Okay we knew the date of Chanukah a long time ago. We carry a Chanukia or Chanukah Menorah with us that my sister gave us maybe 50 years ago. So what’s the problem? When we left New Orleans we entered territory where there is no market for Chanukah candles. Not in WalMart, not in any grocery store, for that matter the nearest synagogue is in Houston, 90 miles to our south, a long way to go for some candles and it is too late now anyhow, next up Purim.

We scratched out mutual heads and decided we would be okay if we brought out the menorah and looked at it. That just does not work. What to burn, without burning down the coach. Tea Lights! we bought a lifetime supply several years ago in some junk shop (probably a Christmas Store) for $2. Here is a picture of our dashboard last night, 2nd night of Chanukah:

I promised to write about these gardens, located on Jefferson Island in southern Louisiana. This is one of the five salt dome islands which include nearby Avery Island, the home of Tabasco Sauce and the MciIhenny  Family. Joseph Jefferson bought Jefferson Island with the proceeds of his acting career. Without providing the entire biography, he came from a family of actors and he sought a “property” that he could make his own and tour with. He met Washington Irving and decided that the Rip Van Winkle story would be that property. He made his costume and properties first and then set out to write a script. He produced the show and took it on the road across the country playing to large and happy audiences for years. He became world renowned for his depiction of Rip Van winkle. Eventually he had homes in Massachusetts, Florida and Louisiana. This was his winter home and he loved the view from the front porch.

As usual we refuse to take a major road when a lesser road will do. We left Grand Isle with eight days to drive 700 miles to Livingston TX. We could have driven up to I 10 and stopped in Lafayette, but we have spent time there and wanted to try something less direct so we turned on to LA 24 toward Houma. Again we really didn’t want to stop in Houma and US 90 beckoned, but we turned on to LA 182 through Waterproof LA (never even saw a road sign for it but it is on the map so we must have passed through it). Eventually we were forced on to US 90 as it was the only road going our way. Approaching New Iberia – think about that name in French speaking Cajun country – we located a Passport America campground, half off is always good, at the Iberia Parish Arena.

 seems to be very quiet wherever we have been.

We are still two days from Livingston, well one if we actually wanted to be there sooner and take I 10, probably not going to happen.  We are staying in place at the empty campground while we catch up with laundry and finalize updates to our websites.

Speaking of which, with Dan’s help we have moved both of our websites to a new hosting company, BlueHost.com. Carol has completely redone cgstudio.net with new galleries and new images. I have wiped the cobwebs off goldberg-online.net and added some new links. These are both “works in progress”. I will try to remember to note when I make changes to mine so, if you are interested, you can jump to either of those websites and then follow them back to our blogs. It is a bit messy right now, and I hope to have it cleaned up before we leave for Israel.

Our personal links as of today are:
http://goldberg-online.net
http://cgstudio.net
Xctraveler Blog
Message in a Minute

We made it to Grand Isle and without a reservation we only had a choice of 40 of the 49 sites here. This is not the biggest season on the Gulf. LA 1 bridge may not be the longest in the US but it is clearly the longest in Louisiana. Toll was $9.50 for the coach and car, one way (no return toll). It was built because after Katrina it became clear that the former road would be under water any time there was a major storm, and with rising sea levels it eventually will be under water at high tide. No one in the Louisiana government would attribute this to climate change, that is far too scientific. They are just being practical.

Grand Isle makes Red Bay look like a hotbed of activities. To get anyplace requires a long drive over a two lane road to get to Cutoff, yes that really is the name of the town. There are two parallel roads that run from Larose to the Golden Meadow. One, LA 1, is along the bayou and is lined with small towns and fishing companies and shipyards. The other, LA 3235 a block to the west, is newer and presumably quicker as it doesn’t have traffic lights at every town. We took the old shore road down. What was the hurry? But we will take the newer road north when the time comes, it may be less stressful, with less cross traffic.

