Estes Park sits at the doorstep to Rocky Mountain National Park, at an average elevation of about 7,500’.  The drive up from Golden was glorious, and re-sparked a conversation about what life would look like from one of the several small towns bisected by rushing rivers that we passed through on our way to the Creekside campground in EP.  We set up there on lush grass and hung one of the hammocks right next to the clear water.  We’ve had some extremely pleasant camp set-ups over the past year, but this one was pushing max glory.

My title of course is a hat tip to C.S. Lewis, whose Chronicles of Narnia I read in early Junior High.  The phrase, if I remember the context correctly, comes from The Last Battle, and is an exhortation from Aslan the Lion to explore the story’s thinly veiled metaphor for heaven.  Now I’m not saying that the Rockies are heaven, that would be a little too easy and cliché.  But I will say that I noticed a distinct, euphoria-inducing character to these mountains that I hadn’t seen elsewhere.  I’ve always known on some level that the various mountain ranges have different “feels” to them: the Sierra Nevada are craggy and wild; the North Cascades are deep, jagged, and glacier-y; the Wasatch are somewhat dry and full of aspen groves – but for some reason this leg of our trek really drove the point home for me, as this stretch of the Rockies struck me as almost a Platonic ideal of mountains.  The colors were vivid, the peaks were sharp, the air was impossibly clean and crisp, and deer and elk roamed freely through enormous meadows.

It’s difficult to convey how calming this all was.  Multiple times I carefully placed my low camp chair into the stream and balanced my cold tolerance with the Zen of the water rushing over my lower half.  I convinced Keeper to dip his head into the stream upon waking up.

 

This head-into-the-river/stream deal has become a bit of a “thing” for us, and bears further exploration.  This has become my compromise of choice when I feel compelled to jump into a cold, clear body of water (usually flowing), and I feel that compulsion pretty much any time I see such water.  Generally full immersion isn’t practical, though, due both to whatever I’m wearing at the time (old guys skinny dipping in public is frowned upon, and soggy cotton doesn’t jibe well with long trips in a vehicle* ) and the temperature of the water, in general.  I don’t claim that this is normal behavior.  But I do claim that it feels amazing.  And for whatever reason, the kids, Keeper in particular, have followed my “lead” on this.  So we’ve dunked our heads into quite a few American rivers this year, and this week we added Estes Park’s Big Thompson to the list.

We didn’t have much time remaining the first afternoon to accomplish much, but opted to pop into the National Park and stroll around one of the meadows.  I could spend this entire post searching for novel ways to say “wow,” but pictures do a much better job.

One thing that became very clear during this stop was the extent to which hiking brings out the best in the kids.  I love this.  It’s one of the things we had hoped for during the planning/dreaming stages of our journey, yet it’s tempered by the fact that they fight us tooth and nail every time we suggest a hike.  They seem to believe, deep in their souls, that they can’t stand hiking, and then get them out there and all the screen-addicted pre-teen nonsense falls away and they start playing exactly like you would want kids to play.  What’s more, they suddenly like each other!  Which isn’t to say that they normally don’t… in fact another welcome by-product of this trip has been the extent to which they have become close as siblings.  They fight, because they’re required to by natural law, but in general they’re extremely decent to each other.  But during a hike it’s all about “let’s go climb this rock!” “let’s take a selfie up here!” “come jump in the lake with me!”

We spent the majority of our second day on a hike higher up in the park, past a few alpine lakes.  Again, ideal.

Early on in the hike the kids spotted a not-yet-melted snowfield a few hundred yards off the trail and insisted we bushwhack out there to check it out (and get some photos).

Little did they know that further along the trail would look like this…

At the trail’s terminus we found the lake still partially frozen, which led to what could easily have become hours of collecting, examining, and creatively breaking ice chunks.

 

Nothing like having to drag your kids away from a mountain lake because they’d just like to play “for five more minutes!”

The next (and last) day in Estes Park we went hike-less, but opted to do some fishing… wait, better add the scare quotes here, make that “fishing”… nearby.  I’ll explain momentarily.

We first played some miniature golf in town.  Not our normal activity, but this being somewhat of a resort town, they had an especially fun looking miniature golf course, along with bumper cars, bumper boats and a slide.  Also, at altitude your putts travel 40% farther on average.  That may not be true.

Anyway, after mini golf we passed a stocked (commercial) trout pond which we had seen on the way into town, and all of the kids agreed that they would like to catch some trout for dinner.

