What have we gotten in exchange?  Well, there’s lots and lots of space.  Too much of it, in fact.  There’s 1,000 square feet to rattle around in and to fill up with the evil of evils — STUFF!  And despite our best intentions, filling up it has been.  The most shocking part of our move is that we carried 45 boxes of belongings out of the RV into the new apartment.  That’s not counting furniture, large electronics, any of the camping gear or other things stored in the basement area, and none of the stuff in my small storage unit.  We had enough to fill up a 10′ box van plus several carloads.  Disturbing.  I think we may have been a bit over our max load limit…just a little.  Good thing our brakes didn’t give out entirely during the last two summers’ trips.

For all the junk we brought over, we still lacked furniture — no bed, no dining table or chairs, no sofas.  The only furniture I brought over were our two small desks, two desk chairs, a small end table, a small filing cabinet, two folding chairs, and two camp chairs.  Fortunately, Lex’s brother sells beds for a living.  We got a new one from him at a nice discount, and I also found a cute vintage formica-topped, chrome-legged, fifties-style dining room table for sale cheap.  A friend gave us some chairs to put around it (Thanks, Corrine!), and another friend gave us a futon.  Corrine also gave us a gorgeous rolling butcher block for the kitchen.  She’s made of Canadian-style awesome.  This was enough to let us limp through for a few weeks.

During those weeks, we bought out Ikea, assembling two dressers, two nightstands, two end tables, one coffee table, one entertainment center, and three shelving units.  I also bought a metal shelving unit and folding table for the kitchen.  And then, just last week, I bought a used sofa and love seat.  Now our house is full of furniture.  Mind you, there’s no theme working here unless it’s Early American Thrift Store, but there are places to sit and places to put all that crap that came over in those 45 boxes.

Oddly, I just couldn’t find enough room in the kitchen to store the exact same stuff we had in the RV.  What the heck is that about?  Too bad apartments don’t come with all those nice built-in compartments that RV’s do.

Aside from filling up our lives with more STUFF again, there are other trade-offs.  We don’t have to swap out propane tanks every week and a half during the cold months, and our third-floor apartment stays relatively warm, so we don’t need to run the furnace very often, but we do have to pay an electrical bill now.  That plus the water bill, the increase in rent, the added gas, maintenance and auto insurance for the longer commute, and the renter’s insurance (which we now have to carry in addition to RV insurance), we’re going broke $50 and $100 at a time.  Ouch.

For all that, we’re warm and dry, when things break, we can just call maintenance, a deep puddle of mud and dirty water does not collect outside our front door when it rains, we do not have a slightly creepy, overbearing groundskeeper, we do not have to worry about flooding or high tension power lines, and there are no small children running around and screaming right outside our windows. I also have a built-in dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a washer/dryer, and a storage unit.  These are very good things.

There are, however, neighbors, some of whom like to smoke in the hallway on the short walk between their apartments and their cars.  There are dogs in the building that like to bark at us whenever we take our own dogs out for walks.  There are a LOT of stairs to climb (well, by our big woman standards),  there’s much more carpet to vacuum and surfaces to dust, we have to battle for good parking spaces, especially in the evenings.  We also feel a little cut off from the outdoors.  While we do have a small balcony (where the bikes are currently being stored) where I’ve put a camp chair and folding table, it’s easy to spend an entire day inside, only going out to walk the dogs three times.  I find myself not knowing what the weather is and being unaware of the moon phases.  That always makes me feel a bit cagey.

The animals have had to get used to the space, too.  While the dogs like being able to run up and down the hall to chase their toys (something I’m sure thrills our downstairs neighbors), the cat hated this place for the first couple of weeks.  She’d spend every night walking around the apartment meowing nonstop.  I think she just felt lost.  In the RV, everybody had their little cozy spots that they called home.  Here there are lots of spots for a critter to choose from.  Fortunately, the cat hasn’t taken to sitting in the windows.  After all, she’s an illegal alien here.  We’re only supposed to have two pets.  We’ve already had to hide her away during one of the semiannual inspections. Don’t want to get evicted from our new digs because Anne Frank kitty doesn’t know how to hide away from the apartment Nazis.

I find myself concerned about the Big Blue Beast.  It’s not close enough for me to just pop over and check on it.  Corry is a six-hour drive away (when we aren’t towing the rig), so I’m worried that without us living in it full-time and without a resident cat, rodents are, as I type this, gnawing their way into my camper and burrowing into my mattress and sofa.  After all, in a NW Pennsylvania winter where deep snows are the norm, that insulated little box has to look mighty good to a critter.  The park owners winterized our rig for us for a minimal fee, and we’re actually free to come use the rig during the winter if we like, but that would mean flushing the water lines and then re-winterizing it again after we were done.  Plus, right now, we’re still trying to adapt our budget to all these additional expenses, so campsite fees are out of the question right now.  Besides, we still have to come up with the balance of the cost for the seasonal site over the next couple of months.  As a result, I’ll be picking up a couple of extra courses, so we can afford it.  Let’s just hope when we head up there in the spring to move the rig onto its permanent site, we find it in decent condition, with functional plumbing and lacking in rodents.

My semester is nearly over, and the holidays are upon us.  Despite having more space, I’ve not put up a large tree, just a tabletop Norfolk pine in the living room and a little artificial tree as a centerpiece. I also hung some lights on the balcony.  We’re about as festive as we can afford to be right now.  This is an exhausting time of the year with me doing the last of the grading and Alexis trying to get in her final projects and exams.  It should all be over next week, at least for a month when the cycle begins again.

Despite my misgivings about our new arrangement, I’m grateful for much.  I’m grateful to have the kind of job that lets me afford (if just barely) a nice apartment AND an RV.  I’m grateful to have healthy pets and a loving partner.  I’m grateful for the family I still have alive and the wonderful friends who fill my life, both here in Baltimore and back in Texas.  I’m grateful that our troops are leaving Iraq and coming home for the holidays (well, some of them, anyway.  Plenty are still in Afghanistan). I’m just plain grateful, even though my whining may not always allow that gratitude to shine through.

Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, Kwanzaa, and Yule.  And to those who celebrate none of the above, just plain happiness and merriment to you.  If I don’t post again until 2012, a happy new year, too.

On Tuesday, I contacted our current landlords and let them know November will be our last month on the site, and I contacted the campground in PA to arrange for us to store our rig there throughout the winter.  We went to the leasing office where we signed the paperwork that allowed the current renter out of her lease and allows us to take over the apartment and the security deposit.  Since then, we’ve arranged for the electric and cable to be turned on and the mail to start being forwarded on the 1st of November.

We’ll be getting keys and signing our lease on Saturday, and depending on the weather and the hour, we may even start moving in then.  We certainly will be spending Sunday moving and waiting for the cable guy to show up. We’re hoping to have Alexis working from the new place by Monday.  Lex’s brother is a mattress salesman, and he’s helped us get a new bed for the apartment at a very deep discount. At least we won’t end up sleeping on the air mattress.

I think we have mixed feelings about all this.  Of course, we’ll be thrilled to have a washer, dryer, and dishwasher and to not be responsible for repairs, but we’ll really miss our cozy little nest right on the water with the groundhogs, foxes, geese and bunnies.  We’re giving up our privacy and quiet here on the peninsula, and I’m giving up being less than a mile away from work.  I’ve grown accustomed to the quirkiness that is life in Dundalk, and now we’re headed back to the ‘burbs.  Fortunately, we won’t be terribly far away.  In fact, we’re back in the same neighborhood where we lived before we moved into the rig.  It’s a nice area, and it’s close to a really lovely park with some good hiking trails and is closer to Lex’s parents.

