A Year About

Elise with cousins Katie and Grace

Our peregrinations have brought us to this final spot in Shenandoah National Park. The weather has been rather mild for July, not too humid and not too hot. Only one significant storm blew through on Saturday evening, but it didn’t inconvenience us thanks to the wise and multitudinous preparations of Danine’s sister Lyn. She has taken the Scouts camping enough to learn how to prepare for every eventuality.


Conor and Taylor

Since we arrived, we have had a number of gatherings. On Saturday night Danine’s brother Colin and sister Lyn along with their families joined my parents and us for cooking out and catching up. On Sunday afternoon we set up in the picnic area and many friends and more family came. It was a welcome back party and everyone welcomed us joyfully and warmly. Many who came had followed the blog all year and some we hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Thank you, loyal fans.



Honestly, our time here has brought on all sorts of conflicted feelings. We are good with settling down and reintegrating with the work-a-day masses. The hard part is remembering, say, our glorious progression from the Grand Canyon to Moab or our quiet days from Elk Prairie campground in the redwoods up to the Olympic peninsula. I think it’s the transition we are dreading — not job worries or house worries so much as the great big mental gear shift that has to take place. It hasn’t always been easy being a tiny, three-person community, but it’s what we are used to right now and it’ll be strange to wake up and go in three different directions each day.



Meanwhile, everyone has been — and surely will continue to be — incredibly supportive and we’ve had a great time here at Big Meadows. We walked a little of the Appalachian Trail on Monday with Danine’s parents and Elise’s cousins Katie and Grace. I’d begun to feel resentful of the many people who told us on Sunday and Monday that they had seen bears on the way into the park. We spent eleven months going to places where bears live and saw only two. Then, on Monday evening, a gentleman walked over to our campsite and pointed to the nearby wooded hillside. There, we watched for about ten minutes a small mother bear and her two tiny cubs foraging for insects. All three wandered among the rocks and lifted or knocked over the smaller stones looking for good things to eat. It was marvelous.



Later Monday evening we went on a ranger guided walk through the meadow. We munched on the wild blueberries growing in it as we walked. Throughout the meadow deer were grazing. Scores of deer. Scores! We watched a fawn about 70 yards away run and leap in circles for the sheer fun of it. Each evening next to our campsite a ten-point buck walks and munches grass. White-tail deer are much handsomer than mule dear. I’d forgotten.



The sleeping weather has been great: cool, not humid. However, even the low humidity is still way too high compared to the West. It wouldn’t hurt the park to install some blimp-sized air handlers and dry this place out a bit. Another upside: few mosquitos. Another downside: gnats, gnats, gnats with a capital gee. These gnats are not disturbed by air currents and will even form a cloud directly in front of a blowing fan (to mock us).

Tuesday morning we went to a ranger talk on birds of prey. Ranger Georgette even brought out two Real Live Birds. Both were owls. The first was a charming Barred Owl. Did you know owls have ears that are asymmetrical — one side is higher than the other? This helps them triangulate the noises made by poor, hapless mice and such. In fact, if you put an owl in a completely light-free room and release a mouse, a healthy owl will find it one hundred percent of the time. That’s ninety-nine point nine percent more often than me. The second owl was a screech owl, which is about the size of a thick paperback book. They don’t screech. Go figure. Did you know that if we had eyes similar in proportion to our bodies as owls do, we’d have softballs sticking out of our heads?



In the humid, langorous afternoon we roused ourselves to go on two hikes. The first was up Bearfence Mountain which requires a rocky scramble to a 360-degree view. Next we joined up with our friends Tom and MJ, along with their son Joe, to hike down to Dark Hollow Falls. The falls were lovely and the water was cool — just ask Elise. She fell in.


MJ and Tom with Danine, Joe with Elise

Tuesday night will be our last campfire of the trip. Tomorrow we drive to Falls Church and begin a new phase of life. I’m sure we’ll be fine, but there’ll be a little bit of sadness as we leave behind this incredible year about.

I’ll write another entry once we are back, so don’t worry.

Our plan was to go tubing on the New River. (Here’s a secret: it isn’t new at all.) Then we woke up. Tubing — that is, sitting or lying in an inflatable tub whilst floating along on the gentle current of the river — just seemed like too much work today. Instead we went into Blacksburg.

Elise had a speaking engagement anyway. Kristie’s son Patrick wanted her to come in and talk to his preschool class. We went with her, but were not needed. She answered questions such as, “Do you have a fire extinguisher?” and traced our route on a big map.

