We have been moving.  1720 miles over 5 days. For the high mileage drivers among you, youngsters, that is a mere 2 exhausting days. For us it is an exhausting 5 days. We are stopped in Las Cruces NM at our regular campground, Siesta RV Park.  It is basic, no pool, no lounge, no pavement. It does offer the services we want and a location we enjoy. We got off the road early, by 3 PM and will do very little until we roll on out on Saturday the 20th. 

The most exciting story of this trek has been that it has been totally uneventful. We have listened to Dan Brown’s Origin and are now almost finished with God of the Hives by Laurie King. We stopped in Monahans Sandhills State Park on I 20 in the Oil Patch, a familiar stop for us.

We went for a short walk in the sand hills and managed to lose sight of everything human created except for footprints and eventually people making them.

We have continued to live on a limited news diet. No more than 30 minutes with the NYTimes and NPR Morning Edition in the background while preparing and eating breakfast.  We limit our rants about . . . to 5 minutes and turn everything off, resume listening to our story and trundle down the road.  This seems to be much easier on the nerves. Sometimes I feel we are shirking our duty of being in turmoil and agony over the direction the government is headed. I am not running for any governmental office and I am not in a position to influence any politician other than by calling and emailing. these are very limited activities and I can only hope that someone actually counts the contacts. Our Senators are Cornyn and Cruz and our Congress idiot is Brian Babin, none of them are likely to ever do anything I consider useful or constructive. 

Hmm, that sounds remarkably like a rant, time’s up.

We are looking forward to getting to Jojoba Hills SKP Resort on Monday to resume our activities there. The remaining stops along the way may be Benson AZ, Peg Leg Smith Monument, or other boondocking areas along the way as the spirit moves us.

Note I am still learning to use WordPress and some formatting is a bit of a challenge. I will improve 🙂

As I write we are parked (parking is allowed, camping is not) in a Walmart in Opelika Alabama. We covered 320 miles today while driving for 6 hours. Time out for fuel for the coach and us, plus driver changes is not factored in.  Nor is a stop during which we figured out where we would stop for the night. Between Columbus GA and Montgomery AL along SR 80 there are no viable places to spend the night. That gets to looking like a very long 80 or 90  miles, especially after 5 and a half hours of steady driving. This is about 10 miles off our route but it will net out just fine in the long run. On days like this happiness is a WalMart that says “come on in and park near the Murphy station”.  

The other happiness was “no news.” We skirmished with the news over breakfast, a bit of NPR and a bit of the NYTimes, just enough to convince us we really don’t need to know any more. Certainly not while driving as throwing  a fit or things at the radio is not really safe while driving. Instead we are listening to “Origins” Dan Brown’s latest novel. There is lots of descriptive material and many puzzles to be solved along the way. Of course the main puzzle remains to be solved until we finish the  book. The miles vanish under the tires as the story unfolds. Monday is planned to be another 6 hour day ending in or near Jackson MS. 

After a way to brief visit, we left Covesville VA to begin our return to our southern California home base in Jojoba Hills SKP Resort by going the “wrong way” as usual. Our first stop was Charlotte NC to visit with Terry and David in their new home outside of Charlotte. As promised, their driveway was adequate for GeeWhiz and the Jeep and close enough to level for our needs. We had a delightful visit and dinner including David’s daughter Greta extended almost to closing the restaurant. After breakfast the next morning, more than plentiful, we began the job of extracting the coach from the driveway. With Carol at the wheel we inched around the curved drive and avoided the mailbox with at least 2 inches to spare. 

We set off for Hilton Head Island Motor Coach Resort and the Tiffin Travelers Rally. Carol negotiated Charlotte morning traffic and work zones with aplomb and eventually I took the helm for the second half of the drive. I was looking forward to easy parking in a well established RV resort, forgetting, or maybe just not thinking about, its being old too and designed, like Jojoba Hills, in a time when a BIG motorhome was 27 feet long! Winding narrow roads required an escort to guide us to the site and to assure we got situated without causing any damage to us or more importantly to the facilities. All done and it is indeed lovely. 