The apartment is huge, more than three times the space we have now.  I don’t want that much apartment, but if we decide to renew our lease next summer, we can move into a smaller place if we are still of a mind.  We have virtually no furniture aside from our two desks, two desk chairs, a file cabinet, and an end table.  We’ll be living out of Rubbermaid containers and off camp chairs for a while.  It will be strange but doable.

On the upside, no more laundromat!  And I think I’ll be able to tolerate apartment living knowing that we have an escape hatch in our RV.  We can hop in the car and drive to PA whenever we need a break from the plain vanilla.

We’re going to be taking the rig to PA on the 12th.  Let’s just hope the tires hold up for this one last trek. We have to get to Corry before it gets much closer to winter.  They see a LOT of snow there in the winter. We don’t have snow tires and don’t want to careen off the side of a mountain.

So, yes, this is the end of our fulltiming adventures.  It’s happened more quickly than we’d planned, and who knows?  We may come to regret leaving the rig, but given that snow is already forecast for the weekend, maybe not.

This is the part of following RVing blogs that’s always made me sad — when the fulltimers go back to living in a sticks-and-bricks home.  I always feel a little betrayed when I read those final entries, and now, here I am, the betrayer.  Maybe one day we’ll be able to go back to fulltiming, but for now, we’re going to have to learn to adapt to life as we once knew it.

Once we get settled, I’ll check back in.  Until then, happy travels.

I brought the flu back with me.  I was back at work just a couple of days when I had to take a sick day.  My flu turned into bronchitis and lingered.  I stayed sick for nearly a month.  Lex got sick about two weeks after I did.  We would both get a little better and then get sick again.  Lex is still recovering from her latest bout of this bug, and  I still cough a bit at night and in the morning.  It’s much better than it was, though. I’m hoping we’re done being sick for this flu season.  I’ve missed more than enough work already.

Fall is definitely here.  Nighttime temperatures are starting to slip into the 40′s, and the leaves are beginning to turn.  That, of course, means it will soon be time to winterize.  I’m putting it off as long as I can, but November will soon be here.  Then there will be no denying the need to wrap the hose and weatherize the windows.  We’ve already turned the water heater over to electric, and I cleaned the furnace and vents.  We’ve had the furnace on a few times now, and I suppose it will kick on tonight, too.  Just today, I put the electric blanket on the bed, and two weeks ago, I swapped out the summer clothes for the winter ones.  The mornings call for a light jacket, and I’ve even worn a sweater once or twice. The saddest part of this time of year is how much propane we start to go through.  We managed three months on the propane we bought in Ohio.  Come the middle of winter, two 30-pound tanks won’t even last two weeks.

The owners of the campground in Northeastern PA where we spent a month and a half this past summer dropped us an e-mail letting us know they had a seasonal site available.  Their season begins the first of May and runs until the end of September, and they charge only about $1000 for those five months.  Given what we pay here at our site in Dundalk, that’s an amazing deal, so we put down our deposit right away.  Of course, we won’t be able to stay for the entire season.  We can probably drive up toward the end of May once my classes are over and then stay until mid-August when I have to be back at work.  I usually have a few meetings between the end of classes and the time our contract is up in mid-June, but I can always drive back for those meetings and stay with a friend for those days.  It’s a six-hour drive one way, so definitely not commutable.  Even with those trips, it’ll be well worth staying there.  Not only will we save on site rent, but we’ll be decidedly cooler, too.  Our A/C decided to break down on one of the last warm days, so before next summer, we’ll have to get that fixed.  The days do sometimes get warm enough in Corry that the A/C is necessary.

We’re back to thinking about moving into an apartment.  If we did that, then we could leave the camper in PA year round.  They charge very little to store rigs for seasonal campers, much less than the local storage places charge.  We’d save enough doing that to pay for the next season. So now I’m hoarding my pennies for first and last month’s rent somewhere.  I don’t relish the idea of apartment living again, but I think we’re about ready to give up fulltiming.The downside will be that we have to continue to pay for a place to live even when we’re not living there, something we haven’t had to do while living in the rig.

I keep wishing that I had the money to buy a little spot of land upon which I could park the camper.  We could live there while we had a little house built. Land here is so expensive and zoning restrictions so prohibitive that I doubt we’ll ever be in a position to fulfill that dream.  I would say screw this and go back to Texas where property can be had for much less and where RVs are more welcome, but, I’ve got my dream job here and would be profoundly stupid to give it up.

Meanwhile, the rig is nearly ten years old, and though we have a year and a half left on our warranty, we’re concerned about how much longer the Big Blue Beast will be roadworthy. As it is, we need new tires before we can drive her anywhere else.  A number of little things are needing fixing.  I’ve got three separate small leaks, all of them from drains, not fresh water.  Those will need fixing before things start to freeze.  So, leaks, the nearly-dead A/C, dry rotting tires, broken shades, the fried surround sound system — it’s starting to add up, so much so that it’s discouraging. Of course, some of this stuff is covered by the warranty.  But the tires and window shades are on me.

I have made one improvement to the place, though.  I bought another load of gravel and poured it down out front.  Then I bought a bunch of resin pavers and laid them over the gravel.  We now have a little “patio” that will drain rather than puddling up in a rain.  There hasn’t been a major storm since I put down the gravel, but I’m hoping this works.

While this has been a hairy couple of months, one good thing has been that I’ve been able to see a lot of my family.  While we were in Texas for the funeral, I stayed with my aunt, saw my cousins, and visited with my biological father.  My sister was in town last week, and now my aunt is here visiting another of my cousins in Pasadena.  We’re headed there tomorrow to have lunch with them.

Lex is working hard at her graduate studies.  After this semester, she’ll be only three classes away from finishing her degree.  I will be going back to school in the spring in hopes of getting all the credits I need to apply for promotion next fall.  Then there will be TWO grad students in the house.  Oh, boy.  Hope we can survive both of us procrastinating that much. I’m going to try and enjoy my last couple of months of freedom before school begins in January.

Now that the weather is cooling off, I’ve got the camping bug again.  Don’t know why I feel so compelled to camp in cold weather.  Seems like a bad idea, but I do rather enjoy it for some odd reason. I’ve also decided to take up hiking in earnest (as opposed to the rambling around the woods for a mile or so looking for a cache).  I have dreams of the Appalachian and North Country Trails — not the entirety of them, just sections.  First, I’ll work up to a couple of miles.  Then five.  Then an entire day’s hike.  The a two-day hike.  Once I’m comfortably hiking at least 8 miles a day, I’ll think about perhaps doing just the MD stretch of the AT.  It’s a long-term dream, but I think it may be achievable.  We shall see if I can stay motivated.

So Halloween is just around the corner.  I’ve got my pumpkin and am ready to carve a jack o’lantern and already have a costume lined up.  Wherever you may be, I hope your Halloween is sweet and scary.

Ger left on Monday, August 22, and on Tuesday, the 23rd, an earthquake that was 5.8 on the Richter scale hit Virginia.  I was at school at the time, and Lex was here at home.  The quake lasted for about 15-20 seconds.  At first, I had no idea what it might be. Then I wondered if it was the renovations that have been going on around school for several months, but then it got worse and felt like a giant was shaking the entire building.  My next thought was that we had been bombed, bu then, suddenly, it stopped.  It wasn’t hard enough to do any real damage, though some buildings in and around Baltimore did suffer.  The Washington Monument and National Cathedral in D.C. were damaged, too.  My school was fine, though, and so was Alexis.

She said that when the camper started to move, she thought the dog had jumped off the bed.  The rig does wiggle a bit when we do.  But then it got worse, and her next thought was that someone was outside trying to move the RV.  She got up to go check, and when she was halfway across the floor, the shaking got worse. The whole RV was moving and making a terrific noise.  We suppose that it was the levelers and front landing gear grinding with the movement.  Lex says by the time she got to the front door, she could see the power towers outside swaying.  Then it stopped.

When the college was evacuated,  I came home to check on Lex.  We all survived intact, but the whole affair was really startling.

