an Olm among our stuffed critters. It looks like a naked eyeless salamander. We picked up the stuffed critter when we visited the Postojna Cavern in Slovenia and it rides with the fox, the owl and the sheep pillow from NZ. 

I went looking for Olm on Google and the best I could find was Oriental Light and Magic, a Japanese company that makes films we would never watch – Pokemon. I intended to write this piece about the juxtaposition of the two “olms” but I no longer have the context.  For that matter as happens more and more often I have no idea what I am writing about, stay with me and we will all find out.

We don’t acquire many items when we travel since we are limited in space to display or even store stuff. The fox has ridden on our bed through at all our RVing and is a reminder of Red Fox a stuffed animal Yechiel had when he was Joel. The owl landed on my arm at an Audubon shop someplace where we had hiked on their birding trails. Or maybe it was the day we had a talk by a predator bird rescuer who did a demo with an owl which rode on my gloved hand for 10 minutes. The sheep pillow just slipped into Carol’s arms as we walked by it in a shop in New Zealand where I was buying lanolin for a sore heal.

The last step of making the bed each morning is to put the critters in appropriate – or inappropriate – poses on the bed.

I’m not sure anyone ever gets to see this display, bedrooms are not usual visiting places and in the RV world it is not even common to visit in someone’s RV. Visiting is mostly on the patio, even pre covid. There is no “social space” in 400 square feet of living space and stuff tends to fill most of the spaces we aren’t sitting in ourselves. 

It will get interesting next week as we prepare to travel and all of the stuff that has moved out onto counters and chairs needs to find its way back into secure storage. Looking around it seems daunting, but we have made this transition many times and I have no doubt we will make it happen again. Then in travel mode, only what we actually need for the moment will be brought out for use and put back immediately to be prepared to move on. It is a different living mode. I am looking forward to it. 

I have some trepidation as I keep reading about state parks across the country being booked solid through the summer. Then I remember there are many other places to stay and many private campgrounds away from major destinations that will still have openings for us to drive up. Also many places that do not have all the amenities will not seem welcoming to the new RVers setting out for their first season of travel. For us electricity is nice but not necessary and water and sewer are luxuries. Also without children we are uninterested in the attractions that draw families with children. 

For those interested in our route, so am I. It is a work in progress. If our work at Redlands Truck & RV is completed in a day we will head up to Sacramento to visit the Braunsteins. If we are delayed, we may have to visit in the Fall on our return. Reservations are only in Albuquerque NM for a visit with Erica (late May) and Rock Springs WY for Escapade (mid July). We plan on Rochester for mid August through September and a stop in Charlottesville followed by a Red Bay visit or not. 

The only critters we are likely to accumulate are pictures like this California Quail that is one of the multitude that inhabit our resort.

His plume is hidden in the shadow 🙁

When I have a better idea of the actual route I will post the plan, usually followed by what we actually did. 

or is that thyme? I can’t seem to break the rhyme.

There, broke away! If I seem a bit slap happy I may just be. I am on the verge of setting a record, completing two major projects for the Resort in a year. I have mentioned that I spent the last year chairing a committee to replace an aging phone system. For those who missed it the old system died abruptly 2 weeks before we planned to install the replacement. Everything was in place so we just did it immediately. We continue to fuss with the final details, but my committee has been disbanded. 

I probably mentioned that the threat of boredom appeared high so I agreed to chair a committee to bring quotes for four backup generators to the park. The motions will go to the Board of Directors on Monday. It doesn’t matter what they do, my work is done. I am planning to take no time off as I took on another project a month ago, just in case. That should keep me on the run until May 1 when we plan to go out on the road.  During this time Carol has brought a project to reconstruct the major facility in our rental campground, it was fun watching the walls being torn out of the Laundry and watching Carol working with the construction volunteers buying stuff and checking that they were on track to get it done. 

In the midst of this we decided that it was time to get a lower, more comfortable car and so we did.  There is a theme, it is as RED as the former Rubicon. We bought using the Costco service so no dickering and no upselling. We chose to sell the Rubicon privately and as I suspected it was gone in 23 hours, for just above the value I was carrying it on my books. We now have a 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trailhawk 4×4 with all the “stuff” you might want on a car except the oversized engine.

