Bar Harbor

We’re just about as far east as you can get in the US, but not quite. Lebec, about 2 hours (half that as the crow flies ENE of here) is the eastern most point. At least that’s our neighbors story. We’re camped next to a couple of couples from there. As I told them, “we’ll just call that good, two couples from Lebec is close enough.” Maybe the next trip when the roads are better we’ll do more! We’ve been on US Hwy 1 and it has been a piece of crap. Hard on the dishes and RV. Yesterday we took the free shuttle from our campground into Bar Harbor to sightsee, shop, and have lunch. On the way back I was going nuts. There were too many screaming kids, talking people, and the ride was right out of ‘hell’. We were sitting over the rear wheels and having our innards relocated by the jarring ride on the washboard Hwy 1. I think we’ve both had enough of the East Coast for now. It has been fun and we’ve seen a lot but……!!! It’s time to go. Too many people and cars in too little space.

But, we’ll be feeling better and getting into a little more relaxed situation in the next couple of days. Labor Day is upon us. Shops and eateries are already closing the day before Labor day. All the screaming kids, their idiot parents and ankle biting dogs can go back home and to school where they belong. That may be a little harsh but you know what I mean.

Before I close on Bar Harbor I really need to say that in spite of what I’ve written, the New England experience has been very nice. It’s much nicer than I remember from last time. Nice people and scenic country. A good experience all around. Kat says she could even live here. That may be too much of a stretch for me but it was nice. We saw the coast (the ‘shore’ as some call it back here), Acadia National Park, Kat got some lobster at the ‘lobster pound’, and I had haddock which was very good. I’m just not a lobster guy when it’s about $32 a pop. If it were half that I might go for one. But the lobster pound experience is not to be missed and I enjoyed Kat enjoying her lobster. Messy! Messy!

As a side note I must report on Jade. She escaped last night sometime and came back about 6:30 this AM. We didn’t miss her until she came back. You may remember that she uses the RV door catch as a “knocker” when she wants in. I thought I heard knocking and then the doorbell rang! Kat was still sleeping but I got up and sure enough it was Jade. We put on one of those cheap stick-on door bells and the button is pretty close to Jade’s regular knocker and she somehow ‘rang’ the bell. Then I discovered she had knocked over the lamp, pulled back the shade, and opened the screen. Who knows how long she was gone? But I guess she figured she didn’t want to become one of, or get eaten, by one of those Maine Coon cats!

Mr Bill and NYC

It’s been a great summer for watermelon. I just had to put that somewhere. I don’t know when I have had more or better watermelon than we have all the way back to Georgia. That was back in April and we have kept one in the frig since then. I cut up half in chunks and put it in a Tupperware bowl and cover the other half with plastic wrap and then do it all again in order as necessity dictates. We often sit, each armed with a fork and the bowl between us stabbing sweet and juicy chunks of watermelon and doing whatever else we happen to be doing. The only rule is, no ‘dirty pickin’; that will get you a gentle, or not, stabbing with a fork.

But this is titled, Mr. Bill and NYC. We really wanted to go to New York City and see at least a few of the sites. Whether justified or not I have always had a little trepidation about driving the motorhome into and thru large metro areas. I think NYC qualifies as a large metro area. Still we were looking for solutions and ultimately arrived at one. There are just a couple of campgrounds somewhat near NYC and they do offer bus tours to the ‘Big Apple’. We chose the KOA park north of the city in Plattekill, NY. As far as we’re concerned it was a good choice. We took the Gray Line tour from there.

Our tour guide referred to himself as Mr. Bill and he did a very commendable job. He was very knowledgeable and kept us all from going too far astray in the crowds and hustle and bustle of the city, all the while telling us what it was we were seeing. Much of the tour was sightseeing from the bus but there were 4 or 5 stops to get out, look around, or do a little shopping. We got out for the ferry ride to Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty, with a stop at Ellis Island and a walk through Battery Park. We stopped for lunch at South Street seaport on a pier that had a great view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Then we stopped at the Empire State building and Times Square, where we got a piece of Juniors very famous cheesecake. We drove through Little Italy, China Town, by the WTC site, which is now closed for construction, and passed Rockefeller Center and down Broadway. My disclaimer for folks more knowledgeable than I about the ‘Big Apple’ is that it wasn’t necessarily in that order. It was a very good tour and I would recommend it to all. But rather than talk more about it or give you some kind of history lesson, I will just post some of our pictures.

