friends – Page 6 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

1-21-2014 Judy finds the spoonbills

Current Location: Belle Chase LA, NAS: Temperature: 33 degrees F spitting wet stuff

I do believe that anyone who has an RV blog probably knows about Judy, the Bird Lady of Blogland. She has hundreds of followers, uncounted readers, and if you are lucky enough to be anywhere in the vicinity, she is likely to have offered to share her refuges with you. I think nearly every blogger that I follow has at one time or another declined to identify a bird in favor of Judy’s final say-so on the matter, me included.

When we realized that we were traveling within a few miles of Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, Judy’s current volunteer location, I contacted her privately and asked where we might camp if we wanted to see the refuge. With her usual generous spirit, she piped up, “Right here on my concrete pad if you don’t mind roughing it with 30 amp. I have the day off and would love to show you the refuge if you have time”.

Well, then! Lucky us!

We arrived on a sunny but windy afternoon and within a few moments were getting set up at the maintenance area of the refuge where Judy is currently parked. I let my guard down for a moment…bad bad bad…and Jeremy immediately jumped out of the rig to investigate. Usually not a problem, but I’ll let Judy tell the story here. She tells the story better than I would and you get another chance to see her sense of humor shine.

With an attempt to thank Judy for her hospitality, I offered to cook grilled chicken with rice and salad. We visited on the patio, but the chilly winds drove us inside our rig for dinner. We enjoyed having someone to share a meal at our new dinette.

I kinda knew that Judy had a dry sense of humor, but as our evening wore on and we shared our supper, all that good stuff started showing up. We had a nice time getting to know each other and talking about travels, birds, volunteering, refuges, and yes…a bit of talk about other bloggers. I guess it is only natural and of course it was all good stuff.

Judy knew I wanted to see spoonbills, but as we began our morning explorations, I let her know that seeing the snow geese do their thing was also high on my list. With a few hours to spend at the refuge, we saw so much more than we could have on our own. There is nothing quite like having a pro around to really show you the ropes.

Judy took us to several locations where we saw huge flocks of snow geese, and during the entire time she was sharing bits and pieces of her extensive knowledge of the history of the refuge, the devastation of hurricane Ike, and attempts to restore the wetlands to good condition. Shoveler’s Pond, for instance, a fresh water environment, was completely inundated by the storm surge and the salt water killed all the natural vegetation. Restoration included removing the salt contaminated soil completely and starting over.

Even with the high winds, we saw more than I ever expected. Judy thought that the winds might have actually been in our favor because the birds were hunkering down. Watching snow geese fly and hearing their sound is thrilling, something I seek out in the Klamath Basin where they move through in March.

Judy took us right to several huge flocks, that obligingly put on a great show. I took many photos, and also did a video recording of the sounds. There is just nothing like it, except for maybe the sound of a huge flock of tundra swans.

As we drove around Shoveler’s Pond, Judy kept saying she couldn’t guarantee a sighting of the ‘big pink birds”, the roseate spoonbills. I actually saw them first, and hollered, “Look, there they are!” Sure enough we found them on one of the distant dikes across the pond, but Judy knew where the grasses would part enough for a closer view. I finally saw the spoonbills, and even managed a photo or two.

After a bit of time watching the birds on the dike, they decided that I needed to see them fly, and took off just for us, knowing that of course we needed a fabulous photo op.

Judy says that if we return in March and are nearby, we can see the spoonbill rookeries on High Island, where birders come from all over the world to see the birds congregating after their exhausting travels over the Gulf of Mexico on their return north.

What a treat it was to spend time with Judy and to see Anahuac (did you know it is pronounced ana whack??) NWR as we would have never seen it without her.

