In Our Own Way

When you've gotta go, you've gotta go.

Arrivals

Closing Up Shop!

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[Caption: our complete route, from Tallahassee, Florida, in June 2021 to Jacksonville, Florida, in October 2022… by way of points north, west, and back east. The jagged blue line shows the actual driving route; there are also a handful of smooth purple arcs, representing plane flights we took to visit our Florida and New Jersey families a few times.]

As you probably know via other channels, The Missus and I eventually — in late 2022 — completed our meandering back-and-forth across the country. I apologize if you’ve been hanging in suspense since the last post, now almost two years old!

It’s hard to say exactly why I stopped updating this travelogue, aside from the exhaustion of travel itself. Post-Las Vegas, we spent the month of June tooling around the Grand Canyon and California (Joshua Tree, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Luis Obispo, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe, Petaluma, Eureka and the redwoods). From there, we pretty much headed east without too much dawdling (Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne WY, etc., all the way through to Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia). We finally landed back in North Florida in mid-August, nominally staying with family there until the first week of October… and beyond.

(I say “nominally” because The Missus became very sick — not with COVID, thank the gods, but still — for a couple weeks, starting just a few days after we arrived in Jacksonville. And I headed off to North Carolina that first week of October to scout out the area for a place where we could comfortably spend our retired years more or less at a merciful standstill.)

Anyway, it turns out that my “johnesimpson.com” Internet domain is starting to run out of space. Because I continue to need more space for my main blog, called Running After My Hat, I am going to be shuttering this In Our Own Way section of that domain (as well as a handful of other test/experimental blogs I’ve set up in the neighborhood since 2008).

Translation: if you want to hang onto the record of the first part of our trip, you’ll need to figure out some way to do that. (I still haven’t made up my own mind about how to do it for myself — probably just save copies of the email messages which subscribers received.)

The timeline for the shutdown is fuzzy, but I expect I’ll do that sometime in May, possibly June. I’ll post one more update here in the meantime, just as a next-to-the-last-minute notice. And then In Our Own Way will — like its two principal characters — will head for the sunset!

Thanks so much for reading!

Arrived!

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[Images above: on the left, The Missus’s rolling log of places and dates we visited (and, often, places where we ate); on the right, our fitfully maintained log of the odometer readings at various locations along the way. (Note that the latter covers two time spans: one for each of the cars we’ve made the trip in so far.) The term “Grand Adventure” is entirely The Missus’s.]

We got to The Stepson’s place in Las Vegas more or less on schedule: Wednesday, December 15, 2021, at around 4:45 PM. I can’t say we were delighted that morning to pull out of the resort in Sedona, Arizona — we’d loved it there — but, again, at least we were more or less on schedule.

If you do the math, then, you’ll know that we’ve now been here for four nights. At some point in the next few hours, I am assured, we’ll be heading out to pick up a tree for the living-room corner. And then, who knows, we’ll link hands and sing a chorus or two of O Tannenbaum, or perhaps just cue up a Die Hard movie. (We have already watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, so that’s out of our system for now.)

Hope you’ve all been able to survive recent months with a minimum of anguish and heartbreak. The gods know there’s plenty of both out there — no reason at all why you should be adding to the pile.

Now getting ready to look ahead to Road Trip (excuse me — I mean Grand Adventure) 2022… because somehow, we have to get both ourselves and the car back across the country to get on with the rest of our lives! 🤨 And in the meantime, I’ll try here to fill in some of the gaps as we made our way to the Nevada desert…

Wake Up! Wake Up! We’re Still Here! (Whatever “Here” Means Anymore)

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Image 1 caption: Progress report, of a sort: this is how our trip planning/reporting software displays our route so far, through Thursday December 2. Unfortunately, you can’t interact with this version of the map at all — it’s just a screen capture — but I’ll have more info about a slightly more detailed version, below.

Yes, I know, you don’t need to remind me how long it’s been since the last post. At the same time, it’s very hard for us to believe it was less than two months ago that we left the Schenectady/Scotia NY area, bound for Vermont. That’s a lot of time in the car (and a lot of time between stops, too).