About fishing. We brought the lion’s share of our fishing gear with us in Davista.  Which isn’t much really, but the grand concept in play was that fishing would become a family activity during our travel year.  Keeper had even, on multiple occasions prior to our departure, thrown out the idea that fishing was something he was very much interested in, and could possibly “get REALLY into.”  So that was a no-brainer – fishing everywhere, for everyone!

The problem is that I am…  well, essentially I’m a sub-standard fisherman.  Severely below average it appears.  Not for lack of enthusiasm mind you, I just don’t seem to have that skill set.  So poor Keeper, having had his first several fishing experiences with ME, well, his enthusiasm had dampened a bit.

Back to Estes Park.  My intention was to get some fish on my kids’ lines and then walk them through the line-in-the-water to dinner process in order to show them how rewarding it can be (or yeah, so I’ve heard…).  This place seemed tailor-made for that.  You didn’t even have to bring your own gear.  Just show up, catch some fish, pay by weight, and they’d even clean them for you.  I probably should have been skeptical of the whole setup, but the idea of having my kids actually catch fish for once sucked me in.

I have this to say for the trout pond folks, they delivered exactly what they promised.  It took more time for us to bait the hooks than it did to get a fish on the line.  I had to wonder whether we even needed the bait… these trout seemed starved and desperate enough that a sharp, shiny piece of metal would have looked like a Thanksgiving dinner.  Within about 10 minutes of arriving, all three kids had caught a trout.  And since catch-and-release was prohibited here, we were done.

Except for the cleaning.  As much I would have liked not only to teach the kids how to clean a fish, and, ok I admit it, to prove to them that I actually know how, because this trip hadn’t provided me the chance to do so… we had neither a good place to at this campground nor the proper knife for the job.  Thinking of ease, sharpness, and weight, we’ve gone all ceramic.  So I had the guys who worked at the pond clean the fish for us.

Not saying this was a mistake, as the outcome would have been the same regardless of who did the cleaning, but somehow Firebolt had yet to make the mental and emotional connection between swimming fish and on-the-plate fish.  She was disturbed.  Deeply.  No father likes to preside over that sort of distress in his daughter, I think, but if he does, he’s hopefully ready with a pithy response when she agonizingly offers up that “it’s just not right!  Those fish should be allowed to live their lives!  Not get sliced up like that and eaten!  Why can’t they just die naturally?”  Hopefully.  I, on the other hand, was not at all ready.  I threw something out there about the food chain, maybe?  Circle of life?  Omnivores vs. herbivores?  Whatever it was, it lacked conviction, eloquence, and forethought, and certainly didn’t change her mind in the least.  She decided right then and there not only to forgo that part of dinner, but never to fish again.  Well, shoot.  Maybe she’ll date a fisherman one day.  Or maybe she’ll become vegan.

And then there was the trout itself.  I prepared it like I remembered from various camping trips of my youth, namely dusting it with flour and/or cornmeal, adding some salt and pepper, and pan-frying it in enough butter to make nothing else matter.  And honestly?  It was nasty.  Tacco made a show of being appreciative that her husband and kids had brought home dinner.  That was a nice gesture.  But none of us made it past a few bites before deciding that these were not tasty fish at all.  I don’t know whether I’m mis-remembering the flavor of fresh mountain trout, or if whatever horrible conditions those trout were living in somehow translated to our plates and palates, but either way, I seriously doubt I’ll be able to pull off serving trout to the family for a long, long time.  And I think the fishing gear’s gathering dust in Davista’s lower compartment will become more or less an official state of affairs.

We did have a cool experience back at the campsite, however, before all of this unplanned rejection of our genetic stock as hunters.  I saw a few large bull elk as I walked up to the bathroom.  Knowing that there were abundant elk in the area, I didn’t think much of it, but did take a picture, as they were quite impressive with their huge antlers.  Well, after I emerged from the bathroom I noticed that they were gone.  I began to wonder where they had wandered to, but didn’t have to do so for long, as they had taken up temporary residence right behind Davista!

I quickly implored Tacco and the kids to take a look out the window, which led to walking outside to get a closer (but not too close) look.

I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like to be rousted from a nap in the hammock by a nudging antler. “Dude.  Wake up.  I want to eat this grass.”

 

Overall I’m just happy to be back deep into the mountains, and these feel especially mountain-y to me.  Life is good.

*True story:  Once while road-tripping with Tacco through the Norwegian fjords in early May and wearing jeans, a long sleeved shirt and a wool Norwegian sweater, I walked to the edge of the water and immediately slipped on the rock, finding myself completely underwater a split-second later.  Those clothes sat draped in the back of the car for days.  They’re probably still damp.

Finally, the mountains!  Real ones.  Fourteeners all up in your face.   Crisp, fresh air and crystal clear water.  It REALLY felt good to be back.