We will be here a total of four days and we are meeting new friends some of whom we have met in the past but a few years ago 🙂  We are touring Hilton Head Island today and will write about what we see and do as we go.

Having fixed the minor failures developed on the 2 months long trip to Newfoundland and back to Rochester, we set out for our Charlottesville family under clear skies, the first actual stop on our way to Jojoba Hills SKP Resort in SoCal. We were debating where to stop along the way as we never consider making the drive in one day in the motorhome because it would be too long a day and we would arrive after dark. As we drove we decided to continue on to Western Village RV Park in Carlyle PA, leaving us a 4 hour drive to the farm. Our new Garmin GPS came up with a totally weird route that seemed to take us 30 miles out of the way. First mistake! since we have driven this many times, we ignored her route and drove on. Seeing a sign that prohibited trucks over 36 feet we drove on, we are not a truck and we are just 36 feet. Second mistake! The very narrow route through a very small town was closed. The detour took us through even more narrow roads with tight turns. Putting a rear tire on a curb and then dropping it off help two glass dishes decide to commit suicide on our tile floor. The resulting noise was terrifying and broken glass sliding around was no better and there was no place to pull off for 6 miles.

After we stopped long enough to clean up the worst of the mess we continued down US 15 only to find it closed!!! The detour of over 20 miles on mostly narrow two lane roads took almost an hour as all of the route 15 trucking traffic was detouring with us. The Garmin’s out of the way route was looking better and better. Lesson 3: turn off the Garmin’s “automatic redirect” so there is some reason for outrageous routes or just believe it. We made the campground before it closed and got set up in the fading twilight. The next day was uneventful and we are now happily set up in Malena and Dan’s driveway.

Side note: If you pay attention to such things, the url for this page has changed. Carol and I have had some challenges with Blogger which has not had any updates in a couple of years. Google does not seem to be interested in maintaining it. All posts from 2004 to today have been moved to WordPress, some early pictures seem to have been lost in the transition. I will leave the xctraveler.blogspot.com up for the immediate future until I finish playing with this new format. The blog is now hosted in WordPress on https://goldberg-online.net and it is the front page. Look up at the menu and you can get to the rest of an admittedly cobwebbed old site that I plan to begin refreshing in the coming months

A year ago we were waiting for repairs on GeeWhiz to be completed so we could resume our life on the road. We were recovering from our trip to South Africa and neighboring countries and thinking about our travel west. Today Rosh HaShanah is behind us and we are in the interval before Yom Kippur and we are taking stock and making amends for any wrongs we have committed. If by my actions or words I have harmed any of you my readers, I apologize, and beg forgiveness and If any of you have inadvertently injured me I forgive you.

The arc of our travels in the past 12 months is fairly straightforward. We drove from Rochester to Jojoba Hills SKP Resort in 11 days, a record crossing of the US for us. We saw nothing. Other than a stop in Las Cruces to visit dear friends we, just, kept, moving. Once we got to Jojoba Hills, we planted ourselves. We took a week in Palm Desert with friends and a couple of weeks in Arizona including Escapade near Tucson. Other wise we were content in Jojoba Hills SKP Resort (here after JJH). Our travel back East had a couple of interruptions. First a stop in Flagstaff for Josh’s graduation from NAU and then a stop near Kansas City to fly to Ashgabot, Turkmenistan for the beginning of our trip to the Stans. Four countries – we had an overnight stop and a day in Istanbul and back to Kansas City to pick up the coach and return to Rochester for Jazz Fest!

Whew, Avi, our youngest grandson, flew in to spend 4 nights of Jazz (46 Performances) with us. and then we were off to NJ where we picked up Corey, and NYC and Cape Cod and Boston where we put Corey on a plane home, and NS and finally the ferry to Newfoundland (emphasis on land). and another ferry back to NS and returning toward Rochester via Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. I’m getting tired just writing this all down. The details can be found in the blogs along the way.