At noon, we packed up, hooked up, and ambled off toward Louisiana

Up Next: Sam Houston Jones State Park, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Internet Magic

Currently in Lake Charles, LA sunny and 53 F with a very light breeze

Our time at the NAS Shields Campground between Corpus Christi and North Padre Island was idyllic, and yet it seemed to fly by much more quickly than I ever imagined it would. Except for the winds, our weather was perfect for exploring in a light jacket, and sadly for the drought-stricken Texas coast, we had no rain. Sometimes a cloud cover would pop up, just enough for making photos interesting, but never a drop did fall. At other times, we were shrouded in foggy mornings, but while we were there, the fog always seemed to lift just in time to give us views of whatever vista we had chosen for the day.

When I planned this trip, I had no clue what the weather might be, because as all Coastal Texans know, it is wildly unpredictable. I also didn’t know whether we would even like the area enough to want to spend more time here, or if we would be disappointed that our reservation didn’t run out sooner. I guess that is one of the delights of travel to new places. Wait and See.

None of it mattered, however, because I would have come to this area no matter what on my trip east for other reasons. Daughter Deborah lived near enough when she was in Texas that she fished for sheephead and even caught a Manta Ray on the beach at Port Aransas. She wanted me to see it. But the biggest draw for me was a meeting with a friend that I had looked forward to ever since I knew that we would be in the same area at the same time.

I archive email messages that I receive from fellow bloggers, and gmail just informed me this morning that I have 269 messages from EE. The first one was back in November of 2011, when I had been reading her blog and admiring her wonderful static maps that always work. Erin wrote back to me with detailed information about how to do it, and that began an online friendship that included comments of each other’s blogs, and private emails over the years.

Since Erin and Mui travel so much of the world, I treasure her writing and photography. She goes places I dream of and may never manage. Erin’s info guided Mo and I during several legs of our trip to Alaska and through some of Alberta, and I pay attention to the parks where they have stayed since full-timing. I won’t repeat the stories, but they are a great example of a couple who planned to go full time, planned it carefully and carried out the plans.

Yes, we clicked. Somehow that just happens. But it wasn’t just Erin that I clicked with, it was Erin and Mui as a couple that I so respected. Erin is the blogger and photographer, and Mui is the video king, fixit king, and cooking king superb. In their blog I saw that the two of them are a couple, not linked totally at the hip, but in a solid union of like-minded best friends. Through emails and comments, I learned that they were bright people, without being the least bit pretentious, and that they had a great sense of humor and an artistic eye.

Mo and I spent time both on Mustang Island, on the Padre Island National Seashore, and in downtown Corpus Christi while we were here, but before I write about those adventures, I wanted to share a bit about our visits with this truly delightful couple I was lucky enough to find through the magic of the internet.

We gave ourselves a day to get our bearings around the area before our planned lunch get together on Thursday the 16th. Thinking originally that we might kayak before lunch, the wind completely nixed those plans and I actually had enough time to write and catch up on bills and such before we drove the short distance back toward the city to an area along Highway 358 that has several big restaurants and box stores. Even though there are good chain restaurants nearby that we enjoy, we decided instead to go for the true Texas thing and met at Rudy’s BBQ.

Yes, it was the real Texas BBQ experience, the one my daughter talks about with nostalgia. We got there a bit early and had a few moments to try to get our bearings and figure out just how to manage a meal in this big barn like place with lots of people running around and no one paying a bit of attention to a couple of Yankees with wide eyes.

Erin and Mui showed up almost right away and the four of us negotiated the ordering counter and the big iced bin of adult beverages. We paid for our BBQ by the pound, with individual side dishes, and carried it all back to the table in what looked like a square laundry basket. Plates were large torn off sheets of butcher paper.

The bbq was fall off the bone fabulous, but the meeting with new friends was even more so. It is just so wonderful to have a real conversation with people who talk enough to be entertaining, who bring in fascinating subjects, and then ask real questions and actually wait for you to answer those questions with interest. My kind of conversation! I just hope I can do it as well as Mui and Erin.

Even before we met for lunch, the two of them had already invited Mo and I to their home the following Sunday for hamburgers. I guess Erin was optimistic that our meeting would go well and there would be no surprises. We parted after a reasonable time for a first visit, looking forward to the next time. Erin and Mui are great friends for us in many ways, especially since we have similar styles in the “togetherness” thing. We love a good time together, and then we each appreciate time to do our own thing. That works perfectly for people like us.

