2022 Maine Expedition is complete

The dust has settled from our first epic road trip with our travel trailer, Snickers. Departing north Georgia on August 1, we covered 3,165 miles to northern Maine (Greenville) and back. The 2022 Maine Expedition found us driving through 14 states and staying at 18 different campgrounds. We’re now busy organizing photos from all the neat places we visited along the way including Natural Bridge VA, US Army Heritage Center, Moosehead Lake ME, the Morgan Horse Farm in VT, Niagara Falls NY, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland OH, USAF Museum in Dayton OH, and Kentucky Horse Park. The best part was getting to spend time with family in ME, NH and VT. Photo galleries coming soon!

Introducing “Snickers”

At 21 feet Snickers is “fun-sized”…big enough for both of us and Bailey, yet small enough to fit into most state park campgrounds. So far we have checked off two USA states, setting a goal to camp in 47 more (sorry Hawaii, we won’t be shipping Snickers on a boat). During our first two expeditions, Snickers has proven to be everything that we had hoped for in a RV. We love having the comforts of home wherever we decide to roam.

New year, new toy

Pete reports: We’ve officially been retired for a year now. I decided that retirement was a time to get involved with hobbies I never had time for but wanted to do. Typical story, right? So with a new motorcycle permit in hand, I went to buy a 250cc TBR7 dual sport I’ve been eyeing. You can order this bike from Amazon and it shows up at your house in a crate with some minor assembly required. Then I found a shop 30 minutes north of us that sells them with the very attractive offer to use their shop, tools, and expertise to let me finish the bike quickly. All for the same price as the Amazon delivery. After talking to them, I learned they also sell them fully assembled and tested for the same price too! No brainer. I bought the bike and the owner said, oh, you live in Ball Ground? I go there several times a week. Want me to deliver it? Heck yeah!

After a couple months and over 400 miles on the back roads near home, I can report it is as fun as I hoped!

Merry Christmas!

Like seemingly for everyone, 2021 has been a year of significant change.

The biggest for us personally was both taking advantage of early retirement from the workforce, Mary at the end of December last year and Pete on March 1 this year.  It certainly is a leap of faith but we’ve been planning for this for quite some time.  We both know how lucky we are to be able to do so and have been enjoying our free time with hiking, kayaking, and some travelling.  We have a big trip planned for the near future and hope that travel restrictions don’t change between now and then.  Keeping our fingers crossed!

Our household at Rott’n Manor is now Mary, Pete, and our German Shepherd Bailey.  Another (literally) big change this year is Mary’s new crew cab F150 pickup truck.  Mary loves her new truck.  It has been fitted with a large wire crate in the back seat area for Bailey.  Now, the three of us can start exploring the southeast together and might try working in some longer road trips.  We intended to be doing road trips already but Bailey needed knee surgery in September to repair a ruptured ligament and is happily almost back to unrestricted activity.

In a typical post-retirement fashion, a major effort we’ve had underway is simplifying our household.  We are well into cleaning out the 27 years worth of “oubliets”, stuff we stashed to deal with later.  Pete even reduced his VW collection by two!  Now we only have the 57 Beetle and 74 Thing for him to tinker on.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate.  There is also the 67 Mustang coupe stored out back that Pete intends to get working on in 2022.

We were grateful to make two Maine trips to be with family this year.  The circumstances for making the trips were sad, both for memorial services for Mary’s Mom Elizabeth Richards and Pete’s Step-Mom Fay Clukey.  However, the time being together with both our families was very much needed after such a long time apart.  We hope to see everyone more often now that our schedule is VERY flexible.

We wish everyone the best in 2022 and hope to see you soon!

The Tail of the Rabbit

A tail of Mary’s first car in Florida from 1988/89.

