A Rant About Flying...

OK, I have to get this out of my system!

Who else HATES to fly now days?? Anyone?
I flew from FL to CA on Continental Airlines (American is the same and so is Delta) this past weekend.

Why? Glad you asked.
I know my butt isn't getting any smaller, but holy cow... the seats on airplanes are freakin narrow and have NO leg room. When the person in front of me reclines their seat back - the seat hits me on my knees. The tray can't even fold out flat because it's so close me. What's up with THAT??  Oh sure - you can ask to sit at an exit row for more leg room... if you're willing to pay an extra $25 per FLIGHT for the exit row.  I don't think so.


The food - Food? What food? Pretzels, sodas and water for free! Big deal. Want a sandwich? That'll be $6 for a cold, nasty ham & cheese on some kind of bread. I thought I'd be smart and eat one BEFORE I got on the plane and I had to pay $10.00 for a freakin roast beef sandwich that was dry and skimpy on the meat to say the least. Where's the BEEF?? Not in MY sandwich that's for sure!

The movies - Oh yeah, if you're on a flight that allows a movie... just slide your credit card through the slot to pay the $6 it costs now and you get to watch the movie! As far as I know Jet Blue is the only airline that give you a movie for free. On the bright side, they GIVE you the head phones now. Remember when the movie was free and the head phones cost $2? HA!

Baggage - THIS has got to be the biggest rip off in the world. Paying extra to check your baggage is CRAZY! It causes a LOT of people to carry their luggage on board to save $25 - $30 so now you have to fight for space in the overhead to stow your "carry on." Hey - just charge everybody another $60 for the ticket and let us check our bags on the plan! I'd hate to fly with a family of 4. Not only are the costs of tickets up, but if each person had to check ONE bag, it would cost $100 more EACH WAY at the gate! That's ridiculous!

Changing Tickets - On this trip I had a little medical emergency and had to change my return ticket home from a Tuesday to a Sunday.  It cost me $433 to just CHANGE my flight!  WTF????  Are you kidding me???   And when I got on the flights... it wasn't even full.

I'm ready for trains...

Done with rant.

Visiting The Warings ( Sister and Mother) in Phoenix,AZ

My sister, Linda and my "bio Mom", Marty, live in the Phoenix area. I haven't seen either of them in years, so of course we had to stop by for a visit.

While we were there, we visited a tourist attraction called the Mystery Castle. It was built by Boyce Luther Gulley, who abandoned his wife and daughter in 1930 after learning that he had tuberculosis. He travelled to Phoenix and started building a "castle" for the little girl he'd left behind.

Mary Lou Gulley ( this is a picture of her today) was a toddler when her father unexpectedly left and never returned. Boyce Gulley's daughter, Mary Lou, still gives half the tour (the main house section) at the Mystery Castle when she feel up to it.

I can't believe she still lives here! No AC. Yikes! After Gulley's death in 1945, his wife and child inherited the castle and promptly moved in. His daughter still lives there and today conducts the tours herself. Depression glass dishes form doorway transoms, and an upside-down bathtub serves as the exhaust vent over the kitchen stove. In one room, windows are formed from the wheels of Gulley's Stutz Bearcat, the windshield of which is used as a glass panel in a terrace wall. To get from the parlor to the bedroom, a flight of stairs goes up over a boulder and down the other side so that he wouldn't have to disturb the surrounding landscape. He hauled rocks from over one mile away so the surrounding landscape wouldn't be disturbed too! This place is the original "green house."

There are a bunch of pictures below. Just click on the pic to see bigger!

Jasmine, this picture is for you! Nice shoes huh? They held weddings at the Mystery Castle and brides would leave at least one shoe behind at the chapel because it was rumored that the "groom would be true forever..." if they did. Needless to say - there are lot's of shoes there! This was one of them. Here are some more >>

Ameriplan - a great dental plan.

Back Home!

Well, as Steve said, we are back home in Jax. So good to be back. We are, as my son says, "living in a trailer on the Interstate".....

So, Justin, it's a great life!! We have a great little spot right OFF the Interstate at 295 and Lem Turner (Jax, FL). Nice and private with a little back yard for Steve's dog. Big lake to walk around, and finally, close to everything we need.

Been busy seeing, well you know, doctors, lawyers, Indian Chiefs, etc., but hope to get all business settled soon.

It's just really really good to be back here. We are already planning next year's trip. Should be here until February and then head south across 10 to Texas, Arizona and then spend some time with Steve's family in Southern California. Plan on heading up the coast to San Francisco so I can re-create the crazy decade I spent there. Probably not up to the task, but there is so much I want to see there.