Now that we are here it feels restful. Carol is updating her new website almost daily with new pictures. I am doing little projects that somehow have cropped up or been put off because I don;t want to do them.  I have recreated goldberg-online.net  and should be opening it for viewing as soon as I get up the gumption to transfer the domain from Myhosting where it has been since 2002 to BlueHost. Watch for the announcement. In the mean time you can see Carol’s in progress at cgstudio.net (I just asked her permission to post his).

The shore birds are plentiful and I have even gotten some reasonable pictures with the Panasonic DMC -ZS20 20X zoom lens:

 We cannot help but think about the many people we know who are in various stages of fighting for their lives or making adjustments knowing that their time may be near. Just the other day my sister and her husband cancelled a trip to New Zealand and Australia, when her middle son’s mother-in-law was stricken with a burst aneurysm in the brain. That she is still alive and recognizes family seems to be a miracle. May the miracle continue to improve! 

The fog has lifted, it is warm and sunny time to go out and play.

We left Summerdale on Monday the 1st with a plan to stop at Infinity Center at Exit 2 in Mississippi which also encompasses a Welcome Center and Stennis Space Center. We had stopped at this Welcome Center several times passing through and decided that it would be a good time to take time to go on the tour. I also had seen that overnight parking might be possible in a side section of the Welcome Center. We always look for free. The tour got off to an unlikely start as the cash register computer was down and would not reboot to even open the cash drawer. They issued us paid bands and said they hoped the cash register would be working when we came back from the bus tour of the Space Center.

This center was developed in the early ’60’s after Kennedy’s call for landing a man on the moon within the decade. Senator John Stennis saw to it that this site would serve for developing and testing the engines for that project.

 They built a canal to enable the large engines to be transported from there, by barge round Florida to Cape Canaveral – later renamed Cape Kennedy and yet again renamed to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. The engines were much too large for any other mode of transport and they could not tested in Florida as there was not a large enough buffer area to make it feasible. The tour is worth a stop if you can allow a couple of hours in your travel schedule. It is no where near as exciting as the the Houston Space Center or Kennedy Space Center tours. The Infinity Center would be a fine break for families with younger children on a road trip looking for an educational event during a long day on the road. Also it would be an interesting stop for nearby locals looking for something different. The center today houses 7 different government agencies and several universities’ space and research departments. Just in the “N”s are NOA, NASA, Naval Research Laboratory and Naval Seals.

It turned out that the signage was clear that overnigitht parking was not permitted and the staff at Infinity confirmed that and one remembered there is a Walmart in Waveland, MS about 15 miles back to the east. That is where we spent the night. Mid morning on Tuesday the 2nd we drove about an hour to French Quarter RV Resort located just 2 blocks north of the French Quarter. It is almost unbelievable that such a nice RV Park is located where it is with I 10 just to the north, I can watch traffic without getting out of my seat, and the French Quarter just two “ugly” blocks to the south. We do not walk back late at night as it does not feel safe to walk through a no man’s land of abandoned public buildings and parking lots in the dark. We have not moved the car since our arrival nor will we until we prepare for departure in the morning.

Our special New Orleans treat yesterday was dinner at Commander’s Palace. This is one of the most highly rated restaurants in a town of highly rated restaurants. We had eaten there only once before, a brunch because that was all that was available on short notice (two days) during our visit. This time the notice was even shorter as I called mid morning and was able to get a table for 2 at 7:30 that evening. To make it really memorable we walked to St Charles St and Canal and followed the St Charles Street trolley tracks to the first Car Stop on St Charles where we got a trolley to ride out to Washington Street where the restaurant is located. We arrived within minutes of our reserved time and were seated immediately. The only complaint of the evening was that Carol’s risotto got gummy as the meal progressed. My osso bucco of lamb was delightful, no there are no Foodie pictures, it looked like beautifully presented food! Naturally the shank of the lamb was vertical. A minor cavil, there was no marrow scoop. Not that I have ever seen one other than in a picture as on this page.

