In the middle of Virginia's Crooked Road

Have you heard of the Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail? I was excited to stumble upon mention of it in December while researching our southern sojourn. One major piece of my agenda was to listen to as much live music as possible and take in some of this country’s fantastic music history.

Answers to burning or not so burning questions

• What's it like to live without plumbing/water in an RV? Ummmm, it's like, ummmmmmm, it's mildly irritating. (LL interprets: it sucks). You have to find alternative ways to wash your hands and you have to stock up with the park ground water to pour down the RV toilet. (LL interprets: it's icky) And sometimes when I go to the park bathroom

The Vanderbilts' Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC

We just spent 5 hours walking through the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, built by George Vanderbilt in 1895 on 8,000 acres.

You can't take photographs of the inside, unfortunately. The rooms and fabrics, walls, ceilings, fireplaces,

New Age Mecca

Asheville, NC, pops up on national rankings for a variety of things:

• The "New Age Mecca"
• The "New Freak Capital of the U.S."
• One of "The 50 Most Alive Places To Be" (Rolling Stone)
• One of the "Best Places to Reinvent Your Life" (AARP Magazine)
• "Beer Capitol, USA"

It's all about the music

Well Marley had her say about Memphis, so I suppose I ought to add a few more notes on that fun city of 670,000+ residents. Yes, I did enjoy fried chicken for the first time in my life. I had to go back for a full lunch the day after I shared my take-out snack with Marley.

"we''ll cash in our plane tickets, give you the cash so that you can buy food for your trip, and we'll come along with you."

We have just spent two days driving around the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, but haven’t managed to get into the city to see any of the sights! I won’t bore you with the reasons why. We feel tired out, we feel like skipping town and will head to Falls Creek State Park in Pikeville for a relaxing two days in the countryside. This is where Laurie’s grandma grew up, raising and training "Tennessee Walker” horses. Her land was sold years ago to the adjacent state park. Not much to say about Tennessee yet, so I would like to entertain you with a crazy unexpected journey

Once a big sister, always a big sister

Last week heading through Mississippi on 1-55, we stopped in the small town of Batesville en route to the campground. Laurie went into the grocery store to pick up supplies while I took Marley for a short walk. As I passed by boarded-up store after boarded-up store, feeling the tremendous sadness of the place, a diminutive

"You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog"

I'm sending out a big woofety-woof-woof to all my dog pals out there, you know who you are. So, I know we talk about this all the time, but honestly our furless-bipeds can be infuriatingly clueless sometimes. Let me give you my latest example:

Laurie sums up the past two days and our tornado experience

Just left Mississippi, after driving through some of the back country, far from the main thoroughfares, where the poverty is heartbreaking. Houses crumbling on their foundations, often with tons of trash or beat up cars in the yard. Whole towns were boarded up, with maybe one supermarket left standing. The only businesses that seem to be able to survive here are government-funded — the post offices, schools, WIC offices.

Hola from NOLA

For the last four days we were having a blast in New Orleans. Luckily, we had a family friend Elizabeth Shannon to give us an insider’s view of this complicated city. Elizabeth's an artist and activist living in the funky artsy Bywater section of NOLA. As soon as we arrived (and secured a rental car — how blissfuly small it felt!), she invited us over to her gorgeous studio in a former warehouse with 25 foot ceilings. She was doing a costume fitting for her best friend Dawn Dedeaux, the “queen” of the artists’ parade that kicks off the Mardi Gras season. The Krewe de Vieux parade

"You all are arriving at a very good time. Carnival hits the streets this weekend with an artist parade called The Krewe du Vieux..." See below:

The past four days have been lovely. More from the campsite at St. Andrew's State Park in Florida before I move ahead to the content of the post title.

One stop away from New Orleans

It’s cold but sunny and we walk, walk, walk. Several times a day. 

We see dozens of blue heron perched in bushes and on the beach of "alligator pond." We see large white egrets complacently standing in empty campsites not 15 feet away. We see a family of five deer in the morning eating berries; they look up at us as we pass (with Marley) and resume eating. We see signs depicting bears and bear cubs crossing the road. Notices about bobcats and rattle snakes. Marley is on a leash all day, but she has accepted this. We see a large pod

A beautiful beach, huge RVs, and plenty of churches

Churches in Carrabelle Beach, population of 2,842 people. So many options, try them all!

• First Baptist Church

Not so pretty

We have just left Rt. 95 South and the landscape of 200+ year old oaks and drooping Spanish Moss. Mostly there are tall pines in view. The air is different, the shadows are shorter. The sun is hot. It may be too early to tell, but we appear to have left behind a certain southern charm. And yesterday we had our first “unpleasant” series of events.

For the first time

Swamp Dog

The nomadic roaming feels good to me. I love arriving in a campground after dark (and, sometimes under the cover of dense southern-coast fog) and waking up to a new world; one night it's along a tidal basin, another beside miles of dunes and palm trees. Here, outside Savannah, we're camped in an old oak forrest that has an understory of palm trees! Each morning

Marley Pipes Up

Woof. Hullo, hullo, hullo to all my friends back in Boston: Wiggie, Penzey, Daaaaayton, Phyllis, Fergie, Piru, Aggie…I'm somewhere down south, don't know where exactly, but it's not home. Dogs down here bark funny. They have a twang and keep calling me, "y'all." Like, "Hey, y'all, you got a really nice tail." Which, of course, is true. Every day we seem to be

Edisto Beach State Park....Magnolia Plantation some other post!

