Departures

Closing Up Shop!

April 19, 2024 by John Leave a Comment

[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!

Movement, Again — and Upcoming

May 25, 2022 by John Leave a Comment

Photo 1 caption: the view west from a park called “The Trails of Summerlin Village,” in the northwest of Las Vegas proper. The Stepson’s house “in Las Vegas” technically is located in a Vegas suburb called Spring Valley. But the gigantic ZIP-Code-spanning development known as Summerlin lies all around. I visited a lot of the parks in Summerlin over the last five months — and now that the daily thermometer is flirting with three digits, I’ve done so, especially, early in the day. The building in the foreground is somehow associated with — I think — a Baptist church up at the street level. The street in question lies between this vantage point and the mountains.

As some — many? most? — of you know, we will finally be putting Las Vegas in the rearview mirror a week from today. We’ve got reservations at various places, doing various things, and mostly in California, for the next month. Here’s the general itinerary for now:

Grand Canyon
Joshua Tree National Park — and, knock on wood, and meeting up with The West Coast Nephew!
San Diego — the Zoo! and a behind-the-scenes “safari”! laundry!
Santa Monica
San Luis Obispo — and, after leaving, the Hearst Castle and elephant-seal viewing in San Simeon!
Carmel-by-the-Sea
Yosemite National Park — including a guided tour and, for me, a photography course “in the footsteps of Ansel Adams”!
Lake Tahoe — including a guided tour!

From there, we’ll be doubling back towards the Pacific for a brief stopover with The Missus’s cousin and a drive up the rest of the way to Redwood National Park. Then eventually we’ll point the car east and north, to drive eventually aaaallllllll the way back, via some route, to someplace yet unknown. Key destinations, if all goes well:

Yellowstone National Park
The Badlands of South Dakota
Mid-Wisconsin (a sort of genealogical side-quest for The Missus)
Possibly a little jog north in order to skate between Lakes Superior and Michigan, then down the coast of the latter
…and then, yes: ?????

I like to imagine that I’ll update you all here more often than I did during the (sometimes chaotic) first leg of the year(ish)-long road trip. But I’ve imagined — and promised! — that before. So for now let’s just say, y’know: stay tuned!

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

November 14, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

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!

Fleeing Henri, Part 2: Saratoga Springs

September 19, 2021 by John 3 Comments

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!

Fleeing Henri, Part 1: Lincoln, New Hampshire

September 5, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

Photo #1 caption: This was taken from our balcony at the Indian Head Resort, Lincoln NH… on the safer side (at the time) of the Kancamagus Highway through the White Mountains.

Our road trip — disrupted at the outset by Hurricane Elsa, in Florida — faced yet another disruption in the form of oncoming Hurricane Henri, in Maine. Luckily, our reservation at Holbrook House in Bar Harbor was up on September 21, a day or two before the new storm’s anticipated arrival. Unluckily, our (modified) plan at that point had been to head south, to Cape Code and so on — also well within the cone of Henri’s path. With this new weather evidence in hand, we chose instead to run to the west, starting with New Hampshire. We figured we’d stay there a couple nights, then head even further west into New York State. (We really didn’t want to deal with a big storm by then.)

It took a bit of legwork, especially by The Missus, to come up with someplace in New Hampshire which actually had space for a couple for two nights. (Remember, this was still the height of 2021’s tourist season in New England.) She finally located such a place, though — Indian Head Resort, in Lincoln.

The drive to Lincoln

I should at this point mention the “new” car’s idiosyncratic GPS…

The car we had until August 6 or so, in North Carolina, had no built-in GPS at all. Of course, we did have GPS apps on our phones, and this led to various “interesting” conversations about the driver’s instinctive desire to glance down at his phone to see the route in advance — how many tenths of a mile until the next turn, and so on — and the passenger’s instinctive desire to remain alive. (These conversations were made even more colorful thanks to the driver’s hearing, and his knee-jerk instinct to look towards the passenger when she was, uh, conversing.)

But the new car has built-in GPS. So the driver can sneak little down-and-to-the-right, status-checking glances without actually looking away from the road. On the other hand, the built-in GPS does not appear to be anywhere near as flexible as, say, Google Maps: it shows you the route in progress, but doesn’t (as far as we know) let you zoom out for an overview, or let you avoid highways by choice. All the way up from NC, in fact, it seemed adamantly to insist that we stick to highways…

…except that if you intentionally ignore it, it will eventually give up and accept that you don’t like its preselected routeing. (You’re following this, right?!?) At that point, it sort of sighs and adjusts its own thinking to accommodate yours.