Afterwards we headed back to Kristie and Al’s for a home-cooked lunch. Al biked home and joined us. One of the highlights of living and working in Blacksburg is biking to work and many other places. We spent the afternoon hanging out with Kristie. We went to the YMCA thrift store because they have used books. I bought a hardback copy of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose for two bucks. Elise got an original (1954) copy of a Trixie Belden mystery…for ten bucks! Apparently they are doing a brisk business on Ebay and, thus, even the thrift store is raising its prices.

You may recall, or not, that during the early months of our trip I read a lot of disaster narratives. I’ve read some other things in between, but I’m back to tragedies. I found a cheap hardback copy of Moby-Dick last month (I don’t remember where). A few weeks ago Elise wanted to read it. She read the first page and I read the rest of the first chapter to her. She liked it okay, but didn’t want to hear more on account of the strange, strange language. I, on the other hand, got hooked. I’m lovin’ it. Don’t ask me why, but it’s a great adventure story and a fascinating character study of the monomaniacal Ahab. I’m on page 230 or so and Moby-Dick has been talked about but not seen yet. In fact, no actual whale hunting has taken place. Of course, I know how it ends.

We plan to end our travels more peacefully. Whatever our faults (they are legion), we are not monomaniacs. So we got that going for us. Which is nice. Tomorrow we drive to Shenandoah National Park. We are going to take the scenic route, the Blue Ridge Parkway and then Skyline Drive.

I just used mapquest to look at directions from Falls Church to Big Meadows in Shenandoah. It looks like it’s going to take about 2 hours to get to us on Sunday if you are coming from the Falls Church area. I had mistakenly put in the blog that it would take an hour and a half. If this distance is too long for you, please don’t make yourselves crazy trying to get to us. Four hours is a lot of driving for one day.

Make no mistake — we would love to see you Sunday, but not at the expense of unhappy kids or tired parents. If you can’t make it, we will see you when we get back. Count on it!

Last night after the community dinner, Elise and I were invited to join part of the group for dominoes. We had never played, but John tutored Elise and I picked things up as we went along. After three rounds she asked John if she could play by herself and at the end of the game, Elise’s score was lower than his! John’s 94-year old mother (who was also playing) told John that he needed Elise’s help a lot more than she needed his! We were playing a version of dominoes called Mexican Train and we had a great time. This morning Elise and I played another round together while we were waiting for our laundry.

Today was another wonderfully relaxing day. We all did chores in the morning and the afternoon was reserved for hanging out. Bobby and I worked on a puzzle and Elise was involved in another sewing project with Ms. Gail. We are all going to miss this group when we leave on Saturday.


Jimmy, the camp host, gives the kids a ride in the golf cart.

Tonight my cousin Kristie and her husband Al came for dinner with their two kids, Patrick who is 4 and Jack (Jacqueline) who is 2 1/2. We see them often at family functions, but it is a rare time that we get to just sit down and talk together. The beers were plentiful and the food was good so we enjoyed them both while we caught up on all the news. Tomorrow, Elise has been invited to Patrick’s class to talk about the trip. She’s a lot excited and a little nervous. We’ll let you know how it goes.


After-dinner sports.


The sunsets keep getting better.

For those of you coming to Shenandoah to see us this weekend:
The weather for Sunday is looking a little dicey. Thunderstorms are possible so you might want to bring some rain gear. Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain, though. All of you can’t fit in this trailer!


Elise reads a bedtime story to Patrick and Jack.

For sale to a good home

When the sky turned black and the thick clouds started billowing towards us from the west, I thought it would be a good idea to put up the awning. The awning on our Airstream is 21 feet long and a great shady refuge on sunny, calm days. When the wind kicks up, however, it becomes a sail that the array of bolts, poles and pins holding it in place cannot hope to resist. At first I started the process casually. I’m used to it now and I have a routine. The last step is to grab a long fabric tab and roll the awning up towards the roof, letting go so the spring takes it the last foot much like a window shade. As soon as I grabbed the tab the wind blew and made the canvas ripple. Normally I like the tab to be straight and flat, but I made an exception and got it rolled as quick as I could. A second later the wind was strong enough to knock over our camp chairs and it brought the rain with it. Whew! With regards to Airstreams, “sailing” should only be used as a metaphor and never attempted in reality.

We drove into Floyd today. No, we didn’t hit anybody. It’s the nearby town. They have a big music festival starting tomorrow and it’s famous as June Carter Cash’s home town, but we just came for sandwiches. You know how we are about food: we eat it regularly. We had another humdinger of an outing — not quite as good as riding the only escalators in Athens County, Ohio. We went to Wal-Mart for the last time. We have always felt our frequenting of Wal-Mart to be a sort of unholy alliance, using their free overnight parking and cheap RV supplies as our reason to go. Those are good reasons, of course. Alas, those reasons are about to end for us. Yesterday I put Shackleton (as we call him), our cozy, shiny home, up for sale. He’s listed in the classifieds on airforums.com. Feel free to buy him.