I realize people who live on the West Coast are used to this sort of the thing, but the ground really should NOT move under our feet!  I’ll be happy if that never happens again.

Then, the next day, we hear that a hurricane is building out in the Atlantic and moving slowly in our direction.  I decided to keep a close eye on it.  Sure enough, by Thursday, the storm was certain to hit North Carolina and then power up the East Coast.  Warnings start going out that the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the Jersey Shore, New York City, Boston, and all the way up to Maine were in danger.  We debated it and decided to evacuate on Friday night.

I found an RV park about an hour or so north in York, PA in hopes of avoiding the worst of the storm.  Saturday night, Hurricane Irene passed through the area.  In York, there were high winds and a bit of rain, but nothing was damaged.  The next morning, the high winds persisted, and we didn’t want to drive back until they settled.  We decided to stay one more night.  This meant that I’d have to drive down to school the next morning because that was the first day of the semester.  As luck would have it, school was canceled thanks to power outages caused by Irene.  I was grateful because it allowed us time to get back home and get settled in on Monday evening.  Sadly, when we got home, we discovered that our power was out, too.  That meant Alexis had no way to work from home.

School was open again on Tuesday, so Alexis went in with me so she could sit in the library and soak up the free wifi and get her work done.  When we got home that evening, the power was still out.  Oh, yay.  At least the weather was cool, we still had lights, refrigeration, and hot water.  We were much better off than our neighbors who had none of that, well, except for the cool weather.

Fortunately, the power came back on Wednesday morning.  Off I went to school to meet my new students for the first time, and Alexis got to stay home and work.  Our neighbors weren’t as lucky.  Their power wasn’t restored until Saturday sometime.  There are still people in the Baltimore area with no power, but flooding and damage was, overall, quite minimal.  I understand folks in Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire weren’t nearly so lucky.  The flooding was pretty fierce there.

I’m just hoping this is the last of the dramatic weather for a while.  I don’t care for having to pick up and pull out whenever Mother Nature sneezes.

The last few days in Corry were spent getting ready to head back.  I did laundry, finished off some geocaches that I’d been meaning to find, and started stowing things away.  The day before we left, however, we did something quite on impulse.  We talked our friend Gerry from Toronto into coming back home with us for a week so he could see Baltimore.  He took a bus to Buffalo on Friday the 12th, and Lex (who was off work that day) drove up and got him.  We discovered this was a much less expensive way for him to travel.  Had he flown across the border, the price of his plane ticket would have nearly tripled.  As it was, the bus to and from Buffalo plus the flight from Baltimore were a fraction of the price.  He spent Friday night with us and then rode back with us to Baltimore on Saturday.

The last night we were in Corry, there was a little bluegrass/country band that played in the pavilion at the RV park.  We went to see them and enjoyed the performance.  The group was The McIllvaines, a family from Tennessee.  The eldest daughter has a beautiful voice and is immensely talented.  Maybe she’ll be “discovered” one day.

We left Corry Saturday morning around 11 a.m.  The park owner guided Lex out of our spot, and he and another staff member, Shirley, waved at us as we left.  We were sorry to leave Harecreek Campground behind, but they made it clear that if we wanted a seasonal spot next year, they’d try to find us one.  We haven’t decided what we want to do about that just yet, but the idea is appealing.  Spending another summer in the cool climate of NW PA wouldn’t hurt our feelings any.  Of course, to park our rig year around, we’d have to live in a sticks-and-bricks place here in Baltimore.  I don’t know if such a move will happen this year or not.  If it does, we’ll almost have to park the rig at a year-round spot.  We wouldn’t be able to afford to travel all summer while still paying rent on a house or apartment back home.  Seasonal spots are less expensive both in terms of site rent and, obviously, fuel.  There’s only be the diesel to get the rig to the site. We could take the car with us and do all our driving with it, saving us even more on fuel.  It’s a very different way to RV, but it’s an option many choose if what they want is a home away from home rather than a home on the road.

The ride back was a bit cramped with three people and two dogs in the truck.  We managed, though, and arrived in Baltimore around 8 p.m., just as the sun was setting.  Naturally, Nosey Groundskeeper Chip was on hand to meet us.  Since it had been raining and Chip was lurking about, we couldn’t drive through the field and pull into our site (something that would have just taken a minute or two).  Instead, Lex had to spend half an hour manuevering the rig into place by backing it.  That’s just something we’re not very good at, mostly because I don’t have a good sense of spatial relations so have no idea how to direct Lex in the right way as she tries to determine which way to turn her wheels to get the RV to go where she wants it.  Ultimately, she did get it into the spot.  Gerry helped her much more than I ever do.

Chip had been there watching the entire time, and once I started to hook up the utilities, he stood over me and stared, as always.  I’d told him I could handle it on my own, but he just kept standing there.  He was waiting to turn on the water, and I knew this.  So, rather passive-aggressively, I hooked up everything else first and saved the water for last.  Took my time about it, too.  If he wanted to stand there and do nothing, I was happy to let him.  I got the sewer, electric, and cable hooked up, and we got the rig leveled.  Only then did I hook up the fresh water connection.  It took me about an hour to do all this, and there he stood, saying and doing nothing the entire time.  That man drives me insane.

The good news is that there were no neighbors here when we got home.  The rig belonging to the family that had been here most of last year was gone, and Chip said they weren’t expected to return.  We’re enjoying the privacy.  With those kids gone, we don’t have all the children in the neighborhood running around behind our rig.  This I do not miss.  To make sure they stay away this year, I bought and posted a couple of “keep out” signs, one on either end of the rig.  Hopefully, they get the idea and stay away.

The rig is slightly closer to the water than it was last year, just close enough that chip won’t be able to get his massive riding lawnmower behind it as in past years.  This is another bonus. If he wants to trim the weeds, he’ll have to do it with a push mower or weed whacker, and as he seems to do that less frequently, I doubt we’ll be seeing him as often.  Oh, my heart is breaking over that.  Not.

On the downside, they still haven’t added any gravel to the pad, so we’re still not likely to be able to pull out our rig in the event of a flood.  That and the area around our front steps still becomes a small lake whenever it rains.  I suppose we’ll have to smuggle in another load of gravel ourselves and put it down during the night like we did last fall.  It’s the only way to keep this place from being a mud pit half the year.

I also noticed that both our trash can and recycling bin went missing over the summer, presumably “adopted” by the neighbors in the house next door.  This meant I had to go to Home Depot the Sunday after we got home and buy new receptacles.  I got a better trash can and an actual recycling bin (as opposed to a makeshift Rubbermaid tub), and I bought big reflective letters and applied our street address to both!  Hopefully these won’t walk off.

It has felt good to get settled back into our familiar surroundings.  We’re enjoying our view of the creek and all its attendant wildlife once more.  We aren’t enjoying the mosquitoes, but they are a fact of life here. I’ve been so relieved to have my little car back, too.  I’ve missed having the little Kia Soul to drive around with its decent gas mileage and improved legroom (yes, that tiny car has more room inside than our big truck).  And it’s been great to see our friends and family again.

There’s been a lot of rain lately, so the ground is saturated.  We actually had a massive thunderstorm with hail roll through yesterday, bringing with it significant flash flooding around town.  Of course, there was half a foot of water standing right outside of the front door.  Thank goodness for galoshes.

We loved having Gerry visit.  He’s 6’8″ tall, and everyone we introduced him to asked where he was staying.  Well, he stayed right on our foldout sofa in the living room.  He had to lie diagonally on it in order to fit, but he says he was quite comfortable nonetheless and even claimed our sofabed was more comfortable than his bed at home.  He had plenty of headroom in the living room but just barely fit into the bathroom.  Showering was a misery for him, I think, since he had to duck a bit the entire time.  He managed, though, taking it all in stride. The dogs loved having him here, especially Ivy, who snuggled up to him as soon as he’d sit down.