Mary began shopping for a car not long after she moved to Daytona.  It didn’t take long for her to find a deal on a used VW Rabbit that was in decent shape and fit our budget.  She bought it and drove it home to our apartment on Butler Blvd, beachside in Daytona.  This Rabbit was light blue with three wide blue stripes down the side that were all a slightly different shade of blue.  We’ve never seen another Rabbit with the same stripes.  This feature will be important later in the story.  Also important is that the windows were tinted dark.  Very dark.  So there’s Mary’s Rabbit, parked on the side of the road, with a temporary license plate taped in the back window.  The dark tinting made the plate hard to see.  Since Mary was working only two blocks from the apartment, she didn’t have it insured and wasn’t driving it.

One fateful day, Pete comes home from school in the afternoon to find the car gone.  He thought it was unusual that Mary would have driven the car since it wasn’t insured and it wasn’t raining.  He waits for Mary to come home to see what’s going on.  Mary comes home a few hours later and asks Pete “What did you do with my car?”  Uh-oh…  Someone stole her car.  We called the Police, filled out the report, and never expected to see the Rabbit again.

Fast forward a few months.  Mary and Pete just finished their laundry and are waiting at a traffic light where Mason Ave approaches the Halifax River and crosses over to become Seabreeze Blvd.  A light blue Rabbit with three wide stripes zips by headed for the beach!  We look at each other in disbelief and both yell “That’s the Rabbit!”  Our light turns green and the pursuit is on.  Well, it’s a slow speed pursuit and we just tail the car from a good distance.  We head north on A1A and it soon pulls in to the parking lot at Steak and Ale.  We pass by as they park then we circle back for a closer look.

Upon closer inspection, the car is definitely Mary’s.  It has the distinctive dent on top of the left front fender and X scratched in the paint on the driver’s door.  Mary calls the police to report that we found our stolen car.  An officer shows up very soon and we explain the situation.  He calls in for backup and gets the Watch Supervisor to show up, too.  After all, we’re dealing with a dangerous car thief!  They were justifiably concerned because there was a big Rambo knife sitting on the dash.  Pete takes off back to the apartment to get the paperwork proving the car is ours while Mary hangs out on the stakeout.

So there are Mary and Pete, sitting in the back of an Ormond Beach patrol car, chatting with an officer about our stakeout.  The Watch Supervisor made a walk-through of the restaurant to look for the car thief based on our description.  That didn’t help any.  We helped prove that people’s observations about what they saw are usually incomplete or just wrong.  We did get the car right, though!

Pretty soon, a couple comes out of the restaurant and gets in the Rabbit.  They are immediately swarmed by patrol cars and officers, pulled out of the car and quickly put in handcuffs.  The officers soon determine the couple isn’t a threat and take off the handcuffs.  Turns out the guy bought the car from a dealership in Deland, about 30 miles away.  The bad thing was his date was asthmatic and didn’t enjoy the situation very much.  After sorting through the paperwork, the officers determined that Mary could take the car home since she’s the original owner.  That left the poor guy and his date stranded in Daytona.  We gave them a ride home to Deland because we felt bad about what happened to them.  Nearly being arrested and having your car taken away doesn’t make for a good evening.

The following day, Mary sets out to make the car less appealing to thieves.  We pull the battery, seats, door panels, carpeting, etc.  We pretty much stripped out the interior.  Mary wanted to overhaul the interior anyways.  She soon was working on custom door panels that looked really cool.  We weren’t too clever and put all the nuts, bolts, and fasteners in one coffee can.  That would normally be a problem but it was soon solved for us.

A couple weeks after getting the car back, Pete notices a wrecker parked out front and a couple guys looking at Mary’s Rabbit.  We go out and talk to them.  They are from the dealership in Deland that sold the car to the guy that was nearly arrested.  You can imagine they were in some hot water for selling a stolen car and, as it turns out, for stealing it in the first place.  They had taken a different blue Rabbit (not running and sight unseen) as a trade-in from a lady in our neighborhood.  They sent an 18-year old kid to get it with the wrecker.  He saw our Rabbit, didn’t see the temporary licenses plate, the key from her car happened to fit ours, so he hauled it off.  The dealership then failed to check the VIN number when they processed and sold it.  Whoops.