Soooo anyhow, we set out from Bar Harbor. We knew we wanted to go to New Hampshire through Bangor, for our requisite photo-op stop at Stephen King’s old house, and then on to Lincoln — and because we weren’t in that much of a hurry, we wanted to avoid highways. If you look at a map, though, you’ll see there’s not really an east-west major-highway route to get you there; you’ll have to follow I-95 south for a ways, and then get off onto US 301, and then et cetera. Boring highways.

Photo #2 caption: Partial satellite view of the Kancamagus Highway. Dig that crazy Hancock Overlook hairpin turn…!

Surprise, surprise: the GPS dumped us off of I-95 fairly quickly, eventually leading us to NH Route 112, also known as the mouth-wateringly-crunchy Kancamagus Highway. (The name rhymes with, well, “bank in August,” and comes from the name of a 17th-century Native American chief who lived in the area. It means, roughly, “fearless one,” or more specifically, “fearless hunter of animals.)

The Kancamagus winds through White Mountain National Forest — or maybe writhes through the forest would be more precise. Definitely not the kind of drive you’d want to do “under the influence,” or in heavy weather! (Aside: driving “through” White Mountain National Forest is misleading: you’re also driving UUUUUUUPPP and DOOOOWWWN the whole time, as well as turning left and right constantly. One of those trips that passengers in the car may generally enjoy more than the white-knuckled driver. 😱)

The Indian Head Resort

Photo #3 caption: Our retro room at Indian Head. We didn’t get to see any other rooms, but I suspect “retro” would apply to them all.

As you can see from the resort’s Web site, the place is, well, uh… not new, by most measures. Knotty-pine paneling, old exposed pipes in the bathroom ceiling, well-worn carpeting on the floor… On the other hand, it was well-maintained (e.g., those pipes seemed to have been repainted within the last couple months) and clean — very important these days, of course.

Also important for our purposes: the resort has (besides the classic tacky-touristy gift shop) a restaurant and bar.

An entry in the Interesting Conversations category: When we ate dinner, we talked a little with our waiter, whose name tag identified him as “Rovshan.” The Missus asked what country he was from; he told her twice, I think, but all she could get was that the name ended in “-stan”… and that it’s apparently a country adjacent to Turkey, a country which, well, no longer exists. (I can’t imagine being from a country I couldn’t point to on a current map. If the USA ceased to exist, would I still be “American”???) He expected to be here for only a couple more weeks until he returned, under whatever unimaginable passport he was traveling on.

[Aside: I’ve since looked up the name “Rovshan” on Wikipedia. All the Rovshans listed there are Azerbaijanis, i.e., “a Turkic ethnic group, living mainly in the sovereign Republic of Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijan region of Iran, with a mixed cultural heritage, including Turkic, Caucasian and Iranian elements.” Reading further about Azerbaijan didn’t reveal any “-stan” names, but I probably just misheard the “-jan.”]

Betty and Barney Hill

One element of our visit to the Indian Resort which most fascinated me, anyhow: out front of the place, on the shoulder alongside US Route 3, stands the New Hampshire state historic marker shown at the right.

Like any good aficionado of the old X-Files TV series and other UFO stories, I knew of Betty and Barney Hill, all right — but I didn’t know the details of the whole thing. (And I certainly didn’t expect to encounter them on our road trip!)

You can read about the Hills’ “interrupted journey” at Wikipedia, naturally. I found a couple other good sources of information:

This history.com article, from January 2020, does a good job of covering all the important points.
Much more recently — on August 29, just a week ago as I write this — the Showtime TV network ran an episode of their UFO series devoted to the Betty & Barney Hill case. The SyFyWire Web site reviewed the episode. (We do get Showtime but haven’t yet seen this program.)

Inside the resort’s gift shop are lots of souvenirs related to the Hills and to UFOs in general — T-shirts, commemorative mugs, bobble-headed little-green-man figurines, that sort of thing. And just up Route 3, you’ll come to the Notch Express convenience store/gas station where you can take a selfie with an alien:

Photo #5 caption: become a part of history!

We’re not sure what can possibly top this excitement, but we’ve got plenty of time to find out… Coming up next: Saratoga Springs, Schenectady, and Lake George, New York!