Our next travel should seem a bit more relaxed. Rochester to C’ville and four days with Dan’s family – Happy Birthday Dan – you can’t be that old, we’re only . . . forget it at least its a square. Then on to Hilton Head, OMG a real resort, for a Tiffin Travelers Rally and then across the country to JJH arriving before Oct 25 if Murphy will leave us alone. There is more foreign travel booked, but that can wait.

Lessons learned, keep moving. We try very hard not to let the ailments of body and coach slow us down. We both feel better if we can move, get out and take a walk, or take a hike or just saunter and enjoy the day or the evening. The coach is easier, a generous application of $$ seems to keep it working just fine and every now and then some elbow grease to make it look nice and to fix the little stuff makes me feel better about myself.

I have skipped over the most important part of our life, after family, that is community. We keep addressing the question of why we return to Rochester, so many friends and acquaintances have moved on. The question can be found in our community in Rochester. Carol and I still belong to the synagogue where we met in kindergarten 70 years ago. We can walk in after a years absence and be greeted with hugs and kisses from people who know us almost as long as we have known each other. I am going to a board meeting of the Jewish Community Federation where I was President 30 years ago and I will know many of the attendees and be welcome to take a seat and participate as if I never left. And then we rush across the continent to Jojoba Hills SKP Resort where we have found a new (to us) and wonderful community that will welcome us with hugs and kisses when we arrive and we can’t wait to get together with them and share our tales of the summer just past.

We are comfortably ensconced in our apartment on Saint Paul Street enjoying watching the people and the traffic in constant motion beneath our windows. We even venture out from time to time and walk when we can in our very diverse neighborhood. We are next to the central bus terminal and all city buses pass through this one terminal with a half hour delay for people to change from one line to another. For us we can go most anyplace we choose by bus and return is easy cause any inbound bus must get here eventually. The cost is 50 cents for Seniors. We also now have Uber and Lyft should we choose. Of course Ruby, the red Jeep, is in the parking lot for most of our travel beyond our walking range.

Read Carol’s most recent blog to see the current status of our walking range. This coming week is filled with appointments, I have not seen so many different doctor visits packed together, with no one sick, in one of visits here. Of course I did have to add one to tell me how to deal with the kidney stone, which seems to have taken some time off from tormenting me. Mixed in we will catch meals with people we want to see and even some time with Ray Ciccarelli, the Financial Planner who bought my practice and acquired me as a client as part of the deal. It’s fun for me to sit on the other side of the desk these days. Oh, just occurred to me his other office is in Naples FL and his sister is there as well as other family, hope they are safe.

I am reminded that the Jewish High Holy Days are not far off. It is a time of thinking back over what I have done and looking forward to how I can contribute to my community in the coming year. I have already made some decisions concerning our community in Jojoba Hills, but that is really only one community of the several that fill our lives and make life interesting and exciting as we approach the middle of our 7th decade. Funny, I shifted from me to we without even realizing until the words were on the screen. The greatest blessing of MY life is to be partnered with Carol for essentially all of OUR lives. I hope we are an example and inspiration to others in our family and circle of friends.

I could ramble on, but I am not sure I could keep your attention, so until the next time, as we say when we part from members of our RVing world “Safe Travels” wherever they may take you.

That pretty much says it all. We hit the ground running yesterday with a tour of several commercial galleries in Veiux Montreal then made tracks to Home of Jazz where we had seats at the bar facing the trio and a fine dinner. The trio was piano, drums and bass. Darn didn’t note the names before they scrolled off the web site. Click here to see the interior. It is loaded with all kinds of jazz memorabilia and “stuff”.

Today we returned to the city driving to the Metro station on the south side of the St Lawrence where we are staying and taking the Metro into town to the Musee d’Arte Contemporary. They are having a special exhibition reflecting the 50th anniversary of Expo 67. Carol and I were fascinated as we spent an extended weekend in Montreal when the Expo was on. Unfortunately most of my memory is of being cold and very wet, will have to review our slides of that period when we are in Rochester. The art we saw was current reflections by artists who were not even alive in 1967. We spent a couple of hours there and were exhausted when we fin ished. Sat down for lunch n the cafe and reflected on our memories of the time, Yechiel was 1 and Dan was not yet a gleam. We must have left Yechiel, then Joel, with Carol’s parents. Anyhow we were drawn out of the museum to the streets where activities surrounding the 4 day fashion show were happening.