From there, we hope to spend the summer and fall of 2009 in Oregon, Washington, and all those other places we in the south never pay any attention to. Steve really really wants to travel thru the Rockies, so I may take a bus on the low road...................meet up with him there. Kidding. I am willing to try the mountains up to a certain point. I'm just really loving being back where there are NO mountains and lots of straight roads!!

Just wanted to stay in touch and if anyone in Jax wants to do a "shout out" we are here on the North Side and would love to hear from you!!!

Ya' Betcha' !!!!!!!!

Take care,
Kathy

$2 A Day!!

SWEET! We're at our new "home park" in Crossville, TN ( http://www.aorcamping.com/resort_directory/aor_resorts/tennessee/docs/breckenridgelake.html ) and we're only paying $2 a night because it's our first visit. Sure beats the $40 a night ( or more) in the Northeast!

Now you may be asking, "What's a home park?" OK. I'll tell ya!

If you're a full time RV'er, then there are camp "memberships" that you can buy which allows you to stay at certain RV parks across the country for $10 a night. Like a time share, if you buy one directly from the "company" then you could spend $3,000 to $10,000 for one of these memberships. Your membership is to a "home park" and you get discounts to other RV parks that are associated with whatever association your home park is a member of.

There are three national associations that sell these memberships:

1. http://www.1000trails.com/ - We did NOT join this.

2. http://www.coastresorts.com/directory/index.cfm - Coast To Coast or as it's sometimes referred to: C2C. We DID get a membership in this one.

3. http://www.resortparks.com/ - Resort Parks International (RPI). We got a membership to this one too!


Since our "home park" is part of the C2C association and the RPI association we also get access to all the RPI and C2C campgrounds scattered across the country. We can stay at one park for 7 days in a row and then we HAVE to be "out of the system" for another 7 days before we can go back to a membership park. The beauty is: we can stay at a C2C park for 7 days and then go directly to a RPI park for another 7 days at a cost of $10 a night!


We won't always be in an area where there is a membership park and that's OK because this will cut our camping costs in half at least!


AND... I bought my membership off Ebay from a reseller for a fraction of what it would have cost new! I love a good bargain!

We're just hanging out here in Crossville waiting for the leaves to change. Tough life huh? hehehe

Mammoth Cave National Park, KY

Here we are in Mammoth Cave National Park (http://www.nps.gov/maca/ ) camping at Diamond Cave RV Resort which is a "not so bad" RV place. I still wonder where in the world people come up with the nerve to call some places a "resort" though! A swimming pool, hot tub and saunas that don't work do NOT warrant the "resort" title in my opinion. HA!

We ended up here because we were running from Hurricane Ike. When I saw it was headed towards the Indiana & Michigan area we fueled up and headed south! All we got here in KY was some wind blowing about 35-35 MPH so it wasn't too bad.

We did take a short tour of Mammoth Cave. They had several walking tours available. One was about 1/4 mile in a section of one cave and the next choice was a FOUR mile walk through the cave. Yikes! That's quite a jump! Guess which one we took? Yep! The 1/4 mile "Niagra Falls" tour. That was just right :) Here are some pictures:

We'll be here for 2 weeks because we only have to pay $10 a night! That's right! We finally found a camping membership that didn't cost $1000's of dollars. I bought one off Ebay for less than $400 a YEAR and it allows us to stay at Coast to Coast and RPI campgrounds for 7 days at $10 a night. I figure that'll save us around $400 - $500 a month :) Sweet!

Our next stop will be to stay at our "home park" in Crossville, TN for a week (maybe 2 weeks) for $2 a night! We haven't been there yet, so we'll see how we like it. If it sucks ( I know it only has 30 amp service and I like 50 amp so everything works) we'll move on to Bluff City, TN to visit our son, Justin, for awhile.

Cheers! Don't forget to tell your friends about Ameriplan if they're looking for a great discount dental plan.

Lake Michigan and South Haven MI

This is our first post from our two week stay near Lake Michigan. We are 5 miles from the lake, which is beautiful. Great RV park; it's brand new and not crowded at all. That will change this coming week, with Labor Day weekend coming up. Steve had spent hours finding us a place for Labor Day (note to selves for next year, make holiday reservations early!!!). Anyway, he did a great job cause this place is very nice. We have the largest site, right across from a huge meadow. Elvis has his own backyard again!! Well, temporarily anyway.