While there are several places to park the RV along the Front Range, once we narrowed things down, a private RV park in Golden edged out a County Park just out of town and up I-70 a bit.  This was a good call.  Though the RV park itself wasn’t much to look at, it had all the amenities, was clean, and was essentially right in town.  I very nearly wrote that the kids appreciated this, and they do, but really that’s a cop out.  The truth is that we, or I at least, have reached the point in our journey where power, water, a sewer hookup, clean bathrooms, and solid wi-fi / cell signal assume far more importance than they did in the first few months, and I’m not ashamed.  I guess how I can best interpret this is that I’ve come to accept that we’re not needing to be too hard core about it all; I no longer feel any obligation to “rough it” more than is necessary.  We’re not camping, we’re moving our home around the country.  A half year’s worth of public toilets and showers, giving your waste euphemistic names (“grey and black water”) & storing it with you in a small tank that fills quite quickly, and keeping close track of various levels (battery, propane, the aforementioned grey and black water tanks) all get you to a point where a few creature comforts are treasured when they’re available.

Plus we have friends in Golden whom we were hoping to see.  And it’s a cool place, as we quickly discovered.

Once again I needed to leave the family behind and fly a trip for work very shortly after arriving, but I was fortunate to be able to connect with another old squadron-mate and friend who has been a Golden resident for quite some time, and who now flies for Delta.  He’s yet another spectacular individual from that time of my life – stellar pilot, top notch mountain biker, and ridiculously intelligent, yet known for his slow, deep style of speaking and generous use of the word “dude,” or more accurately, “duuuuuuuude.”  He’s the only person I know who takes the time to write a handwritten, personalized (and humorous) note with every single Christmas card he sends.  At any rate, I had hoped just to say hello, but he surprised us by offering to swoop us in his minivan and give us a grand tour of town, which we’d have been crazy to turn down.

So as I mentioned, Golden is a cool place.  It’s surrounded by parkland and open space, and criss-crossed by dedicated biking / walking trails. 

It also is more or less bisected by Clear Creek, which is exactly what it sounds like, and provides not only a nice set of streamside trails right through downtown, but tubing for the more adventurous – we saw quite a few tubers get flushed off of their tubes and into the rapids in the short time we watched.  I loved it.

And then there’s of course the beer scene.  Naturally there’s Coors, who I learned essentially owns the town.  My friend talked about how when he first moved in he had to sign an imposing pile of paperwork which turned over, among other things, the right to turn off his water to the Adolph Coors company.  It’s not as ominous as it sounds (at least I don’t think it is), but definitely an interesting anecdote about the consequences of a town’s existence being so tied to one company.  But back to the beer scene, the Denver/Boulder/Longmont area, and I think it’s safe to include Golden in that, seems to be one of the current meccas of the country’s craft beer explosion.  Up there with both Portlands, Asheville, Burlington, and San Diego, to be sure.  Beer tasting wasn’t why we were there of course, but we did get to grab a flight at Golden’s second largest brewery (The Golden City Brewery – and yes that’s how they bill themselves), while buzzing though town.

Upon my return from my work trip, I managed to talk Keeper into doing a bit of mountain biking with me.  I had seen that we were staying very near Apex Park, which appeared to be flush with Colorado singletrack, and hoped that it wouldn’t be too sporty for him (or me).  He was game as usual, but found the climb up the road just to get to the park a bit more exhausting than he had bargained for.  I probably forgot to tell him that we were at about 6000’ too.  Oops (sorta).  We made it though, and started up the trail, only to find, at the point where it diverges into a loop, that this trail system is evidently popular enough that the city decided to make the trails one-way on certain days, our day included.  I had sold this ride to Keeper on the premise that we would climb as high as he wanted on the trail, and if it got to be too much, we’d just turn around and ride back downhill.  I realized fairly quickly that that doesn’t work if the trail is one-way, and had a brief moral dilemma in which I considered “not realizing” it until we were half-way up, but decided that our father-son mountain biking career as a whole was far more important than this particular ride.  Plus there’s the whole not-lying thing, which would be nice to pass on to him.  So we aborted the ride and headed back down to the RV park.