Alexis at Morningstar Baptist Church

While he was here, we showed him around town, took him out to eat, took him shopping, and took him geocaching (of course).  On Saturday, we geocached all the way up through Delaware and into New Jersey, where we stopped to visit Alexis’ grandmother and cousins.  Turns out there was a cache just down the street from her grandmother’s house, across from the church her great-grandfather founded in the 1920s, Morningstar Baptist Church.  We took Alexis’ cousins with us so they could see what geocaching was all about.  Theyy were pretty amazed that people were hiding things in plain sight all around them.  I love introducing folks to the activity and watching them marvel over it.

Gerry with Mr. Peanut at Atlantic City

On the spur of the moment, we decided to drive out to Atlantic City, only an hour and a half away from Lex’s grandmother.  I’d never been before nor had Gerry.  We didn’t stay long since it was getting late and the dogs had been home alone for quite a while, but we were there long enough to play the slots at Bally’s, dip our toes in the ocean, and buy some salt water taffy at James’.  There was a cache along the boardwalk to boot!

The day in the car exhausted us, so much so that we were relieved when we woke up to the next day’s storms that kept us inside until late in the evening when we finally went out for dinner, some final caches, and some shopping before Gerry had to leave this morning.

I woke up today not feeling entirely well, so I’m working from home.  I think the go-go-go of the last week just wore me out.  I have a lot to do before school begins in a week and several meetings to attend, so this will probably be the last of my blog posts for a while.  To those who have been following our adventures this summer, I thank you for reading.  I’m sure the next time you hear from me, I’ll be prepping for winter in the RV or repairing something.  Who knows?  Until then, enjoy the final moments of summer.  Happy RVing!

Summer of the cache

Obviously, geocaching has been the centerpiece of this trip.  I knew starting out that we wouldn’t have as much money to spend as we did last year so wouldn’t be able to travel quite as far or stay in as many places.  I also knew that two major geocaching events were being held within a reasonable driving distance — Geowoodstock IX and Midwest Geobash.  I’d  heard, too, that there was a fabulous geotrail in the area of PA where Geowoodstock was happening; thus the idea for this journey was born.

Found it!

Since June 26, we’ve found 110 geocaches across four states and in Canada.  We attended our first mega events, completed the sixty-cache Allegheny Geotrail,  introduced three people to caching, found our first earthcache, and biked to caches for the first time.  Geocaching took us to countless parks, historical sites, cemeteries, nature and wildlife preserves, alleyways, parking lots, bridges, trails — you name it.  We earned thirteen geocoins, collected more than 100 pathtags, found some really nifty swag, moved a number of travelbugs along, and met dozens and dozens of geocachers from all over the world.

CCBC Geocachers at Geowoodstock

Five CCBC Geocachers also went on their longest  camping/caching trip yet, driving more than 300 miles to attend the four-day Geowoodstock event.  I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that young people with jobs, friends, family, and lots of options for how to spend their summer vacation would choose to pack themselves into a school van, drive for five hours to the middle of nowhere, spend several days in a tent, and use community toilets all for the sake of getting their cache on.  They completely impressed me (even though they did have their little disagreements during the trip).  Tasha, Brittany, Mary Ann, Kelley, and Mark were real troopers.  Thanks, guys, for making the trip.

I’m taking home lots of new ideas for caches, events, projects, and contests that will hopefully get students jazzed about geocaching. I can’t wait to make more converts this year.

Summer of the t-shirt

Shirts, shirts ...

When we moved into the rig a couple of years ago, we had to get rid of our collections.  Lex had a million ball caps, and I had a hundred or more shotglasses.  I also had several little owl figurines, and Lex had tons of CDs.  We had to part with all but just a few of each of these.  That, of course, didn’t stop us from WANTING to collect stuff.  We just have to make sure that what we collect now is useful, and when we bring things into the house, we always have to get rid of other things to make room for the new.  This summer, we collected a number of t-shirts.  We bought shirts from both of the big caching events we went to, but we also picked up shirts from some of the places we visited.  Lex got more of the shirts than I did because frankly it’s easier to find shirts in her size than it is mine.  She got so many, in fact, that there’s no more room in her clothes cabinets.  She’s going to have to do something about that soon or the tires are going to go flat under the sheer weight of all those shirts!

And more shirts!

My favorite shirts of the summer were the trackable shirts we got at Geowoodstock.  They have unique code numbers on the sleeves, so when other geocachers spot us wearing them, they can enter that code onto the website and say they “discovered” us at a particular location.  It’s fun to watch the logs be published.  We make new caching friends via these shirts sometimes, and, of course, we get lots of questions from people who don’t know what caching is.

Summer of the quirky museum

At the Zippo/Case Museum

We actually wanted to go to more nifty museums than we actually got to go to.  Cutting the Ohio leg of the trip short meant no RV Hall of Fame and no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but we did get to go the Lucille Ball Museum in Jamestown, New York; the World War II museum in Eldred, PA, the Zippo/Case Museum in Bradford, PA; and the Oil Creek and Titusville Railroad Museum in Titusville, PA.  Of these, I think Lex and I enjoyed the Zippo/Case Museum the most.  It is a monument to two important artifacts of American pop culture.  We admired the artistry that it takes to create the lighters and the knives and are proud that there are still quality products being made here in the US by American workers, iconic products that are recognized around the world. The best part of the museum was the workshop where they repair the lighters.  We’re only sad that we didn’t get to see the workers in action.  So, yes, we prefer the quirky museums to the typical museums of art and history. Interestingly, our favorite museum in the whole world is the quirkiest of them all, Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas.  Trust me, it’s worth the trip. Lex has seen the Louvre and still likes Barney better.  

Summer of the odd sign

But pointing is rude!

I’ve seen some very odd street signs during this trip, signs I’ve never encountered before.  Apparently, if you are a person with a disability in Pennsylvania, you can have a street sign placed outside your home indicating that drivers should beware.  I have seen signs warning of deaf, autistic, and wheelchair-bound people.  I can understand the need for a crossing near a school, but for a single child/adult in one home?  It almost seemed patronizing somehow.  I also saw signs warning  drivers to watch out for elk, tractors, cattle, and Amish buggies.

My favorite sign of the summer was spotted in Toronto.  It was located at a crosswalk and indicated that pedestrians should press, look, and point.  Okay, the pressing and looking I get, but the pointing?  We followed our friend Gerry through the crosswalk, and sure enough, he pressed the button, waited for the signal, stepped into the crosswalk, and pointed to indicate to drivers that he was crossing the street.  Is that last part really necessary?  When drivers see a flashing light and people stepping out in front of them, where else do the drivers think the pedestrians are going but the other side of the street?  If they aren’t panhandling, they are probably just walking from one sidewalk to the opposite one. I don’t understand it.  Clearly, it’s a Canadian thing, but it made me smile nonetheless.

Summer of the dirt road

I grew up down a dirt road.  The first time I walked to the school bus, it was down a dirt road.  The first time I rode a bike, it was on a dirt road.  The first time I drove a car — dirt road.  The first time (and last time) I ran a mile, it was on a dirt road. The first time I ever made out in a car was while parked alongside a dirt road.  The first time I did something more in a car than just kiss, we were also on a dirt road. My first car accident happened on a dirt road.  I have a long, mostly happy history with dirt roads.  And by dirt, I mean gravel, mud, clay, grass tracks — anything lacking pavement but still supporting four-wheel vehicles.  This summer, I drove hundreds of miles of unpaved roads all through Northwestern Pennsylvania.  These roads took me deep into forests, to the tops of mountains, over rickety wooden bridges, past idyllic farmsteads, and through towns so small they didn’t even warrant a sign. Sometimes, the roads took me nowhere at all.  They’d just peter out and end.