On Sunday, after our morning kayak on the bayside of Mustang Island, we were very excited to go to Gulf Waters Resort where Erin and Mui are staying. By then, I knew that “hamburgers” had morphed into a full fledged Turkish meal, with all the fixin’s and yes…all those great little bowls of veggies that go with any good Turkish meal.

Their home is as beautiful as they are, and Mui’s cooking skills were beyond description. Mui started our afternoon meal with homemade hummus, drizzled with a couple of kinds of olive oil and pita crackers. I think he mentioned that his Turkish mother said something about, “Did you peel the garbanzos”? You have to be kidding me! and no, he didn’t peel the garbanzos, but the hummus was the best I ever tasted.

It was coolish and breezy outside, so we were invited indoors to a beautifully set table and Mui poured a great bottle of red something or other that was perfect. While we ate, Mui talked about meals in Turkey, where eating goes on for hours, with many courses offered one at a time and often lasting until midnight. Erin told stories of their life and we talked about so many interesting subjects, not one of which had to do with politics, religion, other bloggers, or grandchildren. Such wonderful conversation. And yet I didn’t feel as though I had to be “smart” or “witty” or say the right things. How many times do you really get real conversations like that in your life from new friends?!

The meal was just so incredible, and I spent as much time swooning and ooh-ing and aah-ing as I did actually eating, but still managed to have seconds of everything except dessert. Mui bbq’d perfect little Turkish meatballs, flattened a bit, that tasted rich and just a tiny bit like falafel. We had köfte (meatballs) and domatesli pilav (rice made with tomatoes), cacık (cold cucumber soup with yogurt, piyaz (white bean salad), and zeytinyağlı taze fasulye (green beans cooked in olive oil). All but the soup was served at room temperature in the traditional Turkish style. Mui explained that this tradition accounts for the very long time spent actually eating the meal. Keeping food hot would be impossible.

After our extended afternoon meal, Erin, Mo and I opted for a long walk on the beach, just across the dunes from their beautiful site in the park. The sand was the perfect texture for long easy walking, and waves were gentle and musical, the skies were clear with just that little bit of mistiness that seems to hang around these beaches. Have I mentioned the conversation? I noticed the sun beginning to descend to the horizon before I realized just how far we had walked and we all decided to turn back.

We had a wonderful time during our stay in this lovely part of Texas, but this meeting and yes, this meal, were the highlight. Somehow Erin was exactly the person as I knew her to be. Isn’t it amazing how that can happen? Yes, the internet can be incredibly magical. In another life and another time I would have certainly missed out on these delightful friends.

Next: Visiting Padre Island National Seashore and Aransas Pass

Rocky Point October

Sunny! Clear! Crisp! at 66 glorious degrees F

I know, I know…it is supposed to be a blog about traveling, or the MoHo, or at least something a bit adventurous. But I just couldn’t resist talking about October right here at home. Looking back to past years, it seems to be a repeating pattern. October is probably the most glorious month of the year, at least when it doesn’t snow.

The leaves on the aspens are at their high point. I have to take photos every year, and it seems as though I keep going back to the same spots where the aspens have a particular shade of pinky orange, usually backlit since the sun is rather low in the sky. Every year the colors are different, just a little bit here and there, but different enough that I have to take another picture of the same spot.

The colors in the yard are different each year as well. There is lots of shade here and trying to get our hardwoods to flourish is a labor of love. A few of the flowering cherries and crabapples have finally reached high enough to find the sun and are growing in leaps and bounds. The maples are so gorgeous, but due to the shade, they never get really fat and thick the way they might in the sunshine. But oh, how that brilliance lights up the forest!