We are going to explore part of the lake this week, so we'll do lake pics all at the end of the trip. We are going to "Taste of Sagatauk today; it's about 15 miles up the lake. If you did the entire trip around the lake, it's 1100 miles!!! We aren't going that far, obviously.

The slideshow above is from the past week. We stayed in Monroe, MI, where Custer was born. It was a pretty cool little town. Steve found a route called Old Chicago Road, leading from Detroit to Gary, IN. The really cool part about it is that it was a trail that had been traveled over 10,000 years ago (really!) by great mastodons and the indigenous people who hunted them. I don't think it was paved back then.................

We picked it up at Monroe and took it about half way. The best part was that park with all the cement bridges. NO ONE was there, so we had the run of the park (for Elvis again) and we tried to get pics of all 17 bridges. Not sure I found them all. Anyway, pretty interesting stuff you can find on the road; we get ideas from the Motor home magazines. We don't really do lots of research. Too much like a job.

Yesterday on the way home I spotted the small herd of buffalo in a farmer's field. Steve wants to cook some bison burgers, so I may buy some bison meat and try one. Yuck!

OK, I gotta run. Steve is such a task master!!! So, we are going to enjoy Lake Michigan, then head down to Indiana to get something fixed on the RV, then down to Graceland (Yeah!!!!) and hopefully over to Hot Springs, Arkansas for some hot springs therapy, then head home. See you in October!!!!

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

We went into Cleveland, OH on Saturday to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was cool! Cleveland has a very pretty and clean downtown area.

After our visit in Cleveland, we stayed at a campground in Monroe, MI ( http://www.harbortownrv.com/ ) for 5 days. Did you know that Monroe was General Custers home town? Weeee! Monroe is a little town about 30 miles south of Detroit and I feel kind of sorry for people who live here. It's depressing. Half of the downtown stores are boarded up, and the closer you get to Detroit, the more things to see shut town. I imagine that when the auto manufactures were all here in the "good old days" that this area was a busy place... but not any more. And the wind! the wind blows EVERYDAY off Lake Erie. Makes my golf game hard to play! HA! On the bright side I shot a 88 yesterday, which is one of the best scores I've had in a long time :)

Oh well, we're off to Jones, MI today to spend another 5 days hanging out in MI here: http://www.camelotcampgroundllc.com/ . After Labor Day, we're heading south towards Jacksonville!

Rain, rain, rain = Double Rainbow

Boy! Has it been WET!
It rained on us in ME and NH. And it followed us to Herkimer now it's been POURING on us here in Byron, NY. Sigh.

Have you ever seen a DOUBLE rainbow? For the 1st time in our lives, we have! Can you see the 2nd rainbow in the pictures below?

We're ready for our trip to AZ! Not too much rain there I hear :)

We have found a great RV Park to stay in though. Nice open spaces and there's no one next to us. We kinda like that.
There's not much to do in this area, but we will try and take a trip to what's called the "Little Grand Canyon" of the North located in Letchworth Park, NY.

ameriplan

Lowell, MA Folk Festival

Today ( 7- 27-08) we took a little road trip to Lowell, MA and spent the day in the downtown area where they were having the Lowell Folk Festival, which is the largest folk festival in the USA.

Lowell has an interesting history as it was founded around 1802 by private investors and was initially designed as an industrial city that was built to spin cotton goods for the north. A planned community in the 1800's. Imagine that! Bet they didn't have HOA fees then though. :)

The streets in the entire downtown area are still paved with the original brick pavers that were installed when the city was built. Kinda cool. The folk festival itself is a world-wide draw for musicians from all over the world and you can see & hear music from every country. Quite an impressive event! Click on the slide show below for larger pictures.



This Friday Kathy and I will be leaving Exeter, NH for a couple of weeks and staying in Salisbury, MA. From there we'll explore Plymouth and the Cape Cod area. We'll return to Exeter for a week or two and then head west towards South Dakota... AFTER bike week cause I ain't got my baby no more. Boo Hoo!

We're just getting anxious to get back on the road! We LOVED staying in a nice apartment in Exeter for a month, but find ourselves missing our RV ( our home!) and also find ourselves wanting to get bck to traveling some more! Yeah, I know - it surprised us too!

Independence Day in Exeter

Last night Exeter had a little town celebration. There was a little fair, reinactments and a fireworks works show at the end of the day to top it off.

Kathy & I went to the RV, fired up the generator, grabbed a couple of toddies and enjoyed the fireworks from the parking lot. We also spent the night in our RV! We're starting to miss our home! HA! Here are some pictures. Just click anywhere ON the small pics to make them bigger :)

We fought the Law...