Enough of that and we caught the Metro to the locale of the Musee de Beaux Arts and walked there from the stop giving us an up close view of another part of town. We were there until closing and most of our time was spent on the floor with art from the 20th century and contemporary work. We started with the older work with less than an hour to go and literally ran through the top three floors.

By five we were on the street on our way to a Metro stop to catch a bus to Diese Onze a small basement club where Taiwanese-Canadian guitarist Denis Chang was mostly playing bass with a couple of guitarists. He learned that one of the patrons played bass so they switched up with her on bass and Dennis on guitar. By the middle of the second set there were five musicians on stage (there was barely room for the three) and the piano had been uncovered and the lid raised so it could be included. All in all a lively jam session broke out. We exited before the second show, otherwise I couldn’t be writing this.

Uber to the Metro station, Metro back under the river and a 25 minute drive back to the campground. Tomorrow we have tickets for a walking tour on Jewish History of the Old City leaving from the Jewish Museum where I am sure we will start our day.

When we travel with OAT we leave the real planning to them and just figure out how to get on the plane in time. However as RVers getting to the plane on time can take some doing. Since we travel coast to coast regularly we have to decide where we are going to fly from and then figure what we will do with the coach while we are away. But, as always I ramble.

The question came up on a group of RVers about how to plan a multi week long distance trip. I started to write a response and decided to write it as a post here while we take a “do nothing” day in the coach outside Quebec City in lousy weather.

Planning starts with some goal be it “let’s see Newfoundland” or we want to be back in Jojoba Hills by the end of October. I have tried various specialty planning packages and none of them were written the way I think. First is the map. Well in our family’s life the map is always first for almost any discussion there must be a map. Next comes the “far point” or the place where we must turn around and go the other way. Then we fill in with wishes desires and most important people who we would like to see along the way. These people may be RVers whose plans we know or, easier, people with fixed residences. Finally dates we are committed to must be factored in. These could be ferry schedules, flights we have booked or family events. Last as almost an afterthought we get to where we will stay.

The route starts with a map such as Delorme Street Atlas, now defunct, which lets us set the route and build in normal travel days of 6 hours. This lets me see if we can actually fit in what we know we want to do and still not have excessive travel – it is a defined by us as more than two six hour days back to back. Looking at the daily stops and the possible side trips or deviations lets us build the schedule.
Finally I get out the camping resources that we like to use. First I start with Federal resources such as national parks/forests/monuments. There is Army Corp of Engineers, state parks, county parks and then I get out Days End which is a rich resource of free and inexpensive campsites across North America. Harvest Hosts offers wineries and agrotourism spots across the continent that are prepared to offer a night of camping for the price of a wine tasting or boat ride with alligators (we did that) or maybe the chance to buy fresh eggs and farm raised lamb. Resorting to campground review websites like rvparky.com and others brings together the possibilities for any given night. If it is not a weekend or not in the summer we often find ourselves making these decisions at 2 PM as we look for something interesting not to far from our route.

I will create a spread sheet with proposed stops and number of nights to see if it works and gets us where we must be and allows us to take a few days for us to do laundry, wash the coach, read a book. This is not a vacation, it is living and shopping and cleaning do have to fit in to the plan. If the plan sounds open ended that is because it is meant to be. We need to allow for serendipity and for aging bodies to rest.

We are in the midst of living such a plan as I write. As I mentioned we are taking a work day (we call it do nothing because we are not touring Quebec City as originally planned). We had two days of touring in chill and wet and a third such day did not appeal. Carol got to the laundry and I have messed around trying to get better service from our water heater – parts on order and our tire pressure monitoring system, parts on order. We have had a saga of small failures that have made life just a bit less comfortable than we would like. These too must be allowed for in any RV travel plan. We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Quebec City and are looking forward to Montreal where we have allowed three nights as well. We have the time, why not.