My greenhouse didn’t do as well this year as some past. The tomatoes are still trying to ripen, although I did get a few. Seems as though the best crop this year was the bush beans, which fed us many meals of yummy fresh beans. We even tried to grow corn. Probably won’t do that one again. Even though I had pollinated the silks, I guess I am not as good as the wind or bees, since the cute little ears had about 2 inches of filled out kernals and 6 inches of what looked like baby corn from a can. ah well, the price of living in a forest in the Cascades…

Now home for a bit of time, and no longer working even part time, I found myself with time to play with all that fabric I have been hoarding. I had a couple of projects that were cut out last spring, when it was still raining, and some ideas rolling around in my head that would wake me up at 3 in the morning. Fabric does that, kind of the way yarn used to do it to me. It has nothing to do with the quilting exactly, but more to do with the color, the playing with color, moving it around, blending it, turning it into something different than the sum of the parts. Even though I mentioned the quilt in the last post, I didn’t have a photo of it, so here it is.

Mo likes fall too. Her favorite thing is fixing stuff, and with the lawns slowing down she has less mowing time and more fixing time. The Rocky Point place is getting all ready for winter. Wood is in, cabin is winterized, our road has been re-graveled by Mo and her trusty tractor, the chains for the tractor are on and the blade is ready.

Winter will be short this year for us. Sometimes it snows in October, often in November, almost always in December. Last year in December we were plowing and shoveling and blowing every single day for two weeks! January it is getting a bit old, but for us this year it won’t matter at all, since we will be heading south. Snowbirds?! If we go south for three months in a motorhome does that make us snowbirds??

Today we are leaving for Junction City to have our new dinette booth and table installed and the sofa taken out. Of course I’ll take photos of the process, and hopefully we will love it.

During this month past, Time has given the blessing of long lazy visits with daughter Melody on her day off, having coffee and doing the girl talk thing. It is the little things that matter somehow. Time also allowed me to finally almost finish going through the last of Bel’s (my friend who passed away last February) stuff that was in storage and send it off to her sister. Time gave me a day of at long last starting a “retirement project” that has been on my list for the last few years, and one I never could seem to get started.

I am copying a gazillion old videos to DVD, with the hope that someday I will figure out how to edit the goofy footage to the really good parts. In the mean time, I get to look at what I looked like when I was 51. Geez?! I wanna do that again….but I seem to remember at 51 I felt really old….Time.

What is it about fall that makes Time seem so precious.

And friends, old and new. Blogging and Facebook are mixed blessings, I know, but I have to thank my new friend, John Parsons, for somehow finding me on Facebook, writing about truly amazing stuff about water, climate, fires, and the planet in general, and actually being the conduit that helped me to find another old friend from the 80s, Marti Bridges. We worked together for SCS back then and had some truly great times together.

And then, of course, I received news from my friend Jeanne, (who anyone who reads this blog even a little bit should remember). Jeanne had GREAT GREAT news and it seems that I will be traveling to Vermont to share it with her next fall. Ahhhh I can hardly wait till it is old news and Jeanne has told everyone and I can talk about it! Jeanne, do you have a clue just how much self control it took for me to NOT put that photo on my blog??

Time and Friends and the Internet. What more could I ask for.

50 years gone, let’s celebrate at the coast

Currently in Rocky Point, Oregon mostly cloudy, breezy, and 57 degrees F, with a chance of thunderstorms with snow? predicted for tonight.

So very glad that this forecast wasn’t around last week when we were on the Oregon coast, enjoying gorgeous sunny skies and nary a bit of fog. When we planned this trip last spring, our comment to our California friends was all about how gorgeous, warm, and fog free the coast usually is in early fall. We had no clue that a huge storm would blow through just a few days before our arrival, or that the predictions for continued rain and wind would be all wrong.

Long time blog readers have heard me mention Maryruth often, my lifetime friend. This month we are celebrating 50 years of friendship. It isn’t often that friends can stay close, much less even in touch with each other after so many years. Especially since we didn’t grow up together, or go to school together. Maryruth and I met over the neighborhood fence in 1963, both of us young mothers with babies. Even though life circumstances took us thousands of miles apart many times, we never lost each other. The friendship cemented in those early days has stood the test of time.