The GPS experience and Muddy Run

I don’t know if I ever mentioned that we bought a GPS unit back in North Carolina. Kat had been wanting one and we were in Wal-Mart very near her birthday when we found a unit she wanted. So we got it! The pity of it is, and I swear this is true, not 10 minutes after we bought it, Kat’s son Rick called and asked if she would like a GPS for her birthday. I’m thinking, “crap Rick, you could have called 15 minutes earlier and saved me $200”. Her was even going to buy the same unit at Wal-Mart and have us pick it up at the Wal-Mart in NC. Anyway we got the GPS. It’s a Tom-Tom for better or worse and Kat appears to be happy with it and play with it a lot. I don’t get to use it much, but I do get to follow the directions of my new “over the road” boss, Susie. That’s her computer generated voice, Susan actually. The are other voices, there’s even a Mr. T, and we understand other folks have more descriptive ‘pet’ names, some not so nice. The Wayward B#@&*, and the Navigator from Hell, among others, have come to my mind. Susie can be very accurate or she can be very inaccurate, or put a different way, she can be very, very good, or very, very bad. It’s a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ kind of a thing. One of the problems we encounter is that she doesn’t know we’re driving a land barge and pulling a dingy behind us. She just doesn’t have a real good conceptual knowledge of road width and clearances. And sometimes an address we use for a destination may not be the address we should use, like campground X may get it’s mail at address Y, and it’s hard for us to park at address Y, a PO Box. And sometimes addresses and coordinates are wrong or get entered wrong. Anyway it can be a challenge at times. I have found that a little common sense and skepticism go a long way. But it took some experience.

When we left Washington DC and headed for destinations north we had some specific problems that kind of highlight our learning curve. Our intent was to skirt Philadelphia and the major metro areas, spend a couple of nights in Pennsylvania and take a back door into New Jersey. Well! Susie avoided everything. We did see a couple of barns but I don’t know that they were in use, and I had to stop a couple of times to clean the broken branches off the TV antenna and air conditioner. Then I missed a turn! Believe me, you don’t want to miss a turn in these circumstances. It may be OK on the Interstate or somewhere they don’t actually have to pump sunshine into, but you don’t want to miss a turn in rural Pennsylvania. Susie will recalculate! And after a tough day of recalculating I think she becomes a little agitated and slightly vindictive. It’s like, “OK you stupid sucker, let’s see if you can follow this”. In this case we were headed down a road between two cow pastures and then the pavement ran out, and then the fence ran out, and then the cows ran out, and then the gravel disappeared down a gully and into the forest. And there is no place to turn around. I mean it’s disconnect the car and back the RV a half mile back up the road and turn around. Just before I start that process a pick-up pulls up behind us and a rural Pennsylvanian gets out and says “ya lost?” I said “ah heck no, we were just getting ready to spread a blanket get out the cheese and bread and have a glass of wine, care to join us”? Well actually that wasn’t the conversation at all, but the rest is mostly true. He asked if we were headed to Muddy Run campground, which we were, and then told us the road (for want of a better term) does go thru to the highway and it’s just a couple miles to the campground. Whew!!!!! But it was down through the forest and gully and pretty tight for the barge. What he didn’t tell us was that there was a tree down covering half the road (for lack of a better term). I was able to get out and pull it off the road some and then Kat held the branches out of the way while I drove thru. But we made it! And Susie proved to be right. But like I said she doesn’t know I’m not driving a Volkswagen Bug!

Muddy Run was! And all the RV sites available were hillbilly sites. That is; Hillbillies, like me, built with one leg longer than the other to be able to stay level walking down the ridgeline. Except here they were so far from level the jacks just couldn’t compensate enough. Even with ‘Boarding House’ rules we were bumping into each other frequently, not that that is such a bad thing when Kat is the bumpee, nevertheless I made certain I got the uphill side of the bed. But it wasn’t all bad, they had lots of critters for Jade to watch and a nice little café with great ice cream cones.

Cherry Hill

Cherry Hill is a very nice RV Park just on the Washington DC Beltway in College Park MD. There are not many choices at all near DC for parking an RV and seeing the city. This is perhaps the best and in fact the only one I/we’ve tried. It has all the amenities, pool, café, rec hall, and a store with an RV supply section. They even have a tourism director on site who can help with all those little tourism things. On our first day we went to the orientation and picked out a few things to do. Not that it’s hard. If you can’t find something to do in Washington something is very wrong. And a whole lot of it is free. Transportation is easy and relatively inexpensive if you don’t mind public transportation, that being the Metro, and some walking. We had to take a bus to the nearest Metro Rail station and then from there you can virtually get about anywhere in the metro area including all the tourist attractions.