We’ve been intermittently logging our mileage along the way, sometimes recording it when we get to a stop, sometimes when we leave, sometimes forgetting to do it at all. But for what it’s worth, since leaving Greenville, NC, we’ve put about 6,000 miles on the (new) car.

The map above is a bit simplistic. I created it just by pinpointing the cities and towns where we’ve spent at least one night, and leaving the software to depict “optimal” or recommended routes. But such routes bear little relationship to reality: we often have deviated, by choice or circumstances, from the “plan.” Bad weather — and loss of GPS! — has forced us to leave highways; we’ve driven around within those destinations, quite a lot. (Y’know: grocery and other shopping, sightseeing, going out for dinner — that sort of thing.)

For a more complete picture, I sometimes check out a feature of Google Maps called the Timeline. To use it, you must be a bit, um, casual about letting your cellphone identify your location. So it’s not an option you’d want to turn on all the time. But it can be interesting! For instance, here’s my Timeline for a single day of the trip — it was the first day after we got our “new” car in August:

Image 2 caption: Google Maps is watching you (if you let it)! Basically, every time you turn a corner with your phone in your hand or pocket, the software makes a note of it, and saves it to your profile. (This is also how Google Maps knows, for example, that there’s traffic congestion ahead: all the “Google Maps on my cellphone” users are at a standstill. In other words, it’s not all creepy!)

On the map at the top of this post (Image 1 above), this appears as a single dot — and it’s the same dot for every day we spent “in” Greenville, North Carolina. Actually, though, we spent a lot of time driving (or just walking) around on that day. Which is why our actual mileage is so much higher than the straight-line distances seem to show.

(For the record, we did not actually “go to” all the labeled places in the Timeline map. They’re just points of interest, per Google Maps. We actually went on that day to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, to return the rental which our insurance company had arranged for us while we arranged to buy the new car; we drove west to the little town of Farmville, North Carolina, just to get out of town a bit; and we spent that night at the Courtyard Marriott back in Greenville. If I could zoom the Timeline map in far enough, you could even see what streets I’d walked along in Farmville, and all the wrong turns and backtracking I did on the streets of Greenville itself.)

The route-planning software I’m using lets you save its data in a form which can then be displayed in Google Maps for others to see, to zoom in on, and so forth.

Here’s what this exported Google Map looks like at the moment. (As you can see, I can customize its look a bit more; overnight stays of four nights or more are marked with green icons rather than the default blue. And Greenville, North Carolina, is marked with a “fun” auto-collision icon.)

Image 3 caption: Google Maps view — again, just a screen capture — of our travels (partially in the future, as I write this) through December 2. The gold lines are round-trip airplane flights.

You can see and interact with it (at a limited level — zooming, identifying cities and so on) via this link. Just remember: this is a map whose data has been exported from other software; the data doesn’t always come through 100% accurately. This will be especially noticeable when you zoom waaaaay in — the Google Map shows some very strange, in fact entirely imaginary, routes!

More coming up soon as this blog transitions to less of a day-by-day travelogue (you can see how well that’s worked out), and more of a “Here’s something we’ve noticed during the trip” record. Thanks as always for stopping by!

Schenectady? Scotia?!?

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Photo #1 caption: Schenectady mission accomplished! (See below for details, such as they are.)

One side-effect of our four nights in Saratoga Springs: we learned how much we liked — <em>needed</em> — extended stays in general (as opposed to two- and three-night blow-in/blow-out visits). So we started looking for Airbnb sorts of places near Saratoga Springs, even if we couldn’t stay in Saratoga Springs…

Nothing really that close, of course, so we widened our search. Lo and behold, a very interesting-sounding Airbnb place: an older home in a suburb of Schenectady, called Scotia — for a very reasonable weekly price!

We immediately contacted the host.