Congratulations to US!

Maryruth and her husband Gerald don’t have an RV, and haven’t been tent camping in some time either, so a yurt at an Oregon State Park was the perfect solution. Especially the great yurt at space C2 in Harris Beach State Park. The site is huge and just a step back from the front ocean view sites, but also boasts a very long, paved RV pad with electricity, water, and cable TV. The yurt also has electric, with a nice heater that came in handy on the cool coastal evenings. Good thing we had reservations, since the fall is high season for yurt camping on the Oregon coast.

Our friends drove from California to spend the night with us in Rocky Point before we caravanned over to the coast on a cool, cloudy afternoon. Of course, we had to stop on the way in at the Chetco Seafood Company for the best fish and chips ever. (Just proves that you can’t always tell how good something might be by the reviews).

Since they were driving their car and we didn’t have ours, we thought it might be a good idea to stop for supper with the MoHo so that Abby could wait ‘patiently’ while we ate rather than leaving her in the park. The restaurant has a big parking lot adjacent to the harbor where she can bark away and won’t bother anyone. Not such a great idea in a campground.

By the time we settled into our comfy site the clouds were lifting and the skies promised good weather for the next few days instead of the gloomy forecast on weatherunderground. Of course, as anyone knows, forecasting the weather on the Oregon coast is not an easy thing to do.

On our second day at the park, we decided to just lay low and enjoy the beach walks, the trails, and sitting in the campsite reading and visiting. We had a campfire every single night thanks to Mo packing up firewood in big bins that just barely fit inside the MoHo, but it was enough. Tuesday evening we finally made it to O’Holleran’s Steak House, an old Brookings institution. We had heard good things about their food and thought as many times as we have been to Brookings, we should at least say we had tried it out.

Dinner was ‘nice’, with the $31. price of the New York Steak special quite high for the ambience of the place. One of the nicest amenities was a note on the menu that said if you want to share a meal, there would be an extra $3.50 charge, which would include an extra plate, an extra potato, and bread, and vegetable. There was still only one salad for this price, but Mo and I shared our dinner and had more than enough salad, and since we can never eat a full restaurant meal, the sharing option was really nice. Maryruth and Gerald shared their New York Steak with Blue Cheese special as well. What a great idea.

The food was decent, the steak was good, but the restaurant itself doesn’t have the atmosphere that I associate with that kind of price. Although I must say that the service was impeccable. Glad we did it, won’t have to do it again.

That morning, as we walked around the park, I passed a great big 40 footer parked up on the front row. Something looked very familiar to me, and I told Mo that I was sure I must know whoever was in that rig. I kept looking and then thought…hmmmm….it is an Endeavor, now who do I know with an Endeavor?! But wait….I thought Nina and Paul were off to the east side of the Sierras on 395 already? Nope…I checked their website and lo and behold they were in Brookings.

After a few years adjusting to this blogging thing, I have learned that it isn’t exactly cool to just bop up to someone’s rig and bang on the door, so I sent Nina a note inviting her over to our fire. Within minutes she showed up with sweet Polly and we chatted up a storm. Of course, Nina and I couldn’t stay off blogging and traveling subjects and Maryruth and Gerald thought the conversation wasn’t all that exciting! Ha! Guess it is like the old days when I would have soil scientist friends to dinner and the spouses would roll their eyes at all the work talk.

Nina wanted to know about all the exciting things to do in Brookings since we come here so often. I looked at Mo, and couldn’t think of a thing. Geez. We love it here, but most of the time that is because we can do nothing. I wasn’t much good at local recommendations. When Nina asked what to do I said, “Go to Bandon?” Harris Beach is fabulous for just hanging in the campsite, relaxing, walking the beach and the trails and enjoying down time until the sunset shows up.

I followed my own advice and on Wednesday Maryruth and Gerald and I took their car up to Bandon to explore all the wonders of that sweet little town that, unlike Brookings, actually DOES have a cute downtown old town area. Mo thought it was nice to stay home with Abby since she has been to Bandon many times.