I have spent some time thinking about travel this summer. We are not ready to leave the US of A yet, although Canada would be fine if it opens up. I have started by sticking pins in a map with dates attached. The latest date is July 18 to 23 at an Escapade (a gathering of Escapees) in Rock Springs Wyoming. Another date is May 20 in Albuquerque NM. Also a stop in Sacramento CA May 5. If you put it on a map there is no theme just pins. We find we have several reasons to go to Washington, Port Townsend and Spokane and Vancouver if we can get over the border and back. It still doesn’t make any sense. There are also stops in Virginia (?) and Rochester NY to consider and eventually back to Jojoba Hills in SoCal. OMG its a mess. I don’t suppose we can fit in New England while we are at but its only a day from Rochester to Shelburne VT. It begins to feel like I have grabbed a handful of pebbles and thrown them at the map. This is not a plan and it has no rhyme. 

I guess we will know what the plan was after we execute it on thyme.

A piece in the NY Times  today, March 17, about Elizabeth Diamond returning a book to the library only 63 years overdue brought a flood of memories to me. To begin I still have an active library card with the Rundel Central Library in the Monroe County Library System. this was not always my primary library. When I was growing up, the neighborhood library was the Monroe Avenue Branch. It had two entrances, down the stairs to the door under the main door which gave entrance to the children’s section and up the grand stairs to the ADULT section. By the time I was old enough to go up those stairs we had moved and I was using the well stocked and well maintained school library at Monroe High School. I know it was well staffed, I was one of the students staffing it. We shelved books memorizing the Dewey Decimal System in the course of that work,  and tallied the circulation numbers for the head Librarian (yes, capitalized, she was that important). 

Eventually I went off to college where the John Hay Library was the book haven of book havens. For any Brown alumni reading this, that was before the Rock was built. It was in the reading room of that library that I learned of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Although the “Hay” was my home library when visiting  my family in Rochester I used the University of Rochester library to work and just BE in a library. 

At Columbia I worked in the Business School library which was suspended over the gym so the floor had a certain flexibility to it. Other than that and the glorious view out to a new building going up to obstruct the nonview the windows had had been built to take in my memories are limited. I guess because I never came to see it as more than a convenient stopping place. 

Before I return to Rochester I need to make two brief stops.  As 12 year olds our group from Camp Cherokee in Saranac Lake NY went on a canoe trip and eventually we put in to Raquette Lake NY to wait for the camp truck to give us a truck portage to another lake. We discovered the town had a library that was open! We went in to see what it had to offer and we borrowed some books to read on the lawn while we waited. Another story, oft told, my mother decided I need some help reading and arranged for me to spend 6 weeks at a reading camp run by Syracuse University on the campus of a Vanderbilt Camp in the Adirondacks, near Raquette Lake Village. This was after my sophomore year in high school. I was obligated to read at least 4 hours a day! I promised the staff that if they left me to my own devices I would do at least that. They believed me. After 4 weeks I told them I had read every book in the nice little library they had provided and would they please go get more books, anything they thought I might read. I’ll spare you the Moby Dick story saving it for another day.

Eventually I returned to Rochester with Carol who is, if possible more interested in reading than I am, where we immediately got adult library cards in the Monroe county Public Library system, First in the Town of Pittsford and later in Brighton. We moved to the city and started to haunt the Rundel and the new main library across the street which is a three block walk from our apartment when we are in town. Now I access that library from anyplace there is an internet connection to borrow books. I get a thrill every time I open the link and see:

We wait; for our second shots; for the power to come back on; for the phone system install to be completed; for Washington politics to put the past behind us and move forward; for quotes from another project; for data so I can complete a power point presentation; not for Godot! 

Much of this waiting has me up in the early morning just like in the old days when I worked. I know as soon as I get caught up and the deadlines have passed; I will find a way to create or accept new ones. 