A cab brought us back to FQRV and Geewhiz and a good night’s sleep. Wednesday brought us back into the French Quarter and lunch at Stanley’s. Great oyster poorboy for me and Carol had a delightful salad. We stopped by the French Quarter CVS to pick up a prescription and had a long talk with the not very busy pharmacist about  places to eat and places to visit. His lack of “busy” is due to the location and the very short pharmacy hours, 10 AM to 2 PM daily! We continued to walk through many shops and buy nothing and several galleries where we also bought nothing. Back to the coach before dark. we will have dinner on board and watch a movie.

Tomorrow we are planning on moving to Grand Isle, about as far south as you drive into the gulf in Louisiana.  We will stay a few days and Carol will be able to finish the latest updates to her website and I will work at bringing my website out from under the cobwebs and presenting it in a new “dusted off” version and then I will be able to add some new material. I may even move this blog to it. Watch for the news

Updated 12/6 to include image of Engine Test Stand

We are in Summerdale AL, at Rainbow Plantations Escapee Park. We have picked up mail. We have shopped. We have tried to fix the verdamta (badly spelled German) DVD player and failed causing the possibility of yet more work by a skilled technician rather than a somewhat skilled RVer who still thinks he is young and capable of fixing anything. I won’t regale you with all the details unless someone writes and begs, maybe not even then. Suffice it to say we have over the air (OTA) TV, internet TV and satellite TV when the trees are not in the way. Oh yes we also have cable from time to time when a park makes it available for no extra charge. Who needs one more source?

I must say I am grateful that our miseries are so far limited to the lack of a functioning DVD player and the usual ills of people our age. I sleep fine, just not always in bed during the usual sleeping hours. I fell asleep this after noon, you could blame the turkey and wine, sitting upright on a hassock. I might fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, so I know I am getting the prescribed 8 hours, just not contiguous and well

– where was I?

I am great at keeping Carol awake at night so she too takes advantage of the unintended nap while reading late at night.

The thanks I must give and have not done enough is to my late mother for whom family came first. She insisted we take time to get to know family wherever they were. There were times I really wanted to be with friends, but family obligations always had to be considered. So we see family, second cousins in Fairhope AL and stay very close to Ellie who is now alone, when we are in the same city. When we go to New York we gather with our Ornati cousins because that  is what we do. We also stay in touch with the closer cousins by email and phone. Carol too keeps in touch with her many cousins and is always organizing get togethers when we are near.

Thanks Mom! I know you would be overjoyed to know that we shared Thanksgiving with Joy and family

and that, when we pass through New York City on our way to Israel, we will stop over with Molly for an evening. Oh yes,Sandy and I stay in close touch too, although it is more by phone these days as neither of us seems to ever be in the same place.

More immediately I am grateful for the health and well being of our children and grandchildren.

Yes, I am thankful!

We don’t quite know what we will do with ourselves now that we no longer have to wait. All day I checked the UPS tracking for the last piece of the puzzle and all day it was “out for delivery”. I think the last time I checked was at 2:30 at which point I gave up on leaving as the guys go off work at 3:00. As I was relaxing in the coach, practicing patience and waiting, I heard or maybe felt a strange vibration, like some  was driving a screw into the coach wall! Peering out the door I spotted the entire work force gathered on a platform ladder with something that looked remarkably like a topper awning.

At 3:00 I went to the office to pay the bill and found that Mrs McKinney had gone to town without her phone. I elected to leave the insurance check and my own check for the deductible on her desk and beat it out of town. When i got to the coach it was closed up and almost ready to roll, Carol was still trying to put stuff away as I started the engine. We got mostly clear and I backed out very slowly and carefully and we set up to connect the car for the first time on a month. By 3:30 we were on the highway headed south.

We are often asked how quickly we can get underway from a standing start. I can now answer the question unequivocally; less than 30 minutes. I took us about 2 hours south in Mississippi to Columbus in a Walmart that was not warm and friendly about parking overnight. We shall see if they bother us.