Already we are angling for ways to get another Airstream and get in a few trips here and there, but first things first. We need to get settled, find a home, and — I shudder to think of it — go back to work.

Highland Haven had a community dinner tonight and, as guests, we were welcome. Since food was involved it was not difficult deciding to go. Elise has already spent hours sewing with Ms. Barbara and Ms. Gail. For her it was, as it always is, a social outing. The folks here are great: incredibly friendly and kind. We have felt welcomed and at ease since we arrived. I won’t talk it up too much because I don’t want it to get too popular. So forget I mentioned it.

My main chore while we are here is reading the daily racing news from the Tour de France. Despite doping scandals and organizational fallouts I love this race. It’s equal parts insane test of endurance, wargame, technological showcase, insane test of skill and nerve, and carnival. Danine is very tolerant of my chore.

Oh my gosh, we are back in Virginia. And I’m not ready to be.

Today we drove from Ohio through West Virginia and into the Old Dominion. On I-77 to get from West Virginia to Virginia you drive through a tunnel. As soon as we got through it, there was the sign: “Welcome to Virginia”, complete with the red cardinal. This year, every time we have entered a state, we read the sign all together and really loud. Today, as soon as we said, “Welcome to Virginia”, I started to cry. Bobby choked up, too. We weren’t expecting to react this way, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. Our arrival in Virginia has crept up on us and its suddenness is unexpected.


Our site at Highland Haven

We are staying in Copper Hill, VA until Saturday at Highland Haven, an Airstream-only RV park. It is actually a co-op. People buy a share in the park and that gets them a site here. They can use the site for the whole season (May to October) or not. If they aren’t in the site, the site can be “rented” by people like us. For $21 a night, we have full hook-ups, wifi, laundry (50 cents a load, both washer and dryer!), use of the clubhouse (pool table, library, social functions) and a beautiful view to boot. It is incredibly quiet. Bobby accidentally scared away two deer from the back of our site this morning.


This bumble bee spent ten minutes looking for pollen on Bobby.

We plan to see my cousin Kristie while we are here. She is a professor at Virginia Tech, about 45 minutes from here. We’re going tubing on the New River tomorrow (a flashback to my days at Tech) and maybe into Floyd on Friday for a festival. But most of all, we are going to relax and just hang out. It is, after all, our favorite thing to do.


Elise with Martha, Hannah, and Nathan

Elise works through a sparkler in the driveway.

Our drive yesterday was not too long and pleasant. Ohio is not hard to look at, when you are driving on the secondary roads. We got to toodle along another piece of Route 50 and saw field after field after field of corn. Thanks to ethanol subsidies, it seems to be the only crop this year, aside from the strawberry fields we saw in California. The farmers are happy because they are finally making some money on their crops. Corn takes a lot of nitrogen out of the soil, though, so they won’t be able to grow corn forever. Some crop rotation will have to be done to keep the soil in good shape.


This luna moth has been hanging around the front door since yesterday.

We ended up in Athens, Ohio to visit some friends from our old neighborhood in Annandale. Dean and Laurie have three kids: Martha (8 1/2), Hannah, (7) and Nathan (almost 5). Martha and Hannah were some of Elise’s first friends and they haven’t seen each other in about two years. The girls played together often — at the playground, the nearby nature center or each other’s houses. Luckily Laurie and I liked each other so play dates were fun for everyone! It has been wonderful to see these girls pick up where they left off so easily and quickly.

They have moved up to Athens so Dean can work on his PhD. in Electrical Engineering at Ohio University. Dean drove us around campus last night and it is lovely. Founded in 1804, it is the oldest college in Ohio and ninth oldest public university in the United States. The highlight of the tour was going into the student center and riding on the only escalators in the county!


Hannah gives her sparkler a whirl.

Athens County is the northernmost county in the Appalachian region. Correspondingly, some might say, it is the number one county in Ohio in terms of number of residents on welfare. There are old coal towns nearby and today after we all went to church we rode our bikes to one. The Plains is about three miles away from here on a rails-to-trails bike path. The destination was a food spot in The Plains, Jana’s Soul Food Cafe. Yum-my. They were only serving brunch today and that was no problem for us. Bobby had a curry tofu salad, Elise had (of course) chocolate chip pancakes and I had a Happy Hill which consisted of fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, red peppers, and scallions covered in melted provolone and cheddar cheese. Yes, it was delicious. Dean shared his sweet potato pancakes and Laurie forced herself to eat her Scrambled Mess, a delicious concoction of scrambled eggs with green pepper, broccoli, zucchini and a side of fried potatoes. All dishes came with a large slab of toasted marbled rye bread with honey butter. Like I said, it was good.


Nathan’s turn.