Whew! We arrived in Exeter, NH about 7:30pm last night after deciding to drive about 350 miles from our last spot. Of course it POURED all the way... and I mean literally ALL the way. Traffic was going about 30MPH in some areas because it was raining so hard. Our aux braking system for our toad was acting up, so we stopped about 3 times to try and fix THAT problem, but finally I just disconnected the thing. Sigh.

Our friend told us that we would be able to boondock in an abandoned parking lot across the street where she lives, but when we got there, we couldn't get in the lot because we are too big. Uh oh. Now what do we do?

We disconnected the toad, and I sent Kathy ahead of me with walkie talkie in hand as a scout to be sure we could drive out of the narrow streets we found ourselves in. We finally made it out of the neighborhood and back on the main road where we found and empty lot right next to a Dunkin Doughnut shop! SWEET! Both of us were worn out from the drive, so we parked it in the lot.

About 11PM we have bright lights shining in the window and Exeters finest was walking around the RV trying to figure out what the hell we were doing parked there.

Someone had called us in as a "suspicious vehicle." WHAT? US?? Suspicious?? Get outta here!

Of course Elvis is barking his head off, Kathy is digging for ID's, I'm begging the officer to PLEASE let us stay the rest of the night and we'll find another place first thing in the morning - I promise! Being the staunch enforcement officer that is expected here in Exeter, the officer called his station to ask his sargent for permission to let us stay ( It IS private property after all. Just a 2 acre blank piece of black top with a big freaking "For Sale" sign in front. It WAS the local McDonalds lot until they moved about FIVE YEARS AGO).

No answered the phone ( hmmmm I wonder where they were at 11:15pm on a Monday night?) so he let us stay! YEAH!

Now I have to find another place to park before someone calls in to report us as a "suspicious vehicle" again. HA!

We're off to visit, sight see the area and eat a BIG lobster tonight for dinner :))

The good news - I get to have Dunkin Doughnuts and coffee in the morning (parked about 50 feet from the door)! Oh yeah - our coffee pot broke yesterday after falling to the floor so I NEEDED a good cup of java anyway...

Niagara Falls; Day 1

So, it's 2 am; (ish) and I just find this is the best time to write. Steve is asleep and so is Elvis. I am wide awake. Maybe it's because I went to BED at 9 pm!!! Woke up and it is 68 degrees in the house! That's with the a/c off and just pulling fresh air thru the vents. What a difference from the 97 degrees in Gettysburg.

Left PA yesterday and to conserve $$$$$ (lest someone has to get a job whose name begins with Steve) we are trying to find free places to stay occasionally. So, we stayed at a "Flying J" truck stop last night. It was pretty scary. Big big trucks fly by you every minute or so. But it's safe and free, so I can adapt. We met a couple who travel with, yes, 16 dogs!!! I wonder what their motorhome smells like. So, left there and headed up here to Niagara Falls. I was only good for about an hour, then had to nap in the back. We thought we were out of the mountains, but Steve drove us thru 3 hours in the Allegheny's. He said it was best that I wasn't watching the roads. Pretty hairy turns and the lady (that's being nice) on the GPS keeps trying to take us on little roads that were apparently designed for go-carts. Suffice to say, we made it to Niagara Falls proper.

Found the campground easily; had a lot of trouble getting parked in the spot I wanted. But he did it! We took a short drive to the Falls, with Elvis, so we couldn't get out and take pics. Just wanted to see where we need to be tomorrow. We are doing the "Maid of the Mist" boat tour, and a couple of other touron (that's half tourist/half moron) sites. Leaving on Saturday. Am a little concerned that we are going on Niagara Falls on Friday the 13th. Not over the falls, but under. I am going to attempt the "Hurricane Deck" at the Cave of the Winds................if it's not too high up. It's the spot from the Marilyn Monroe/Joseph Cotten movie, "Niagara" which is my favorite Marilyn movie. Except that she has her husband murdered there. Don't worry Steve, I KNOW nobody in Niagara (kidding hon). We will post pics in a couple of days.

So very great to hear from everyone who reads the blog. We don't "blog" every day, which I know you may be grateful for.

Leaving here early Saturday to go to Kayuta Lake near Utica, NY. Will be there for a week. On a lake, things to do nearby so I am looking forward to that.

Other than that, all is good. I'm off to bed again, as we have a busy day tomorrow.

Miss you all...if anyone wants to send us their snail mail address, we would love to send more postcards!

Take care,

Kathy