Another feature of our RV park was a pool and a hot tub.  While this isn’t an especially uncommon amenity among RV parks, I’d put the running percentage of “RV park pools I’d actually put my body parts into” at around 25-30.  Bozeman and Las Vegas were notable exceptions, but one was a natural hot spring and the other you definitely paid for up front.  This one wasn’t bad at all.  The girls wanted to get some hot tub time in, so Tacco and I took turns supervising, while Firebolt made friends with all the kids within 3 years of her age as usual.  She tells us that she’s “shy,” and we tell her “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…”

Before heading up into the mountains we had wanted to check out Boulder as well.  For whatever reason, possibly the fresh mountain air, maybe the miles and miles of green/flowery (it’s May – I’m sure that changes) open space, certainly in part the obviously athletic and outdoorsy residents… most likely some combination thereof, our “auditioning places to settle” radar began to sweep and net us some promising returns.  Sorry if that was too radar-geeky – I promise it makes sense if you’re used to operating a radar…  Golden piqued our interest when we started looking at a Denver airline commute, from which I could fairly easily go either east or west.  Boulder, being a college town of a little more size and renown and a bit deeper into the mountains, struck us as possibly further up our alley.

We made the relatively short drive up there via highway 93, which was sort of an impossibly pleasant meander along the front range via the iconic Flatirons.

We also made a stop at Eldorado Springs, which I’m not even sure how to describe, so I’ll initially let Wikipedia do it.  This is about all Wikipedia has:

“In 1910, Eldorado Springs was a resort community, known for its Big Radium Pool, then the largest swimming pool in the United States. The pool, along with several other smaller ones, was known as “Coney Island of the West.” Also known for its good tasting spring water, “Eldorado Springs” bottled water is sold in stores around the U.S.”

“Big Radium Pool” and “Coney Island of the West.”  OK.  This in a town of 585, with dirt roads.  And a “you’re still in 1910” feel, but with a heavy hippy vibe, and tucked deep into a canyon, surrounded by high peaks.  “Hey kids, let’s grab a couple hot dogs and then take a dip in the Big Radium Pool after we go freeclimb a cliff!”  Interesting place…

Pearl Street is Boulder’s main drag, and we walked the length of it in both directions before settling in for some lunch.

Unfortunately the friend of mine who lives in Boulder was working, but we were able to exchange a few texts.  Guess we didn’t need to be physically in Boulder to do that, but it was a good excuse.

Boulder is impressive.  The climate, the vibe, the people, the food&drink…  in fact we were impressed enough to pull out trusty Zillow right there on the spot to see what we might be able to afford, home-wise.  Nothing at all, as it turns out.

I guess we aren’t the only ones to find Boulder impressive.  So that fell back off of The List after a very short stay on it.  Golden is still doable, as are the eastern outskirts of Boulder, a bit further from the mountains.  We discussed it, though, and it was actually my friend from Golden who confirmed several things we were thinking.  Though he very much enjoys it there, he listed several things about it that are less than ideal and angles in which Bend has it beat, at least for the lifestyle we want.  He was insightful as usual, and pretty much dead on.

Lastly, and I hate to be repetitive, but my leg / sciatica is becoming even more of a factor.  At one point on the way back from Boulder, with Tacco driving no less (driving tends to aggravate it), it became excruciating enough just sitting in the front seat that I had to have her pull over so that I could get into the back in order to try to maneuver into a position I could tolerate.  We need a plan here, one that doesn’t involve pain killers.  Fortunately the position in which I’m sitting when I fly doesn’t aggravate it, and therefore it hasn’t yet affected my work.  But the prospect of continuing to wander around the country in that type of agony isn’t appealing.  Tacco has been doing some acupuncture work on me, and we have another friend in Albuquerque who can do some work as well.  I’m also reaching out to friends in Utah for some medical recommendations, under the assumption that either we’ll be back there soon or it would be easy for me to fly there.  Time to take action.

In the meantime, we’re getting into the mountains for real tomorrow with a drive up to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, and we’ll stay at high elevation for the foreseeable future.  I’m stoked!

Ten months ago today we took the picture on the top of our blog page, and six and a half of those months we’ve been on the road.  We’ve reached the mountains again, and will stay in them pretty much for the remainder of our adventure.

We both noticed the extent to which returning to the crisp and dry air, rushing streams, and pine smell gave us a palpable sense of relief.  Even if things change dramatically, there’s no doubt this part of the country feels like home.

Here’s our progress:

Still no real movement on the house, other than some verbal feints: “what if we offer this?” Us: “Put it writing and see!” (more or less… that’s a two-line summary of various painstaking multi-day exchanges) and lots of vaguely positive but ultimately unproductive feedback from open houses and visits.  It hits Tacco and I at different times — our frustration with the house situation that is — and I think it comes more from realizing that we really need to be looking forward now, not back.  The idea that selling our house was once a no-kidding prerequisite for even doing this trip seems hopelessly quaint now.  It now looks probable that we will have done the entire year paying for an empty house.