It's stunning here. A long, white, shell strewn beach, the dunes right in front of our camper. Air that is suddenly soft enough to allow leaving our door and windows open as the sun sets beyond the palm trees. Marley has enjoyed a wet and sandy romp, Laurie is cooking freshly caught local shrimp. Earlier this afternoon, I hitched a ride with

Photos from Charleston, SC

Y'all may want to hear something about Charleston, but the truth is, we only spent half a day there before heading 18 miles north to Magnolia Plantation. We parked our little RV on E. Bay Street — the waterfront, in the area called South of Broad. Free parking all day long! For the next five hours or so, we wandered the streets

Laurie Pipes In

So Thursday we drove down to Charleston and along the way we stopped at a rural supermarket where eyeglasses were $1/pair, packages of broccoli came with plaintive labels urging "Try Me," and there were steaming cauldrons of boiled cajun-spiced peanuts. (Our assessment: soggy warm spicy glop.) At our campground just outside the city, there was a huge

Good morning. Looks cold out there. A very unusual 27 degrees.

Oh dear....

Does anyone know, do you have to have a Google "profile" in order to leave comments on a Blogger post? I may have just fixed my settings so that anyone can comment---let me know? Thanks!

Yesterday we raced south, leaving the storm behind and our plans to visit the NC Outer Banks-Cape Hatteras Island, where winds were gusting up to 50 mph. We looked up what that would mean for an RV and learned that we'd be rocking and reeling so we high-tailed it down south. 

As the sun began to set around 6pm, we crossed into South Carolina. It had been a long day of driving but well worth it. An audio recording of Pat Conroy's "South of Broad" set in Charleston, SC, kept us company for several hours. At last we

Our home on wheels

I haven't taken the time to enhance the photos in any way. And it's a bit hard to see here how much moving around space we actually have!

Marley in Delaware

It's Martin Luther King day and the traffic is light in New Jersey– this state of endless tolls. Laurie is driving (in slippers!) and we have just passed our first gun shop sighting. It's still cold and we will have to head further south than anticipated before we can de-winterize the camper. This second winter "arctic blast" will effect even the Florida panhandle for the rest of the week. For us, this means a few extra days without running water in the camper. But we will happily

Planning v. Spontaneity

I'm an organization "addict" who's primary goal in taking this two month, southern, coast-hugging trip with my wife and dog is to take advantage of some open ended time and incorporate some SPONTANEITY into our life. My vision of this amounts to stumbling upon or cruising into the totally unexpected. People, places, experiences, challenges, feelings, insights, ideas. You name it.

On the other hand, I hereby admit that I have spent the past month trying to PLAN out the details of this trip. I haven't gotten very far because I have been engrossed in solving a problem. That is, What "systems" should I use to gather and arrange and store and retrieve and map out and detail and categorize —and of course list, all those wonderful places, those "main stops" and larger points of interest that will guide our trajectory south and back? You see, I feel the need to pin down (pun intended) some pre-planned points, if only in order to not MISS anything interesting.

(In case you didn't already know this, an underlying fear of the control freak is that if she doesn't control her life, she will miss the good stuff; it will slip between her fingers when she isn't looking, it will fall out of sight and worse, out of mind.)

So, what to do? The question for me has become what and how to pre-plan before leaving, so that we will have less of a need to do so while on the road. My expectation is this will leave us more time to take walks, sit around a camp fire, tour an historic site, converse leisurely with locals, follow our dog's nose down a trail, and generally gape open mouthed at the variations in this country's stunning landscapes. More time to experience that spontaneity.

Getting Down to Business

The main stops:  Boston—Norfolk, VA—Beaufort, NC—Charleston, SC—Savannah, GA—Jacksonville, FL—Panama City, FL—Mobile, AL—New Orleans, LA—Lafayette, LA—Austin, TX—Marfa, TX—Memphis, TN—Nashville, TN—Asheville, NC—Centralia (sunken coal mines), PA—Boston.

Example points of interest: Pea Island Wildlife Refuge, the African-American Heritage Walking Tour, St. Helena Island, the Creole Nature Trail (a national scenic byway), a Second Line Parade in New Orleans, the Carlsbad Caverns, Graceland, and Dollyland.

In my research process, I was hoping to find a single application, so to speak, for mapping out information. I mapped our general route using Google Maps, and that will be our main general guide. I tried Apple Maps which is great for dropping pins to mark places of interest and save bookmarks, but it doesn't work well in other ways. I won't bore you with the details. I also tried using the map routing function on the Good Sam's Club website which is awesome for listing campgrounds and gas stations, but slow and clunky and doesn't interface with ANYTHING else. I'm using a huge stack of maps and guide books that we picked up from the very helpful AAA office, but they are very hard on the eyes and besides, in this day and age, shouldn't we be able to make it all happen at the tip of our fingertips, digitally??? Let's just say that no system is perfect, and no system is comprehensive. Perhaps I need to be less focussed on the system, and more willing to let go. Perhaps that's how I might allow spontaneity to infuse this trip. Hmmm. In  defense of over-planning, this has been an amusing way to fill the long dark northern nights!

And I must admit, it's kind of FUN, too.