The big excitement on Saturday was a 30 minute drive to Russellville WalMart to restock the refrigerator and pantry. We spent an hour reveling in the process of shopping. This was too much excitement for one day so we returned to the coach and stowed the proceeds of the trip and resumed waiting. Carol was working on her new website, which may or may not be up depending on how you access the web. If through Verizon, not so much, we need to wait for them to flush their cache (whatever that means and it sounds worse then it is). On other providers it may already be up as cgstudio.net. you can tell if it is the new one because the top bar is a sunset image and it is different from the old one with the black header. Sunday was far more relaxed, it rained all day, the only variation being really really hard or just very hard. I may have opened the door a time or two out of sheer need to move. I did not exit into the rain.

We did watch a movie, sort of by accident, I was desperate for something besides football to make noise while we prepared dinner – okay while Carol prepared dinner. I found an old Clint Eastwood movie “Space Cowboys” how bad could that be. With judicious use of the DVR we trimmed it down from three hours to 1 and a half hours of actual movie (you ask, “do I exaggerate?” maybe but not by much). I’ll answer the first question, although we had never seen it we were predicting the plot line after the first 15 minutes. We did sit through to the end for some reason. Oh yes we are waiting.

Monday the 17th found us at the service bay entrance for McKinney at 6:50 AM so we could begin waiting early.  Here is the view out the windshield. I’ll spare you the views in the other directions.

Somehow I had this idea that we would be out of Red Bay by Wednesday, Nov 12. A couple of days to paint and a half day to install the awnings that were waiting for us in McKinney RV Service. I had no idea how long it would take to tape the coach to get the swirls and lines to match up. It was a full day and then after they put one color on they had to redo the tape for the next. We couldn’t take the coach out of the bay Monday night because it was all taped for paint and slideouts were partially extended to make it work. We stayed in it in the bay. Tuesday night we were still in the bay waiting for the clear coat to dry well enough for them to buff out some runs and drips. Finally Wednesday afternoon we made it back to our camp site after learning that the repair bay where the awnings were to be replaced wouldn’t be available until Thursday.

It should take two, maybe three hours to install the awnings, we were told. I had visions of driving south Thursday afternoon stopping at a Corp of Engineers campground about halfway to Summerdale AL. The first thing we learned  was that the rear awning topper that had come in was the wrong size! How strange after two weeks they just found that out. The next thing we learned was the top shield for the forward awning topper had gotten dented either in shipping or in the warehouse. Naturally neither of these parts were available here in Red Bay. There are plenty in the factory, but those all have coach numbers on them and are most likely different in some way from ours. After all they are building 2015 models now.

While they were installing the patio awning, the rear leg got loose and naturally scratched the new paint in a couple of places. So while waiting for the parts we have been in the paint bay again. But first we had to wait for Daniel to charge the batteries in the coach he had parked in the driveway which had died in the cold. So we waited in the driveway from 8 AM until 11 AM. Fortunately we had no place else we had to be since the parts have not come in yet, that I know of.

We are waiting for the paint to dry, I have been watching it dry, that is excitement around here. We will go back to our campsite after we top off the propane tank and the water tank and we will wait for Monday. Watch this space for more exciting waiting.

After a week of daily trips to service bays at 7 AM we were planning on having Saturday and Sunday off to do some touring out of the immediate area. There is indeed very little to do in Red Bay within a few minutes of the Service Center. Then we got a call from Daniel McKinney who is doing the body repair, “can you bring it in at 9 tomorrow?” Sure, why else are we here in Red Bay if not to get on with it. Daniel assured us we did not need to hang around. When he was finished he would put it back on our site for us.

Off we went to finally do a serious day of touring. About an hour north is the four city grouping of Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and just across the Tennessee River Florence. Tuscumbia has several claims to fame, the most well known is that is was the birthplace of Helen Keller. The family home where she was born and where Annie Sullivan taught her to communicate is maintained as a museum and memorial. It is clear that the Kellers were well off in a lovely 1820 house that sat on 640 acres, much reduced today but still very spacious.

We took the house tour and walked next door to the cottage her parents were living in when she was born. Her grandparents occupied the main house at that time. After the tour we wandered through Tuscumbia and came across Spring Park which is built around the water source that made the town possible. The town served as a way station on the Trail of Tears. Many Cherokee were brought by train and transferred to steam boats to continue there trail to Oklahoma.