On The Road Again

After almost five months of being parked at Happy Trails, interrupted by a couple of short trips, we are back on the road for the next six months. Our general plan is to spend the next six weeks or so in Utah and Colorado Rockies before heading back to the Midwest for a family gathering in Wisconsin and doctor appointments for Sue. In August we meet Seattle friends in Sault Ste Marie and head to New England and down the East Coast to Florida and Jeff's folks.We spent a couple of days in Las Vegas sightseeing the new hotels (and eating!) before heading to Zion NP to meet up with 20 friends from the RV Forum to start a two week tour of southern Utah's National Parks.Our route took us over Hover Dam after a short inspection of the m/h by Homeland Security who checks each vehicle that drives over the dam. A new bridge over the Colorado River is being constructed to detour traffic away for security reasons.
The new hotels are really lavish and we spent two afternoons checking out three or four of them. Everything from the Eiffel Tower to Flamingos greet you when you come on off the street. We don't gamble but enjoy the City of Lights anyway.

Hawaii

Another way to break up the winter is a flight to Honolulu and its balmy weather in February! We see our Hawaii gang about twice a year so the girls seem to be really growing every time we get together!
We spent a week with our kids including babysitting, trips to the zoo. and a pre-school field trip for Jeff and Emily where he was the only grandpa there.

A New Winter Home

We are spending our 3rd winter in Surprise at Happy Trails RV Resort and have decided to buy a RV lot here. A lot across the street from the lot we have rented for the past two years from friend and fellow RVer Russ Mahoney has become available. It is on the golf course and we made an offer that was accepted.
Having a casita equipped with restroom, washer/dryer, sink and dishwasher plus room to store what we are accumulating has made this year a comfortable one. Happy Trails is a 55+ RV resort with golf course, three pools, and many activities that we are involved in.
We have talked to several contractors and will probably decide to build an Arizona room next year that will have a bedroom and kitchen. That will mean having a place to bring our possessions that have been in storage and an alternative to living in the motorhome over the winter as we have for the past four years.

Back to Quartzsite

An annual tradition for us is to join the RV Forum in the desert just south of Quartzsite, AZ for a week in late January. QZ hosts a combined rock show and REV rally the last full week of January that attracts thousands of RVs to the desert of SW Arizona.
The Forum always gets involved in new upgrades to our equipped such as our satellite antenna. With all week to shop, visit, and help out there is never a shortage of willing hands! The week helps break up the winter months in Arizona.

From Cape Cod to Florida to Arizona

This is really playing catch up but it has been a wild 3 months.! After traveling down the east coast and meeting up in Altlanta, after Sue visited our daughter Jami and family in Hawaii, we spent six weeks in Florida with Jeff's folks.

A fast trip to Arizona got us there in time to travel back to Chicago for a very cold but nice Christmas with daughter Laurie and her family.

We are back at Happy Trails for New Years and will be spending the winter here in the southwest.

Cape Cod

After all the years of traveling to Maine for Cousins family functions we finally made it down to the Cape. We had a short 50 minute drive to Dennisport from Plymouth and were settled in by 1:00PM.
We headed up the Cape from Waltham to Provincetown which encompasses the entire Cape Cod National Seashore. The visitor's center at mid Cape has a beautiful presentation that explains the ever changing landscape and ecosystem of the beaches, ponds, and salt marshes. It is hard to grasp that eventually the entire Cape will disappear under the relentless pounding of the winter storms off the Atlantic.We did not give the upper Cape the time it deserves so after several detours on the drive up the Seashore we had little time to spend in Provincetown, a whaling center two hundred years ago and now a summer haven of artists and tourists. The community has retained its 18th century look with very narrow streets and alleys and weathered buildings.
The next day was a trip to Hyannis to visit the JFK Museum and memorial and see how the upper crust enjoys summers on the Cape. Jeff managed to brush the curb with a tire pressure sensor that snapped the tire stem off so we had lunch waiting for our road service show up and change the flat that resulted. An hour at the local Honda dealer installed a new TPMS sensor that is attached to the stem and we were set.
Our last full day was a chance to travel by Ferry out to Nantucket Island and spend four hours touring the very busy summer resort before the 1:50 minute ferry back to Hyannis. We took a tour around the Island to get a little background on Nantucket and Siasconset, the fishing village on the SE side f the island that has become a haven for the New York artistic set.The unusual building design in Siasconset include the trellised roofs. The trellis prevents the roots of the vines to penetrate the shingles and damage the underlying roof. Some of the buildings were covered by beautiful vines to the peaks of the roof.The ferry ride was quite violent on the open water because of high winds so we stayed outside on the rear deck. We returned to Hyannis around 6:00PM and headed back to the m/h.

The next day we drove up to Wompatuck State Park in Hingham, Mass 30 miles south of Logan Airport to be as close as possible for Sue's early departure Thursday for Honolulu. After dropping her off and making sure the flight left on time Jeff spent a couple of hours in downtown Boston around Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall having breakfast and playing tourist.

Plymouth Rock

After crossing back into Maine on Thursday we met Jeff's uncle Carroll and Kevin for lunch, picked up our wine and liquor that we had left with them in July and headed for Freeport for the night. We spent the afternoon and evening cruising the stores including L.L. Bean and left the next morning for Kittery, Maine and the malls there. Dinner in Kittery was lobster for Jeff, probably the last of this trip.We have finally shopped ourselves out and are in Plymouth Massachusetts for the night. We spent the afternoon touring the Mayflower II and the Plimoth Plantation, a replica of the Plymouth Settlement and the Wapanoag natives who they interacted with. The plantation was interesting and does a good job of tracing the settlements beginnings.

We will leave in the morning for Cape Cod.