It was a perfect day for coastal driving, with gorgeous sunny skies and warm temperatures. Mo suggested that we stop in Port Orford and check out the boat lift, thinking Gerald might get a kick out of it. As many times as we have driven that part of the coast, I had never stopped at the lovely Visitor Center or been down to the docks to see the famous lift, one of only six in the world and only two in the US.

As luck would have it, there was a fishing boat coming into the dock while we were there, and we got to see the famous lift in action. We watched in fascination as the fishing boat was lifted up by a hook and just four ropes and dropped down easily on a big old wooden trailer.

There is much more to do in tiny Port Orford than I realized and I added the Lifeboat Station Museum to the list of future todo’s, in addition to going to the Cape Blanco Lighthouse, but on this day Bandon was waiting.

Our first stop in Bandon was Tony’s Crab Shack where I had fresh grilled halibut with cilantro lime, Maryruth had fresh steamed clams, and Gerald had a rock cod sandwich. So fresh, so good! YUM.

Back another block from the waterfront we found the Coastal Mist chocolate shop. As we walked through the door the rich, warm aroma of really good chocolate welcomed us into this beautiful little store full of the most amazing chocolate ever. Trained in Belgium, the owners are chocolate makers par excellence! I had never tasted “sipping chocolate”, and believe you me, it is nothing whatsoever like your everyday cup of hot chocolate. It was beyond incredible, and so rich and so decadent. Of course I came away with a little bag of solid gold/er chocolate truffles and a big chunk of pure Belgian chocolate.

After browsing a gorgeous gallery that almost tempted Maryruth to spend a half year’s salary on a clock, we ambled off to the new Face Rock Creamery, built to replace the old Bandon Creamery that had such a great Bandon history. Sold to the Tillamook Cheese company, the owners lost their rights to the Bandon Cheese name. Bandon Cheese is now made under contract by Tillamook Cheese somewhere in Wisconsin. Check out this website. Sheesh. We still like Bandon Cheese that we can buy at Fred Meyer, but it isn’t really Bandon Cheese.

Face Rock Cheese is wonderful, and the owner is the original Bandon cheesemaker’s son. I asked if there was any cheese that tasted like the old Bandon cheddar and the cashier laughed and said, “No, not yet, We haven’t been open long enough! Just leave it in the fridge for a few months and you’ll have it”.

Hoping for an ice cream dessert so touted by so many visitors, we decided instead that the money was better spent on cheese goodies. The ice cream is great, but it isn’t made by Face Rock, and we can get Umpqua ice cream any time.

Home after a great day, we cooked up a good supper of spaghetti and salad, eating one more time at the big picnic table with another roaring campfire. I think it was a perfect way to celebrate our “anniversary”.

On Thursday we had a leisurely departure from the park, driving through the brilliant light and dark shadows along the Smith River, past Jedediah Smith State Park, and home to the cottage in Grants Pass. The celebration wasn’t yet over. Maryruth and Gerald decided to stay in town for a couple of days to check out the area, see the cottage, visit with Deb (who is almost like a niece to Maryruth) and share some more great meals with us before they went back to California.

Grants Pass has a great downtown area, with historic buildings, some nice art installations, and several annual festivals. Saturday and Sunday was the annual “Art Along the Rogue” festival, a celebration of street art. I guess that street artists are a genre of their own, and I only saw them some time ago when visiting downtown Pasadena. I loved having such a cosmopolitan event right there in our second adopted home town. Both main streets were shut down to traffic so the artists could create these amazing images with chalk on asphalt. Ephemeral, beautiful, like a sand castle, they are created, we enjoy them, and they then disappear. I actually do wonder just how long they last after the traffic opens again.