I wrote the above a month ago and never got back to it; most of the waiting is past. The politics have moved on; and the telephone project I worked on for over a year is complete. We are doing the final verification that everything works. I spent much of the day going to sites on my list that did not answer the phone so I could verify that they rang. 

Somehow the idea crossed my mind that with this project complete I might find nothing to do. I heard that a committee to search out back up power generators for critical areas in the resort needed a chair. I don’t know much about generators; but I know how to organize a committee and delegate work. So I have been meeting with our Maintenance Manager and another volunteer who is a retired electrical contractor and various vendors. When the quotes come in, I’ll get the committee together to review the results and make a decision to take to the community and to the Board. Then I will need to find some other way to keep busy. Carol says the next projects will fall in my lap, or more likely on my head.

We have made a couple of trips to San Diego to get Carol vaccinated and a couple of trips to Menifee to get me vaccinated. Somehow we were not able to get our shots on the same day; at the same place; but we are both vaccinated and in another week we will both be two weeks out. A certain sense joy and freedom is greeting many of us as we are getting our shots. Still wearing masks and keeping our distance, but it is more about making everyone feel included and safe.

When we were in San Diego we met with Jing and Ron. Jing was a caregiver to my mother; providing massage therapy when she was in the Summit and later when she was in the nursing home. They have a lovely apartment with great views of the harbor and over the airport. We walked to a Japanese restaurant where we were able to be seated outdoors. The weather was fine and we had a grand time. The drive to San Diego is about 90  minutes and there are mountain routes and coastal routes if we don’t need to scurry along the freeway. 

For now we are looking forward to some quiet time with zoom meetings. We are starting to think about what our schedule might look like after April. We do love it here, but hitch itch will rear its ugly head one day and it would be nice to have some sort of thoughts. Maybe Rock Spring WY for Escapade in July would work with a trip back to Rochester for Jazz Fest the end of July on the RIT Campus? But that only takes care of July. Will there be any hope of driving to Canada and putting Saskatchewan and Manitoba on our list of states and provinces finally? I doubt it.  People talk about plans, we talk about hopes. People reserve campsites months in advance, we call from the road at 2 PM  unless we really know where we want to be next week. 

Watch this space for decisions.

After a week of cold (for SoCal) and rain in the high desert we have returned to blue sky and mild temperatures. Carol and I have both had our first Covid inoculations  and things seem to have calmed down some. Even politics seems a bit less roiled than recently. News about who can get a “jab”, where seems to keep changing. Some people going to Petco Stadium in San Diego have been turned away because they are not residents of San Diego County. Many more have not had a problem. Riverside County where we are, was  limiting appointments to over 85 this past week, we will see what the coming weeks bring.  Now we begin the search for our second jabs.

Those who know me will not be surprised that with the telephone project winding down into installation I have taken on a new project that I know even less about. After 30 years our resort has experienced two extended blackouts as a result of Southern California Edison – SCE –  shutting down our area for high wind and fire risk. Our only backup power for the resort is a couple of small portable generators to keep the phones and some office computers going. there is no back up for our well pump or other critical infrastructure. The Board created a special committee and most of the qualified, knowledgeable people signed up, but none would agree to take the chair. As I told the committee at our first virtual meeting my only qualification is I can start the generator on my motorhome AND I do know how to chair a committee. 

We have had our first two meetings and with any luck we will have a completed project in one or two more meetings. It is wonderful when there are knowledgeable, dedicated committee people willing to actually do the work and all I have to do is coordinate. 

Literally as I was writing the above I got a call that the the old phone system lost access to 2/3 of the park and is beyond restoring. We almost made it. People will be a week without internal phone service.

Carol is doing the same with her projects and her art. The fence art keeps changing and so does the site. I will let her speak for herself on http://cgstudio.net if she chooses. 

We have no plans for travel. We have wishes, but no plans, unless you count a trip in Spring 2022. Maybe after we both have our 2nd shots and things settle down further we can take the coach out for a spin. I keep dreaming, but I have so much to do right here that I wouldn’t be traveling for another month or more anyhow. 

Damn, retirement is exhausting 🙂