Our Last Day in Canada

Today will be our last day in Atlantic Canada and it marks two months since we crossed the border up at Fort Fairfield, ME to Perth-Andover New Brunswick.
We did do a little sightseeing today by making an early trip at low tide across the tidal flats to Ministers Island, the summer home of Canadian Railway magnate Sir William Van Horne. Sir William was credited with completing the Trans Canada RR and chose St Andrews as his family's summer residence. He purchased the island from Loyalist Anglican Church minister Rev Samuel Andrews' family. Andrews settled the island in 1778 and his residency there gave it its name.

The Van Horne home went through decline at the hands of several owners after the Van Horne daughter, the last of the family, passed away in the 1970's. New Brunswick finally stepped in and named it a historic site and assumed control. It oversees operation by a trust that is restoring the property to its original state.Access to the island is by boat except for 2 1/2 hours twice a day at low tide when you can drive across a sand bar connecting the island to the mainland, which is how we got there this morning. The staff provides a tour and a great explanation of the family history as well as the features of the house and large barn complex.

We were back at the campground by 11:00am where Sue decided to spend the day while Jeff headed back to St Stephens for a round of golf. We had an early dinner in St Andrews and were back well before dark to enjoy a last evening on Passamaquoddy Bay.
Our 62 days in Atlantic Canada have been one of the highlights of our retirement travels and we will enjoy the music, photos, and memories we carry back with us. Our traveling included 3,000 miles in the motorhome, 4500 in the CRV, and six ferry crossings.

We cross over to Calais Maine in the morning.

Passamaquoddy Bay

Being on an extended RV trip as we are can have its ups and downs but today is what makes up for days like yesterday. We really did not enjoy Saint John very much, probably mostly because of the campground and weather but we were definitely ready to leave this morning.

We awoke to a beautiful blue sky and got on the road by 8:30AM to have as much of today as possible to see the St Andrews area before crossing to Calais, ME Wednesday morning to meet Jeff's Uncle Carroll and Kevin for lunch.
We drove about 50 miles down the coast to the Kiwanis Oceanfront Campground in St Andrews that friends Tim and Jan Lynch stayed in a few years ago and Betty Brewer mentioned to us a couple of weeks ago. We came around the corner and saw the campground looking over Passamaquody Bay and knew we had made the right decision in leaving the Saint John area. After checking in and pulling into our campsite looking out across the bay Jeff called Carroll and postponed Calais until Thursday; we just have to spend a couple of days here enjoying the glorious view!We did drive up to St Stephens, the NB side of the border crossing, this afternoon to visit the Ganong Chocolate Museum. Ganong's is a fifth generation maker of candies and boxed chocolates in St Stephens that still make their signature candies like the Chicken Wing, a cinnamon flavored pink, hard candy jacket over a chocolate center that was created in 1885!

Now being charged $4.00 to enter a businesses museum might seem expensive but when they set out trays of their boxed chocolates to sample as you watch videos and tour the museum it gets to be real reasonable, especially after going next door to the Chocolatier and seeing what fine chocolates cost! It was a bad day for weight control but Jeff got the price of admission back several times over!We then returned to St Andrews following the Passamaquoddy River down to St Croix Island, the first French winter settlement in Atlantic Canada. Pierre de Monts and his cartographer Samuel de Champlain chose this small island as their first wintering location while exploring Le Cadie (Nova Scotia) in 1604. Unfortunately they were late getting established and did not consider the consequences of being stranded on the island by ice and a harsh winter. 35 of the 70 men died of scurvy and sickness that winter and caused the party to choose Port Royal as the location of the Habitation the following summer.
We went down to the waterfront at St Andrews for dinner and strolled around the beautiful little seaside town admiring the murals and boats moored in the harbor. This is obviously a tourist destination with golf courses, a large hotel and many good restaurants. We will enjoy our stay here!
The sun was setting as we returned to the motorhome and it is getting quite cool; fall is coming!

Foggy Old Saint John

We are not having great luck in St (Saint) John ('s)! Today turned out just the same as the day we did the city tour in St John's, Newfoundland, so foggy the tour bus driver was telling us to "imagine" what the view was like!We met the city transit tour bus in the campground at 10:00AM and traveled about the city seeing old homes and hearing a brief history of the city and its primary employer and benefactor, the Irving family. KC Irving started in the oil delivery business here in the 1920's and expanded into automobiles, refining, retailing, trucking, forestry, paper mills, and just about any other business that supported his other endeavors.We revisited the Reversing Falls but decided to pass on the boat rides that are available over the rapids. After a few minutes of watching harbor seals catching fish we climbed up to Marcello Tower and saw less than we did last night, nothing but a dim outline in the fog!Our stop at the City Market was a chance to see the roof that is designed as an upside down hull of a boat to carry the winter snow loads. It was a chance to sample the foods and coffee offered by the many local vendors. Brad our tour bus driver also arranged for us to tour the Imperial Theatre, a local theater that had deteriorated over the years as it passed from live shows, to a movie theater, to a church, and then was saved and restored by local citizens led by a cab driver.

We were back in the campground by 12:30PM and had lunch at home. The weather was still dreary so Sue decided to stay in and Jeff headed downtown for the NB Museum a tour of the natural history and industrial-ship building sections of the museum. No photos we allowed even though he skipped the art portions of the 3 story complex.
We headed over to the east side of town for dinner and a movie, two movies actually, "The Woman" for Sue and "A Righteous Kill" for Jeff. We find only a few movies that we both enjoy. We did climb back to the Carleton Marcello Tower for the 3rd time as the sun finally broke through around 4:30PM and allowed a view of the city.
We decided we have seen enough of Saint John through the fog so we are moving down the coast to St Andrews By-The-Sea in the morning before crossing back into Maine Wednesday.