Now they needed our help to get out of trouble.  They wanted Mary’s Rabbit to give back to the other guy.  We told them no, we wanted to keep it.  They kept offering more money and we kept saying no.  I think we got up to $1500 for a car that Mary paid $400 for.  We liked the Rabbit and didn’t want to deal with shopping for another car.  They came up with another idea.  They had a friend with a car lot in Daytona.  They would take us there to look at his cars.  If we saw something we liked, they would exchange it for the Rabbit.  We said OK, we’ll look. The only thing we liked was a brown Toyota Celica hatchback.  It looked good, drove fine, but the tires were nearly worn out.  We told them the Celica would be acceptable, but they would have to put new tires on it.  They had little choice and agreed to the deal.  We later found out the price on the Celica was $2200!  Not a bad trade for a $400 Rabbit.  We drove the Celica home followed by the wrecker.  They hooked up to the Rabbit and tossed in all the loose interior parts.  They said not to worry, the kid that took the car the first time would have the pleasure of reassembling everything.

Dinner inspired by our past travel

At the end of 2012, we traveled to Morocco where we were served shakshuka; a dish of eggs poached in a sauce of tomatoes, olive oil, onion, garlic, aromatically spiced with cumin, paprika, and cayenne pepper. It appeared one night for dinner and included meatballs. Tonight Mary recreated that meal using this recipe: https://downshiftology.com/recipes/shakshuka/https://downshiftology.com/recipes/shakshuka/

Here is a picture of the meal that we had in Morocco back in 2012:

And here is a photo of Mary’s shakshuka:

Hopefully someday soon, we can travel to a country where this dish is served, but for now this will have to do!

So, 2020 has not exactly started the way that we all had hoped for…

It has however slowed us all down and made us appreciate life more.

Perhaps never before have we appreciated living where we do more than we do now.

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Both of us remain employed, working from home which we both enjoy immensely. Less commuting gives us more time, which we take full advantage of on our daily photo-safaris around Rott’n Manor. Spring time means so much variety of flora and fauna in our yard.

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And Mary seems to be enjoying cooking. Fortunately, we have quite a few smaller local “farmers markets” nearby that have online or phone ordering and curbside delivery…fresh produce, meat, and even some dairy, all locally source!

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Pete is in danger of running out of “honey-do” projects, nah.

And despite all of the human activities, the critters are still able to get in their naps.

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Then it helps

On a shelve in my cubicle at work, I have a little bucket of sand from the Sahara desert in Morocco.

Looking at it today, I snickered as I thought of how similar my bucket of sand is to Jack Sparrow’s jar of dirt.

The scene in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Deadman’s Chest between Tia Dalma and Jack Sparrow goes as follows:

“Davy Jones cannot make port. Cannot step on land but once every ten years. Land is where you are safe, Jack Sparrow, and so you will carry land with you.”

“…Dirt. This is a jar of dirt.”

“Yes.”

“Is the jar of dirt going to help?”

“If you don’t want it, give it back.”

“No.”

“Then it helps.”

As I glance at my bucket of sand, memories of places we’ve been and thoughts of places we’ll go, take me briefly away from the box (cubicle) within a box (building) in which I work. And for a brief moment, yes “it helps”!

Spring gardening

Every year, we weed and replant around our lilac bush. This year it was our big weekend project!

We turned one side into a memorial garden…”No longer by my side but forever in my heart”. Bolo and Indy being most recently lost, but this is for all our critters who have, as a friend of ours likes to say, made their transition into what is next.

The other side is a small herb garden.

Catesby Trillium

What started as one little plant has grown into quite a big clump this year.

Catesby Trillium (Trillium catesbaei) is a spring ephemeral plant that is native to Georgia. This perennial is one of 20 trillium species native to Georgia.