Tonight the girls are going to see the new American Girl movie while Bobby and I sneak out for yet another date night! I think we’re going to go see The Dark Knight and eat our dinner at the movies.

Just before Danine and I went to John’s show, the kids put on a show of their own in the basement. It required a ticket, which they provided, and included a playbill with the names of the plays. I’m not sure which ones we saw because they were pretty avant garde. I never can understand that kind of stuff, that and T.S. Eliot’s poetry. Maybe the kids had been reading “The Waste Land.”


Julie and Mark get into the performance.

Whatever the theme and plot of the show, it was clearly funny (Charlie fell off of a stool laughing) and filled with sudden drama (inexplicably, several Barbies were thrown from great heights). Like a lot of modern stories, it didn’t have much of an ending, but just kind of petered out.

Les Miserables was much easier to follow. Actually, it was the best high school show I’ve seen talent-wise. All of the principles could sing their parts perfectly. The sets were simple and well done. The lighting, which is one of John’s particular hobbies, was excellent. Danine and I already love this show, so it made for a great night out.

Today we went out for a pizza lunch. Naturally, before and after this the kids played tirelessly as only kids can. We are babysitting everybody tonight including cousin Megan while the other grownups go see the show. Everything should be fine unless the kids find a secret stash of Ezra Pound or Allen Ginsberg.

We played Monopoly last night, but not with John. Our friend John earned a reputation in college for ruthless negotiating and brow-beating when playing Monopoly. He’s mellowed, thankfully. Seana, Danine and I played with Julie (8), Charlie (6), and Elise (7 5/6). We carefully ended the game before things got ugly and kids started losing money, committing crimes, or making too much noise. The youngest kids, Mark (4) and Kelly (18 months), were asleep.


On a hot day, Kelly prefers her frozen margaritas indoors.

John is in a pre-show frenzy. He teaches high school theater and, in addition to the shows during the school year, he puts up a big production during the summer too. This year he’s doing Les Miserables with a cast that draws from many local high schools. John’s good at this and tonight is opening night. Danine and I are going to it for our ninth anniversary date!

It’s been fun catching up with old friends. We never expected to courtesy park this much. Courtesy parking is when friend, family or strangers graciously allow you to park your 51 feet of truck and trailer in their drive or yard, and permit you to use electricity, showers, laundry, etc. They almost never charge, which is nice. We are grateful for the break from campgrounds and the chance to enjoy their company.


Charlie (standing) and Mark fine tune the sprinkler’s placement.

Surprisingly, extensive wind-tunnel testing has shown this bicycle, and my careful positioning on it, to be the most aerodynamic possible. Look for it in the last time trial at this year’s Tour.

We are back in the Airstream after another day of repairs. They finished early today, only having to fix a piece of vinyl in the bathroom and address the fridge recall. The recall doesn’t prevent the possible leaking of the ammonia fluid that cools the fridge. It only protects the pilot light so the fluid won’t cause, or worsen, a fire. This protection consists of a square sheet of aluminum about six inches to a side. Not impressive, but completed!

We passed the time by driving about fifteen miles west to the town of New Bremen, OH. It’s bigger than Jackson Center although it also appears to have only one single screen movie theater. We didn’t go to the movies however. We went to the Bicycle Museum of America. The museum has about 350 bikes, many of them are unique or important in the history of the bicycle. The core of the collection was purchased from the Schwinn family in 1997. The earliest bike is mostly wood, requires pushing, and dates from 1816.


The state of the art when the art was first started.

The newest bike is by a custom frame builder name Ezra Caldwell and is a lugged steel fixed gear bike with a cool bamboo handlebar. I want one! They also have one of Lance Armstrong’s carbon Trek bikes from the Tour de France. There’s a big sign saying, “Do not touch,” near it. I think it’s because the bike is dinged a bit and carbon fiber once cracked or broken will easily break further. It’s light of course! But the lightest may be the nice custom titanium road bike by the family that started the Litespeed company. It weighs negative five pounds. Elise would actually rise up off the ground if she rode it. It costs $7,000.


Simple and elegant

There is a bike for everybody here. Remember the old stingrays with the banana seats? So good for popping wheelies. Remember the military issue bikes complete with rifle mount and ammunition? So ideal for every Cub Scout…




Even Felicity tried out a bike.

After grabbing a coffee (me) at the shop a few doors down and browsing their books, we headed for home. Tomorrow we’ll drive to glorious Cincinnati to visit our friends, and Elise’s godparents, John and Seana.


These guys are at Airstream for some work. The trailer on the left had some unfortunate graffiti sprayed on its sides. The trailer on the right was in a very serious accident with a Dodge Sprinter van. It looks like the van will have to be surgically removed and the interior completely redone.