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.