Maryruth and Gerald left for home, and Deb, Mo and I wandered the town, discovering the fabulous Saturday market where I bought more goodies than I really wanted to carry. We then met up with our neighbors, Wes and Gayle who were also at the market, and wanted to come and see the cottage before they leave for their winter home in Arizona this week. We then ran into a bunch of folks from Rocky Point who were visiting the festival as well. So much social stuff! Geez, for someone who isn’t very social, this was a LOT of interaction. 10-05-2013 Art on the Rogue

When we got back to Rocky Point on Sunday afternoon, I was so very very glad to be home where I didn’t have to talk any more. Except for one little surprise. My sister Sal, who was a medical transcriptionist, lost her job to changing technology, and instead of sitting around moaning, decided to go to truck driving school and become a truck driver. I hadn’t seen her since Easter, and she was in Klamath Falls for just a quick turn around before getting back out on the road.

My baby sister, at 63 years young, is now a big rig driver! Sheesh! the girl has guts, always has. She is trying to get her tractor fixed up a bit with some girly stuff, and asked me to make a quilt for her that had LOTS OF COLOR!. So I did. I was glad to have the top finished at least to show her when I drove into town for our quickie visit.

So now, finally, it is Tuesday, and I really don’t have to talk any more. Once I hit the PUBLISH button for this blog, I don’t even have to write any more. I don’t have to do a dang thing! At least not today. Tomorrow it might be time to pull out the Halloween decorations, trim back the summer foliage for winter, wander around taking photos of the fall colors, and maybe catch up on the Homeland DVD’s that showed up in the mail yesterday.

Who said planning is the fun part?

Clear warm evening in Rocky Point at 83 Degrees F

When I first imagined what RVing would be like many years ago, I pictured an idyllic ramble around the country, taking my time, staying wherever I felt like staying for as long as I wanted, and just picking up and leaving when I felt like it. That might work in the desert southwest now and then, but not so much for a three month sojourn through Texas and Florida and back, during prime season.

In the midst of all the other doings around here, I have been trying to get a handle on those plans. Usually I like this part, and open up the various apps that Nina discussed so well in a recent post, start up my old copy of “Streets and Trips 2011”, open up Google Maps and my Google Calendar, and start planning a route. Even for our trip to Alaska, this was a fairly straightforward process. We didn’t even make reservations for that entire summer on the road.

Florida in February is a completely different story, and as Sherry warned me, I should have started six months ago! I not only have to plan a route, I have to know EXACTLY when I plan to be in any particular place and make real honest to goodness reservations. Ack! How in the world can I be sure that I’ll be in Chiefland, Florida on a specific date when there are many months and thousands of miles between me and that date?

I have dreamed of a winter in Florida with my kayak in tow ever since I started visiting Bel in Ocala back in 2000. Mo and I got our boats to Florida on our cross country trip in 2007 for one magical float on the Silver River before we trundled on back west to buy the new motorhome in Texas and continue toward home. I have read the blogs avidly, ‘pinned’ campgrounds and rivers and events, and they created the beginning of my google map. The problems only begin when I try to link them all up, figure out the route and the miles and the DATES…and then make reservations. Only by now, I have been working on this for a few months, and I am too late for some of the places I wanted to go! Yup. Sherry was right. I should have started this six months ago, but somehow I was too busy TRAVELING then to be thinking about what I was going to be doing in 2014.

Before I go into the ‘plans’, I want to remember the fun things I have been doing NOW.

Would you eat dinner in this place? We did, and it was a fantastic experience. The Cowboy Dinner Tree used to be just that. It was a big old juniper tree out in the Oregon Outback near Silver Lake where they parked the chuck wagon for the cowboys. It has evolved a bit, and now people come from who knows where to fill this place up every weekend. Reservations required, two choices: chicken or sirloin. Dinner comes with salad, rolls, bean soup, potatoes, iced tea or lemonade (oops another choice) and dessert.

It isn’t cheap, and it takes two hours to get there. We rode with some local Rocky Point friends so the distance was irrelevant, and the experience was priceless. It is a “thing” and I am glad we took the time to do it. Although I brought the completely ridiculous steak home and made fajitas two nights in a row and then two more dinners from the chicken. Sheesh!