Not all who wander are lost

Alexis’ poor truck took quite a beating rolling over surfaces that were only just barely passable.  I learned a couple of important lessons this summer.  When driving beyond signs that say “no winter maintenance,” be prepared for the worst.  Also, forest service roads, while passing through some of the most beautiful country on earth, are not really suited to anything more than mules.  Vehicles with tires, beware.  The whole experience made me wish I had a four-wheel-drive truck.  There were a number of occasions when I wondered whether or not I would end up stranded, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and no passing motorists.  Some of the roads were a little terrifying. but the amazing scenery more than made up for it.

Alexis is generally wary of taking any unpaved roads.  She’s afraid we’ll get stuck or lost  (both distinct possibilities) or wander into a Klan rally in the woods somewhere (much less of a possibility).  But consider that this is a woman who grew up learning to drive on the Autobahn and has never lived very far from major population centers.  As long as I don’t get stuck or run out of gas, I’m quite content to bump down a one-lane track. I don’t mean to break out into a John Denver number, but country roads really do take me home.

***

Well, it’s country roads (all paved) that we’ll be taking out of here on Saturday, at least until we get across the Appalachians.  It’s definitely not Alexis’ favorite route as it’s hard on the truck and her nerves, but it’s the one that will take us back to Baltimore.  Wish us luck!  Just one more drive until we’re back at our little spot by the creek.  Looking forward to seeing some of our favorite Marylanders again very soon.  

Friday, July 22- Sunday, July 24

We drove up to Toronto, crossing into Canada at Buffalo’s Peace Bridge on Friday afternoon, arriving at our hotel around 10 p.m. or so.  We called up Lex’s friend, Gerry, to see if he was up to a late supper.  He was, so we met him at his apartment not far from our hotel and then walked a few blocks to a sushi restaurant.  I was in awe that Toronto’s subway stations are also small shopping malls, including grocery stores, restaurants, drugstores, and other specialty stores.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The sushi was quite yummy.  By the time we were done, it was late, so we headed back to the apartment that Gerry shares with his friend (and Alexis’ friend), Brennan, and Brennan’s brother, Chad and picked up our truck so we could return to the hotel.

In downtown Toronto

The next morning, we got up, had breakfast at Tim Horton’s and drove back to the boys’ apartment where we left the truck and walked toward the metro station.  On the way, we convinced the guys to give their first geocache a try.  They were immediately hooked, and we spent a good part of the day searching for other caches in downtown Toronto as we walked through the city.  And walk we did.  And walk.  And then we walked some more.  Periodically, we’d hop on the subway or take a streetcar, but mostly we walked.  Just a reminder:  I’m fat and out of shape.  I was tired of walking before we even got to the first subway station, but there were still eight more hours of walking ahead of us.  By the end of it, I had blisters on my blisters and was wiped out.

Storm clouds gather behind the CN Tower

We’d had a great time, though, stopping for lunch at Smoke’s Poutinerie and frozen yogurt at Blushberry (oh, God that was good).  We also got to see a number of Toronto landmarks like the old courthouse (which also happened to be a virtual cache) and the CN Tower as well as the stadium where the Blue Jays play.  As we were walking, storm clouds started to gather and then burst over us just a couple of blocks away from the Korean barbecue restaurant where we had dinner.  We ate in our soaked clothes.  I’ve never been in a cook-it-yourself joint, so found the whole thing quite novel and yummy.

At the end of the day, Brennan and his girlfriend Jenny went off on their own while we followed Gerry back to his apartment where Alexis and Gerry got online and played a little WoW while I snoozed on the sofa.  When they were done, Alexis and I went back to the hotel where we crashed and burned.

The next morning, we had a greatly overpriced breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel and then went to meet Gerry to go to an early showing of the final Harry Potter movie.  It was so good, the best of the series.  After the movie, we went downstairs to the Loblaw’s to pick up some digestive biscuits for our Canadian ex-pat friend, Corrine back in Baltimore.  That done, we headed to a nearby Asian fusion restaurant, Spring Rolls, and had a regular dim sum feast.  They just kept bringing plates of food.  It got discouraging after a while!  Fortunately, Gerry can put it away (he’s 6’9″ tall), so nothing went to waste.  We finally bid Toronto and Gerry adieu around 5 p.m. and headed for Niagara Falls.

Neither of us had ever been to the Falls, so we had a magnificent time.  We rode the Maid of the Mist, of course, took loads of pictures, browsed the gift store, and left the area just as it was getting dark.  We rolled back into Corry around 10 p.m.  We were both sad to see the weekend end.  We’d had a wonderful time with Gerry and Brennan, loved Toronto, and were awed by Niagara Falls, but the work week beckoned.

MJ and Lex aboard the Maid of the Mist

Monday, July 25 to Wednesday, July 27

Lex grudgingly got up for work the next morning while I went to pick up our pups which we had boarded all weekend at a kennel in Corry.  The dogs appeared unfazed though we had missed them terribly.  The cat seemed absolutely indifferent to our return, but she did seem upset that we brought those damned dogs back into the house. I think she was hoping for a life as an only pet.

In Susquehannock State Forest

We had just three more days in Corry, so I had to hurry up and finish my last Allegheny Geotrail county, Potter.  So on Tuesday, I drove the two hours to the first cache in that county and got down to work.  I’d heard rumors that Potter was the most challenging county.  I had steeled myself for the worst.  It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t awful, either.  One cache took me into a park that was having a huge archery competition, and they weren’t letting non-archers in the gate, so I had to park across the road and bushwhack into the cache which meant forging a stream and slogging through some muddy flats before climbing up a pretty steep hill to get to the actual trail.  I wasn’t going to let some gatekeeper stop me!  Turns out the competition wasn’t actually happening that day, so they could have let me walk down the trail the easy way, damn them!  Another cache took me up a trail, through a forest of ferns, and atop a ridge overlooking the valley below.  What a view! It was about a mile roundtrip which wasn’t bad.  It was just the grade that got me.  I managed to get all six caches, though, and made it back to Coudersport, the county seat, to pick up my county coin and the master coin.  I was so proud of myself !  It had taken me a whole month (not the three days that some folks claim it took them) to complete the entire Allegheny Geotrail, but I did it!  I figured I drove about 2,000 miles all told and hiked at least 25 miles to obtain 60 caches.

Alexis berry picking

Wednesday was our last day in Corry, and I wanted to go pick wild blueberries, so Alexis and I hopped into the truck and headed for a site in the Allegheny National Forest near one of the AGT caches where the blueberries were supposed to be plentiful.  The bushes were everywhere, but they had been picked over pretty well.  Had we come the week before, we might have gotten more.  Clearly the locals know the treasure to be found there.  We walked away with about a pint of berries.  I froze them and hope to have Alexis make us some wild blueberry muffins soon.

Thursday, July 28 to Sunday, July 31

The rest of Wednesday was spent breaking down the rig and getting ready to travel in the morning.  We needed to leave by 5 in the morning to reach our destination in Ohio by 10 a.m., so we hit the hay early, rising around 3 in the morning to get something to eat, stow the last of our gear, hitch up the rig, and pull out.  On the way to Wauseon, we had a couple of scary moments when the pigtail that connects the trailer brakes to the truck managed to unhook itself.  Both times we got safely off the road and reconnected the line.  We also hit a downpour while negotiating Cleveland’s rush-hour traffic.  Lex did a great job, though, and got us through it all.  We arrived at the fairgrounds in Warren a little later than we’d hoped, around 11 a.m. and discovered that the site I’d reserved was far too small for our rig, so we got to choose one in an area of the campground that was empty.  As Lex was backing the rig into the site (we hate back-ins), she cut the wheel a bit too sharply, and before I could shout out a warning, the back window of the rig was shattered by the nose of the rig.  Oops!  Fortunately, we were covered, and for a $50 deductible, Safelite came out and replaced the window in a matter of hours.