We did all kinds of stuff and quite frankly the first couple of days kind of wore us out. We went to the National Zoo (free), and the National Mall and all it’s museums including, Air and Space, Modern Art (yuk), Natural History, American History (unfortunately closed), Art (plain old), the Botanical Garden etc, etc. all free. Then we rested at the pool a little and started again. We chose to take the Washington-By-Night bus tour and it was well worth the price. It’s mostly a driving tour with four or five stops at monuments including the Lincoln, Jefferson, and FDR Memorials. It’s not quite as easy as it used to be to get in the Capitol so we contacted Ron Wyden, one of our Senators for a tour and did that one day. An aid is assigned to conduct tours on a regular basis. We were fortunate to see the House Republicans in their protest of Speaker of the House Nancy Polosi’s decision to not bring an energy bill to the floor for a vote. Kat and I would have stayed longer to watch that but we only had a short time. Still it was great to see. Go House Republicans! The rest of the tour was good too but the highlight for me was to see Polosi getting slammed a little, though not nearly enough. We went to the Supreme Court building and Union Station and had an opportunity to by a hot dog and coke for $9, that would have been $9 for each of us, but we passed. We did get some good frozen desserts from a stand for only $3 each. I didn’t say it was all cheap. We had lunch at the Dept. of Agriculture cafeteria and that was neat. I wondered if that was where my grandma used to eat when she worked in DC way back in the 50’s? Who knows?

We did experience one of the sadder moments of our RV travels while at Cherry Hill. Our neighbors from California, Henry and Mildred Hoyt took the DC-By Night tour a few days before we did and Millie, who I really never had the opportunity to meet, though Kat did briefly, took suddenly ill and passed away at the FDR Memorial. I had talked to Hank a little before this happened and he was real nice old guy, they were in their 80’s. During the tour Millie complained of feeling a little poorly and went to the restroom. They found her passed out in the restroom just a few minutes later. She had had a heart attack went into a comma and could not be revived. We didn’t know all this immediately but when they didn’t show up at the RV for a couple of days Kat inquired at the office and found out what had happened. When Hank did show up he was obviously devastated. I talked to him at length and Kat gave him some hugs and attention. Two of his children came back to help him make arrangements and get home. He was going to go stay with his daughter and ‘son’ in law who had some interesting work for him to do. It had something to do with cleaning up fossils and tree burls, anyway, Hank was looking forward to it. Like I said, Hank and I talked quite a while over the course of the two or three days before he left. I’d like to think that if nothing else I provided come comfort in listening and understanding. He was a nice old guy! We’ve sent him a couple of cards and hope he is well.

Colonial Williamsburg and VB

I’ve been to Colonial Williamsburg before and it was very interesting and educational. This time we got to see a few more things than I did a few years back. We toured the haberdashery and hat and wig shop. Of course in Williamsburg most things are as they were back in the 1700’s, including the locals who are dressed and acting in period style. I asked at the wig shop “why I should be interested in purchasing a wig at all” and was quickly informed that if I “wished to remain some rube and country bumpkin I would not need one. However, if I aspired to being gentlemanly and refined I’d better sit down for a fitting”. OK !!. We toured the tavern/inn and learned what it was like to travel back in the day. I think I prefer our lifestyle. I’m not willing to share a bed with a couple of other guys. Only the wealthy were able to afford private accommodations. Gentleman like Peyton Randolph who’s home we toured and who was from one of the aristocratic Colonial families of the day. You may remember that I am a Randolph on my mothers side. Regrettably, or not, I am not from this line. My line was from ‘more sturdy farmer stock’ that settled originally in New Jersey, not Virginia. As a point of interest Peyton Randolph returned to England before any of the move for independence from England began. To use a phrase of the period for English sympathizers, he was very much a Tory. We did a few more shops, talked to a volunteer tending a garden and even had hamburgers and ice cream; very un-colonial like! All in all though it was good. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a more color. My first trip here was in the winter months and this time, in the summer, I thought there would be more flowers and color. I guess it’s not something the early colonists had time for? Maybe it was just that they couldn’t eat it they didn’t grow it.

Virginia may be for lovers but Virginia Beach was not for us. It reminded me of the beaches in Southern California except the sun rose and set on the wrong side. Too many people and too many cars. We just took a quick look and left. I think it was about here on our trip up the East Coast that I began to suffer from the crowds and the pace. It happens to me every time. But continue we did!