And then waited… and waited…

Finally she got back to us, the next day. Alas, she said, she would be unable to host us — because something had come up with another reservation, and she’d had to scramble to take care of her current guests, and she’d had to move one of those parties into the house we wanted, sorry sorry so very sorry—

Well, by then, we’d invested a certain amount of time in researching things to do in and near both Scotia and Schenectady. And we had almost no time left to look for longer-term lodging anyway. So we just checked around for plain old hotels, found a Comfort Inn in Scotia, and booked it… for three nights. Not ideal, but honestly there wasn’t that much we wanted to see nearby. We just wanted at that point to regroup, and plan a real extended, put-our-feet-up interlude somewhere.

Which we did. Oh, we had a few highlights right there in Scotia(ish):

  • A family member’s family had once lived — but no longer lived — in a favorite home in Schenectady, and although it wasn’t delivered as a <em”>request, exactly, I could tell they sorta-kinda wouldn’t mind if I maybe took a photo or two…?
  • On the way to that address, I stopped at a mall to see if I could get my watch battery replaced. (It’d stopped the day before.) Of course the mall — like many — was on its last legs, but a jeweler there did replace the battery. Unfortunately, they also set the weekday-and-date display just slightly wrong: it was 12 hours off-schedule. So ever since, every time the watch’s time creeps towards noon, the day of the week and the date also start to roll forward. I haven’t taken the time (haha) to fix it yet. It’s very confusing, though, when The Missus asks me what day it is and I look down at my wrist and then must asked myself, “Wait — is it actually daytime outside, or is it night? And thus do I just tell her what my watch says, or do I need to subtract a day?”
  • After I left the mall, I headed into the heart of Schenectady. I had my new camera with me. It was raining quite a bit, off and on, but I figured I could at least take the pictures of the house from the curb, through an open car window. But as I headed that way, I kept glimpsing, in the sky, an enormous dark tower. A church…? But what the hell kind of church…?!? I realized I just had to photograph that, too. So I drove around, glancing skywards occasionally… and just as I arrived at the foot of it, promptly got lost in a maze of streets on which I couldn’t park at all. I didn’t get the photo — the one shown here was taken by the author of this fascinating blog post, titled “Schenectady’s Grotesque Grotesques.”.
  • While discussing the family member’s house project, she told me the location was very close to a residential section of Schenectady called the “GE Plot.” (You can read about the GE Plot on Wikipedia.) The Missus and I did drive around that neighborhood while we were up there… took no pictures, but the houses and properties were indeed impressive!

By the way, a shrewd observer will notice that Scotia itself doesn’t seem to have been a highlight. We’d meant to spend more time looking around there as well as Schenectady — just didn’t, as it happened, have the time to spend. Even the meals were cursory — two of the three were simple takeout or delivery at the hotel. The third was a surprise — a Japanese restaurant which probably rates among the top dozen meals we’ve had on the trip so far… But yeah, we just didn’t experience Scotia enough to do it, well, justice.

Fleeing Henri, Part 2: Saratoga Springs

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Photo #1 caption: The Batcheller’s Mansion Inn in Saratoga Springs. No, we didn’t stay there (and aren’t likely to stay there in the future, given the room rates). It’s across the street from the Holiday Inn where we did stay, though. I didn’t know it was there until one evening when I went outside to move the car to a more convenient location. This place looks C,R,E,E,P,Y in the dark, let me tell you!


Let’s get a little administrative detail out of the way, shall we? I’m speaking of course of the obvious fact: there’s been nothing new added here in two freaking weeks. And this bloggish background silence has taken place behind a foreground that included (as of today) stops not only in New York State, but in Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. So there’s a lot of catching up to do… and this means, I think, that I’m going to accelerate the schedule a bit: I’ll just post brief narratives of each of those missing places, until the catching-up is accomplished.

(Remember: if you’re after a more up-to-date sense of where we are, the best place to look is probably my Instagram account. That, too, isn’t 100% current, because I’m posting only one photo a day. But it will at least reassure you that We Are (as the saying goes) Still Here.

Let’s get started!