We spent the next couple of days enjoying Midwest Geobash at the Fulton County Fairgrounds in Wauseon.  There were vendors, games (we entered the treasure hunt and I played geobingo), and fellowship.  We decided that Midwest Geobash is decidedly more fun that Geowoodstock.  It has more of a party atmosphere.  There is one part of the grounds set aside for an all-night party, Area 51.  The first night there was a tinfoil hat contest, but I was late getting there.  By the time I arrived, everyone was pretty well plastered.

My tinfoil hat

We saw a few Maryland cachers that we recognized and met a lovely couple from Indiana who were new to caching.  They had lots of questions, and we were happy to answer them.  I continued trading my paracord bracelets (of which I’d made many) for pathtags and came away from the event with another fifty or so.  Lex bought us a gorgeous custom-made wooden box to store our tags, and we both walked away from the event with t-shirts, new geocoins, and lots of miscellaneous cache swag.

We made a run to nearby Toledo on Friday evening to see about picking up a new desk for Alexis at Office Depot.  While we were there, we grabbed a few caches, including one across the state line in Michigan.  I had found a bike for sale on Toledo’s Craigslist that I wanted to check out, so we met up with the seller after finding our caches.  I liked what I saw, so plunked down fifty bucks for an old beach cruiser.  I discovered that the seat post was loose, and all my efforts to try and tighten it were in vain.  Sadly, this meant I didn’t really get to ride my bike around the fairgrounds for the rest of the weekend like I hoped.  It would need repair first.

My "new" bike

Alexis was so taken with the idea of having her own bike, that we went to a Wal Mart in a town about ten miles away and picked up a ladies’ Schwinn hybrid bike for her.  She just loved it!  Neither of us has had a bike in years, and we’re looking forward to breaking them in.

Midwest Geobash wrapped up Saturday night, and on Sunday we hitched up the rig and left for Sunny’s Campground about fifteen minutes away where we were set to spend about 11 days while exploring the area.  We got there and found out we had no cell signal (AT&T) and none of our broadband modems were working, either (Verizon, Virgin Mobile, and Cricket).  The park’s wifi was useless.  This is a problem.  Lex had to get back to work on Monday, so she relies on a cell signal and Internet connection to do her job properly.  We had to think fast.  With no way to research local parks — we couldn’t call around or Google anything — we decided to go with what we knew.  Harecreek back in Corry, PA had working Internet, we got a cell signal there, the park was nice, and we liked the area.  So I called the park owner and asked him if he had room for us.  He did, so we headed back to Pennsylvania.  On one hand, it was disappointing because I’d hoped to go on a caching trip through Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, stopping to see Chicago on the way.  Well, that wasn’t going to happen, but at least we were returning to someplace cooler with less humidity.  The weather had been miserable the entire time we’d been in Wauseon.  We’d gotten spoiled in PA!

We got back to the campground in Corry around 10 p.m. Sunday night.  The owner met us and guided us into our spot.  We got unhitched, and Lex was driving the truck back around to the rear of the rig to park it when there was a horrible noise.  She’d run over one of the fire rings they use here in the park, and it had lodged itself between her front tire and the front bumper.  The fire rings are rims from semi trucks, so they are indestructible.  The bumper, however, didn’t fare so well.  This meant ANOTHER call to Geico, our second in three days.  Oh, boy.  There goes the safe driver discount.  In fairness to Alexis, it was pretty dark out here; I don’t think she saw the thing sitting there.  The damage seemed minimal, but I would have to take the truck to an adjuster in Erie on Wednesday to get an estimate.

Monday, August 1 to Thursday, August 4

The first day of August depresses me.  It means that I have to go back to work in just two weeks and our trip will soon be at an end, both reasons to be bummed.  So I spent most of Monday on the sofa, moving only to go take a nap in the bedroom when I developed a migraine.  I couldn’t have done much less.  Lex put her new desk together Monday night, though, so the day wasn’t a complete waste!

On Tuesday, I got up, went into town, dropped off our bikes at a local cycle shop.  Lex’s chain had come off and she wanted to make sure it was properly adjusted.  Wal Mart isn’t known for its expert bike assembly.  I really wanted my seat post fixed.  The shop owner said he’d try to get them done by Friday.  I hope he can manage it.  I want very much to go ride part of the Corry Junction Greenway Trail here in town.  It’s a rails-to-trail hike/bike trail, and the first part is paved and relatively level, so it’d be perfect for the two of us. Afterwards, I rented some videos, picked up some pizza for lunch, poked around town for a while, and came back to the campground where I watched movies most of the day, pausing to get up and take my wash over to the laundry room here in the park.  I posted a sign up hoping to get rid of Lex’s old desk, but we haven’t had any takers so far.  It’s in pretty good shape except for the wobbly keyboard tray.

Wednesday morning I drove to Erie to meet the adjuster.  The estimate amounted to $857.  Wow!  Considering how little damage there was, that’s a lot.  It’s a quick fix, apparently, with only one or two hours of labor.  The body shop where I met the adjuster was too busy and wouldn’t be able to get the truck done by the time we needed to leave the area, so I called around to another shop.  He told me to get the adjuster to fax over the estimate, and he’d get back to me.  Well, okay then.  I did that and then headed back towards Corry.

On the way, I saw an RV dealership and decided to stop in and look at some rigs.  Alexis and I are seriously considering trying to pay off this rig quickly (within the next year or so), get back into a sticks-and-bricks place, sell the rig, and buy something much smaller and easier to tow.  We talked about a truck camper as a possibility (loads in the bed of a truck instead of being pulled behind it), but neither of us had ever been in one.  Turns out the dealership had a few, and I took a look around.  I decided that without a slide, it wouldn’t really be doable for the two of us and the pets.  Even with the slide, it’d be a squeeze.  Of course, we’d only be traveling a few weeks a year instead of living in it year-round, but with so little floor space, I’m not sure what Otis would do with himself.  The sleeping area is a bit too high up for him to jump, so he’d always be underfoot.  I also looked at a couple of smaller (under 19 feet) travel trailers, and those seemed more our speed.  As we get closer to paying off the fifth wheel, we’ll have to look at more small travel trailers.  We’d liked to Heartland MPG quite a lot.  I think that’s the size we’ll need.

I got back into town, stopped at the CVS and picked up a prescription I had transferred here, and stopped by a local body shop, Corry Collision.  Turns out they could fit me in and could have the parts very quickly.  I decided to go with them.  While they work on the truck, I’ll probably take Corry’s lone cab to and from the campground.  He’ll probably take the truck in on Monday and it’ll be all shiny new and ready to roll that same day (knock wood).

Wednesday afternoon was grey and rainy, so I spent most of it watching yet more movies.  I really should start to work on my fall classes, but I’m absolutely unmotivated right now.  There’s just so much to be done that I can’t bring myself to begin.  I’ll have to suck it up and get to work soon, though.  School is coming, whether or not I’m ready.  Doing actual work means acknowledging that fact, though, and I’m in denial right now.

Now here it is 3:30 on Thursday afternoon, and I’ve accomplished precious little today other than figuring out my bills for the next month.  This trip is leaving me dead broke, and I won’t have money for dining out or going to the movies or any such luxuries for the next several weeks.  In fact, it’ll be all I can do to muster the cash to get us home.  Let’s pray nothing goes wrong on the way (knock wood again).  We can’t afford it!  I wrote out the rent check for our site in Dundalk today.  We only pay for part of the month in June and August and don’t pay at all in July.  Thank goodness.  Site rent is so expensive there that we wouldn’t be able to afford to travel if we had to pay even when we weren’t parked there.  We pay $800 a month in Dundalk for what we can get for less than $500 here (we get more here, actually, since there’s a pool, laundromat, dumpster, propane filling station, etc. here in the park).  There’s also no grumpy groundskeeper here.