This week was bittersweet in a good way. I worked the very last time for soil survey. Sequestration and budget cuts and no federal budget all combined to end my contract career, so I retired for the second time. So I am really really retired now. Completely. It makes for some nice travel time, and is the reason I can manage to be off work long enough to take off next winter for three months instead of just a few weeks at a time. I’ll be poorer, but richer in time. I am pretty sure it is a good thing.

Another delight this week was a visit from Vermont friend Jeanne, (yes the famous adventure woman, Jeanne, that I have written about before). Only this time she brought along her sweetie, Alan, and he won Jeremy over in about two seconds and won me over about two seconds after that. Jeanne, you done good!! As did you, Alan. A pair made in heaven, or as all Jeanne’s friends say, a Danielle Steele novel. It is just romantic beyond imagination. He is a forester, she is a botanist, they both had basically given up on finding a soul mate, and they met in the woods at work! Isn’t that just incredibly perfect?!

We were on the water by 7 with beautiful partly overcast skies, perfect water, and lots of birds. Jeanne and Alan planned to see Crater Lake later in the day, but weren’t in too much of a hurry to miss out on pancakes and bacon for breakfast before they left.

After all the smoke that has been here, I was so glad to see perfectly clear skies by the time they got to Crater Lake, blue and smoke free and gorgeous. At least on the web cam. I had to keep checking to be sure that Alan’s first view of the lake would be wonderful. Jeanne wanted to show him all the cliffs she used to ski down when she lived here. Crazy woman.

Now back to the planning thing. Which is pretty much how that planning thing has been going. I work on it awhile, then something comes up and I get back to it later. Which is why I missed out on Myakka Springs and a couple of other places I wanted to see in Florida. Completely Booked!! We did manage to have a conversation with John and Carol from Our Trip Around the Sun who are going to be at Ding Darling Refuge on Sanibel Island and yes, I arranged a day, at 7 in the morning, when we will meet for a refuge trip that will hopefully turn up some spoonbills. Big on my bucket list. And yes, I have planned that specific day and specific hour from 3500 miles and six months away.

I know, I know. I have no right to complain. If you haven’t read Erin’s post about her plans for the next three months go check it out. That is planning on an Olympic scale! I think they have so many vacations nested in their vacation that it reminds me of those little Russian dolls. Ours will be just a bit simpler. We only have a simple vacation with a cruise vacation buried in the middle there somewhere.

We will amble through California, Arizona, New Mexico, and into Big Bend country in Texas, wander off to the coast at Port Aransas where I will get to walk the beach with Erin and watch her with that famous camera! We will continue east toward New Orleans, where we will take a 9 day break for a little cruise to the Western Caribbean, and after returning we will amble off to Florida for a month of kayaking and beaches. There is a saying about Florida, “I came for the beaches, but I stayed for the rivers”. Ahhhh. We will go as far as Key West, then amble back up the coast.

I have mostly reserved everything along the way. I think we will be in Blue Springs on Monday morning, March 3, at 10:02 AM. Or something like that. I know, the best laid plans can be severely disrupted, and I am trying to accept that with equanimity. Still. Those reservations are all prepaid, for Pete’s Sake! When we leave Blue Springs a few days later, I have no plans except for going north and west. I have no reservations. I have lots of blog posts about COE campgrounds and great places to see along the way, but we are going to actually stay loose during this part of the trip. For the month of March, we will just move gradually west and north toward home, following whatever route the weather and our mood dictates. I’ll let you know how that goes as well.

It is so great to have Deborah here to house sit for us while we are gone. She wants to keep the home fires burning and I’ll leave my truck with her so she can get back and forth in the snow. We will be bringing Abby, but I have decided to let Jeremy stay with Deborah for the trip. At least for now that is what I have decided. I’ll let you know how THAT goes as well. Sigh.

Lots coming up. More to tell, but this post is entirely too long so I’ll save it for later.

Next: MoHo interior renovations and we are soon off to the far northeastern part of Oregon!