Putting Henri Behind Us

Despite our worst fears about Hurricane Henri, the storm really didn’t bother us until shortly after we left the Indian Head Resort…

Once we’d decided to flee further inland, we pulled up the maps of what lay to the west. To head to Vermont felt like too small a baby step, given Henri’s forecast cone, so we jumped right over there and looked at northern New York State (i.e., “anywhere north of Albany”). Part of my motivation, I think, was that it would put us on the way to our western New York State destinations, Niagara Falls and Jamestown, which might simplify the next-state planning. (I was very disappointed that Vermont appeared to be out of the question, but, well, as we’d already learned: the road trip taketh away as well as giveth.)

But then we noticed something we simply couldn’t ignore: the route would take us verrrrry close to Enfield, NH, where one of The Missus’s favorite nieces had just bought her first home (with her husband and daughter). So as I drove, The Missus burned up the (wireless) phone lines with The Enfield Niecelet, making plans for our stop along the way.

We got a tour of the house, of course, and visited The Niecelet’s Husband at his workplace, and then we The Niecelet, and the Grand-Niecelet headed out for lunch. It was a nice meal in nearby Lebanon, but by the time we paid the check there were already raindrops falling on our heads.

Off we headed, westward… into the worst of Henri we experienced.

Was it a good thing or a bad thing that we’d opted not to take any major highways? Well, it depends on the kind of route you’d find more suited to your personality, given a whiteout-level rainfall:

  • On a highway, even the straightest, you not only are moving faster, but also are just incapable of seeing the other vehicles around you until it’s (almost) too late.
  • On back roads, at least in New Hampshire/Vermont, probably won’t be sharing the trip with many other vehicles at all. On the other hand, such vehicles as you do encounter are likely operated by locals who well know the sinuous twists and turns, the spots most likely to be shallowly flooded, the surprise stop signs and bear-crossing signs and so on, and so those vehicles will be riding your tail the whole way. And, of course, you still can’t see anything further than about a car’s-length in any direction.

So it was pretty white-knuckle driving, all the way…

…all the way until we crossed into Vermont. Suddenly the clouds parted, the rain stopped, and we could just enjoy the rest of the drive to Saratoga Springs.

Last Week of the Saratoga Springs Racing Season

Somehow — I certainly don’t know how — we’d managed to secure two nights’ last-minute lodging at a very nice Holiday Inn in Saratoga Springs. Even more remarkably, this was during the last week of the biggest tourist event in the town, during the craziest tourist season in anyone’s recent memory: the final week of horse-racing season. The town, in other words, was mobbed. Even more surprisingly, we were able to extend our stay for a couple more nights.

(We wanted to extend the stay for a number of reasons: Saratoga is such a nice town, with such a nice downtown, and neither of us had ever been there before; we felt like we really needed a break — we were tired of thinking we had to run away from something, or to run somewhere, like Bar Harbor, which became this hard, fixed external thing which controlled our schedule; and we really needed to do laundry (heh) — this Holiday Inn offered free laundry facilities for guests.)

Highlights of the Saratoga Springs visit:

  • Laundry. (No, really: this was important by now!)
  • I’d bought a replacement (used) camera, making up for the one which had gone belly-up way back in Greenville NC. I’d had it shipped it to my brother’s, thinking we could pick it up the next time we were in NJ… but since we were now staying in Saratoga Springs for a whole week, I could arrange for him to overnight it to me at the hotel. (Hurrah!)
  • I had a couple hearing-aid-related near-disasters — which seemed disastrous enough that I was in genuine despair about them for about 24 hours. (Neither truly was a disaster, thank God. But it was a near thing.)
  • We bought gear for what we imagined to be some upcoming trail adventures: “trekking poles”; compasses; binoculars.
  • Fabulous meals, with drinks to match (here, here, and here — in addition to the nice food and cocktails offered by the hotel itself), served by almost frighteningly competent and cheerful waitstaff.

In fact, we enjoyed our stay there so much that we tried to extend it again… but no such luck: not just the Holiday Inn, but everywhere else in Saratoga Spring was booked solid for the very last couple of days of the season. So: last-minute emergency strategizing occurred. Stay tuned!

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