We’re not looking forward to pulling back into our site in Dundalk because last year Creepy Groundskeeper Chip actually yelled at us when we pulled in through the field instead of backing in.  Next week, I’m calling the park manager and explaining that we will be pulling through the field again this year and that she should inform Chip since we have no desire to be yelled at again.  I’m also going to tell her about how he stands right over me and stares at me while I hook and unhook my utilities.  He doesn’t help and in fact will refuse if I ask him for help.  Frankly, I think he’s just there because he thinks we’re a couple of dumb broads who don’t know what we’re doing, and I think he looks down my shirt while he’s at it.  I’ll make sure Diane knows this last part, too.  I’m hoping to scare him away so he’ll leave us alone entirely.

Well, there’s more laundry to be done, trash to be taken out, dishes to be washed, a catbox to be cleaned, and dogs to be walked.  See how different this kind of travel is from the usual hotel room or resort?  The chores come right along with us.

Tuesday morning was back to work.  I spent much of the day answering e-mails, reading discussion threads, and grading essays.  Alexis, too, had an avalanche of mails to which to respond and phone calls to field.  The day was a busy one. 

At the end of it, we decided to spend the evening relaxing.  First we took a walk around the RV park.  We hadn’t explored the part of the park dedicated to seasonal campers, and we wanted to check it out.  Visiting RV parks is a bit like going to an RV show; you get to see lots of different types of rigs and dream about what it might be like to own them.  The difference is that in an RV park you can speak to an owner and find out the truth about the rigs rather than having to sort out fact from fiction during a sales pitch.

Interior of a park model RV

There are a number of park model trailers here.  Park models are RVs that aren’t really meant to travel very often.  They are sometimes called destination trailers because they are meant to be towed to a particular destination, left there for a season, and then towed back into storage.  Some are mounted permanently on blocks, the axles are removed, and they have porches attached to them.  Park models look like small mobile homes and have many of the same features as regular residential homes — shingled roofs, full-size appliances, regular flush toilets.  The rigs cost anywhere from $30-50K, not bad given that they are usually about 10′x40′. You get a lot of bang for your buck.  Park models, however, represent a very different RVing lifestyle, one that is about staying put rather than going places.

As we walked through the park, we talked about what it would be like to park the fifth wheel permanently on a lot in Texas and spend winter break down there while buying a park model and parking it in the cooler climates (like this one) to use as a summer abode.  The fall and the spring we’d spend in good old Baltimore in a traditional residence. Then all we’d have to do is pack our clothes up in the car and head off to our “other homes” for a while.

It’s a different way of thinking about travel, but it’s something many embrace.  A number of folks in this very park are Southerners who spend their summers here in PA enjoying the cooler temps, and I can’t blame them.  It’s lovely here.  Of course, we’re in no position to make that particular dream come true anytime soon, so for right now, it’s just another one of those things on our “maybe one day” list.

Dusk turned into night while we walked,  so we wandered back over to our site. I’d bought some firewood earlier in the afternoon, so we started a campfire in the fire ring out in the yard, pulled up our chairs, and curled up with a lovely eBook!  Yes, that’s right.  We’re in the Pennsylvania wilds in an RV park, but we haven’t abandoned our technology!  Lex stayed outside until she got a mosquito bite, but I remained to read until the fire burned down.

Our campfire

It was lovely and quiet with a nice little chill in the air, the perfect evening to spend around a campfire.  The only unusual thing is that it’s July!  I can honestly say that I’ve never quite enjoyed summer weather as much as I’m enjoying it now.  There are very few bugs, not a great deal of humidity, and most afternoons, it barely hits 80.  That’s what we call winter in Texas.

This is the last week of the summer course I’m teaching, so it’s been imperative for me to grade the research papers the students turned in last Friday quickly.  At the same time, I wanted to have some fun this week, too, so I established a daily grading quota of six essays.  This meant I’ve spend three to four hours each day for the past three days getting the papers done.  As long as I’ve started early in the morning, I’ve had some time in the afternoon to play.  And you know what that means — geocaching!

Crawford County AGT coins

Yesterday around noon after doing my grading, I struck out for Crawford County, adjacent to Erie County where we are currently.  My goal was to find six caches in four hours and get back to the visitors’ bureau in Meadville (about an hour from Corry) before it closed at 4:30 so I could claim my Allegheny Geotrail coin for that county.   I met my goal, and along the way met some nice geocachers with their dog and encountered an amusing muggle, a self-professed “goombah” from NYC.  He actually helped me find one of my caches.  I even had time to find an earthcache, my first, at Canadohta Lake.  An earthcache isn’t a traditional cache.  There is no box to find or log to sign.  Instead, it’s more like a virtual cache.  You go to a set of coordinates and discover some geological phenomenon.  You then have to answer a few questions about what you see.  It was a lot of fun, actually, and I learned a thing or two about the formation of glacial lakes.
I got back home right around 6:00 p.m., in time for Alexis and I to head back out again, this time to Lakewood, New York, about half an hour to the north.  We went to a movie theatre there and saw the new Transformers movie.  It was a nice little midweek date.  We didn’t get back home until just about bedtime, so we both sacked out.

Today, I had every intention of doing another set of Allegheny Geotrail caches in another county, but my students had other ideas.  I had several e-mails to answer this morning, including one from a student who wasn’t happy about his grades.  I had to spend a good bit of time reviewing his grades and his essays and responding to his questions.  This I did not mind doing; what I minded was the very rude tone he took in his mail to me.  Students in online courses are quicker to be disrespectful because they have this sense of anonymity; in essence, they feel they can hide behind the keyboard.  This is one drawback to teaching online.  I generally respond with firmness while remaining professional and polite.  When I don’t return the attack, students usually respond with some contrition, realizing they had been unnecessarily harsh.  This particular student did just that.  Sometimes, the lessons I teach have very little to do with grammar at all.

By the time I was done dealing with this student and got my requisite papers and journals graded, it was too late to accomplish the six caches I wanted to find, so I just dawdled the afternoon away, piddling around the house a bit, researching more caches, updating Facebook — just wasting time until Alexis was done with work.  Once she finished up, we donned our bathing suits and walked across the street to the park’s pool to relax for a while.  We had the pool to ourselves so had fun splashing around until the sun started to slip down beyond the horizon and the air got just a little too cool for us to be in the water.

We came back in, changed, and I made dinner.  Now, it’s nearly bedtime.  I don’t have papers to grade in the morning, so I think I’m going to strike out earlier than usual on my cache hunt.  I’m determined to bring home another AGT geocoin tomorrow!  This is the summer of the geocache, after all.

In two weeks, the RV park is hosting a bus trip to a nearby casino, and I think Alexis and I are going to try to go.  I’ve never actually been in a casino, so this will be quite the experience for me.  I’m sure we’ll be the youngest people on the trip by at least twenty years.  Of course, we’re often among the youngest folks in the RV parks where we stay (just as we are at this one).  Full-time RVing is still primarily the domain of the retired, though younger and younger people are getting involved in the lifestyle as telecommuting becomes more common.  Weekend RVers (the kind who show up in the parks on Friday afternoons and leave two days later) are predominantly couples with children.  It is a cheaper way to travel if you have kids and dogs, to be sure.  There was a family of seven with a huge shaggy, white dog next door to us in a travel trailer earlier this week. I can’t imagine trying to pay for a traditional vacation for seven people plus boarding a pet.  It would just be impossible for most folks. RVing is significantly cheaper.  You pay for your gas, campsite fees, and food, and that’s about it.  Affordable travel is one of our major motivations for doing it, certainly.

Speaking of traditional vacations, on the 22nd, we’re headed to Toronto to visit a couple of Alexis’ Warcraft guildmates (it’s an online game that she plays with a group of people).  She’s met these guys before, but I haven’t.  It’ll be my first trip to Toronto, and I’m hoping to make the most of it by doing some sightseeing, grabbing some Canadian caches, and seeing Niagara Falls on the way back.  We won’t be taking the rig.  Instead, we’ll be boarding the dogs and staying in a hotel in Toronto.  We never get to do that!  It will be a vacation from our vacation!

The weekend before the Toronto trip, we’re hitting two unusual museums in the area – the Lucille Ball museum in Jamestown, New York, and the Zippo Lighter Museum in Bradford, Pennsylvania.  We’re both fans of quirky museums, so that trip should be fun.

This coming weekend, however, I have nothing planned except for paper grading.  The last set of essays comes in Friday at midnight, and I have to have them all graded and returned to students and final course grades calculated by Monday at 10 a.m.  That means two days of hustling. Once it’s done, though, I’m free from paper grading for at least two months!  Not free of schoolwork, though.  Just grading.  I’ll have to start getting my fall courses ready next week.  It’ll take me the rest of the summer to do all the preparation.  But I’m not starting that tonight.  Now is bedtime,  so I wish you all a goodnight wherever you may be.

Edit: Alexis has reminded me that I left out something rather interesting that we discovered here in the area.  This is Amish country, and there are buggy crossing signs everywhere.  I’ve seen a few buggies during the daytime, but what we didn’t know is that the Amish are night owls.  We were coming home from the movies in Lakewood, NY on Wednesday night around 10 p.m., and we saw one Amish man coming out of a convenience store and two buggies just tooling down the road.  So dangerous!  We come around blind corners or over hills, and there they are.  On the way to the movies, we actually saw a buggy turned over in the ditch, and the poor Amish fellow was standing there waiting for help.  His horse appeared to be okay, thank goodness, and a couple of motorists had stopped to help.  Well, one of them may have run him off the road.  I don’t know; we didn’t witness the accident.  I wonder how many Amish are killed each year in the US in collisions with cars?  Lex said she didn’t want to have to make that phone call to GEICO: “Hello, GEICO?  It seems we’ve hit an Amish buggy and destroyed it.  They don’t have insurance, but there’s a nasty dent in our bumper from where we broadsided their horse.”  I can just imagine the adjuster putting us on speaker phone so the entire office could hear and then asking us to repeat the tale while everyone on the other end laughed their butts off.  We’ve learned to take it slow on the back roads around here, especially when we can’t see around the next bend.

This morning before we headed out to go caching, I discovered that I’d lost the ring that was holding all 23 of my pathtags.  Pathtags are the geocaching equivalent of baseball cards. People buy, sell, trade, and collect the small metal discs, and I had been working hard to build my little collection.  I had tags from as far away as Czechoslovakia.  I suspect I lost them in the woods somewhere.  I posted a lost and found notice on the Geowoodstock forums, but I suspect I’ll never see the tags again.  Some lucky cacher is going to get a major bonus some day soon.

The good news is that during the Geowoodstock events today, I began to build my collection again.  Now I have five all-new pathtags, so I’m not quite as forlorn as I was earlier.

Alexis and I headed out around 11 a.m. to go find the last cache we needed to earn our first Allegheny Geotrail geocoin.  We found it after a short hike through the forest, returned to the vistors’ center in Warren, got our coin, and went back to the fairgrounds.

While were on our adventures, the students had gone to two event caches and been grocery shopping.  They stayed pretty busy!  Alexis and I wandered the fairgrounds early in the afternoon while they were out and about.  Only a few vendors were open, so we managed to make some purchases without having to stand in the lengthy lines that developed just a few hours later.

We returned to the RV with our purchases and laid down for a short nap before getting up and going back down to the fairgrounds where the early registration event was taking place.  The line of people waiting to pick up their registration packets with name badges, tshirts, geocoins, meal tickets, and pathtags was ridiculously long. We waited in the line at least half an hour, got the goods, and distributed them to the students who wandered up just in time to miss all the standing around in lines.  How convenient!

There was a geobingo sheet in our packets, so we all started playing.  This is a sort of icebreaker game that involves going around asking strangers questions about their geocaching experiences. If a person can answer yes to a question on the sheet, he/she signs the page.  When the page is full, the player has “bingo,” and can turn the sheet in for entry into a prize drawing.  Tasha and I went off together to get our sheets filled out.  It took us an hour, but we did it, meeting lots of nice people on the way.

Once we had bingo, we got some food and sat around and chatted with each other and some Maryland cachers we recognized.  By this time, it was after 9 p.m., and the events were winding down.  Alexis and I left the young people to their own devices (let’s hope they stay out of trouble), called it a night and came back to the RV to go through all the swag we’d gotten and to log all our caches and trackables.

Our Virgin MiFi is really slow, but it’s no slower than the wifi network the organizers have arranged here at the fairgrounds. We paid for an hour’s worth of connection through the vendor here at the site, but discovered it wasn’t very good, so we’re sticking to our phones and mifi modem, even though they’re only operating on the Edge network.  It’s frustrating because we’re used to much faster speeds, but, as you can tell, we’re still able to connect to the web and get our mail, update Facebook, write blog posts, and log into Geocaching.com.  You know, the important stuff.

If I have any single complaint about this event thus far is that while it’s in an incredibly beautiful location rich in recreational opportunities, someone overlooked the fact that geocaching is a tech-heavy activity and cachers are a finicky lot when it comes to that tech.  They want connectivity, and they want it now so they log those finds! The onsite network is simply not equipped to deal with the kind of traffic they are experiencing.

And if they thought today was bad, just wait until tomorrow when the numbers here at the fairgrounds will explode!  I’m looking forward to the activities tomorrow.  There will be games, seminars, a silent auction, prize drawings, more vendors — plenty of things to occupy our time and steal away our money.

The dogs are spending their time here at the fairgrounds in the RV.  We aren’t taking them out onto the midway because they are poorly socialized, and there are so many people here with dogs that we’d end up with them tugging at their leads and barking their heads off all day long.  It’s simply easier to come back periodically, walk them, and then go back out again.  When we go back to the campground in Corry and Lex goes back to work next week, they’ll return to being the spoiled creatures they usually are, spending all day with us.  For now, though, they are pitiful pups, indeed.

Here’s we are right now:

- South Carolina is out.  We just didn’t have the money and were worried about the distance given how long the rig has been parked.

-We’re not leaving until the 25th when we will head to NW PA for Geowoodstock. This will save us money and mileage.

-We keep considering moving back into a sticks-and-bricks place  but keep backing away from the idea for reasons of money, independence, and quiet.  We actually went to look at a cute little rent house this past week and put in an application.  The owners called tonight to tell us we’d gotten the place, but we turned them down.  In part, we realized the stairs were going to be difficult for our older dog to navigate but also because we weren’t really fully committed to making the leap back into renting.  We were torn about turning down the house, but we think it’s probably for the best.

-We want ultimately to buy a home but aren’t really in a position to do it anytime soon. Saving is hard when we have both an RV payment and site rental on top of all our other debts and expenses.  We’ll have to quit making excuses, though, establish a budget, and stick to it if we’re ever to become homeowners.

Don’t get me wrong. We like our cozy little abode on wheels; we just wish it were a more permanent solution.  The truth is that we can’t live full-time in one forever, at least not this one.  RVs wear out, and it’s just not easy or cheap to find long-term parking for them in this part of the country.  It’d be a much more idyllic situation further south.

Well, enough with the wishy-washy.  We will be leaving in two weeks, so I’ll be turning my attention to getting the rig ready to go.  There’s plenty of maintenance to be completed before then, and it’s going to take a miracle to find a way to secure all the “stuff” that has crept into our house over the past year.  More will be going to storage, no doubt.  Sorting it all out should keep me occupied until we head out.