Interestingly, what we’ve learned is that we can be pretty thrifty on the road, even without skimping.  Our only main expenses are gas, RV sites (lodging), food, and entertainment.  The entertainment tends to be cheap if not free, arising naturally from our destinations.  And we’ve gotten very good at meal planning, such that we very rarely eat out.  Even fast food, which we’ve not done once.

At any rate, we are still optimistic that we’ll get it sold based on recent activity, and we have left July and August fairly open and unplanned, anticipating the need to both  return to Maryland to pack out our house at some point and do some house-hunting in Bend (or wherever — still not 100%!).  We still intend to nail that down before the kids start school.

If you look at our map, it has us returning to Park City after we’re done playing in the Colorado / NM Rockies and eastern Utah.  I’ll fly a trip from there, and then we’ll bolt to Bend in order to reach it by the 4th of July.   Our stay in Bend is open-ended.  We added a possible (hopeful?) loop through Washington and northern Oregon just because.  But we’ll see!

That’s not much traveling left, and that fact has yet to sink in…

This was a long two days, but significant.  Or at least they felt that way.  Essentially we made our way from what I think of as The East, to The West.  For what I assume is the last time.

As has been the case of late, Tacco’s description is both thorough and insightful, so I’ll stick with providing some color commentary.

Our route below, also as usual:

 

A few things struck me about the drive.  The first was the German influence in western Missouri.  I know next to nothing about Missouri save for what I learned in the previous few days, but I hadn’t expected to see so many small towns with German names and the obvious provenance.  Possibly “Anheuser Busch” should have given me a clue?

The second was that eastern Kansas and western Kansas are very different.  Eastern Kansas seems to be where most of the “civilization” is… the college towns, the reasonable sized cities, the trees, etc.  It’s a pretty area.  We circumnavigated Kansas City, but we stopped in Topeka and drove through Manhattan, home of Kansas State University.  Both places had a vibe I appreciated.

Western Kansas, on the other hand, is wide open.  WIDE open.  As is eastern Colorado.

I want to dwell on Topeka for a moment, though, as we stopped there to visit the Brown vs. Board of Education National Historical Site there, and it affected me more deeply than I would have guessed it would have.

I confess to having had only a bare bones knowledge of Brown v. Board prior to this visit, and I learned quite a bit on our stop.  I won’t belabor the points Tacco already made, even though they affected me as well.  What really stayed with me (I almost wrote “haunted me”) after viewing the exhibit was this idea that our country was a very different place only a few decades ago, and it’s exceedingly easy to forget that.

There is significant exhibit space devoted to fleshing out the ideas and consequences of racial segregation, and tangentially, the degree to which a large segment of society seemed to be not just ok with this idea, but willing to fight for it.  To watch video of not only the common folk, but the authorities and elected officials standing up with what appears to be a clear air of moral superiority in support of segregation is more than a little mind-blowing in 2018.

But I think what stuck with me most were the videos of the people reacting to the protesters.  And by protesters I don’t mean aggressive, sloganeering, in your face types, I mean people trying simply to walk quietly into a school.  The people around them are screaming, pushing, spitting… it’s shocking, frankly.  And when I go deeper and try to get into the heads of these folks, whom I whole-heartedly believe were convinced they were doing “the right thing” at the time…  It scrambles your brain a bit.  I could go far deeper here, but I’ll leave it at that.

It stuck with me.

After our Topeka stop we headed into Kansas’ great western unknown in search of our Friday-night-of-Memorial-Day-weekend campsite.  I had no idea how this would turn out, as this was the first time we started a Davista drive without a definite destination reserved, and on a holiday weekend to boot.  My operating assumption was that this being Kansas, the people-to-space ratio couldn’t possibly support fully occupied campgrounds.  Hmmmm…

Our plan consisted of stopping successively at four campgrounds, using their occupancy state, the surroundings, and my sciatica to determine where we’d drop anchor.  The first was at a city park which I’d repeatedly tried to call to verify vacancy, but got no answer.  It became abundantly clear why there was no one at the other end of the phone line once we pulled into the campground.  Wow.  Tacco’s description was diplomatic.  I’ll remain diplomatic, but slightly less so – there was no chance we were staying here with our kids, free of charge or not.  There are some seriously depressed towns in central Kansas, and we had found one.  I wish we had photos… kinda… but that would be piling on.  Better to just move on.

The next stop was at Glen Elder State Park on Waconda Lake in Cawker City.  The campground here was enormous.  And completely full.  And then some.  Not only were all the sites occupied, but people seemed to be camping on any open grass spot they could find.  It was quite the festive atmosphere.  We drove around all four (or more?) campground loops, past hundreds of campsites, for a good half hour if not a full hour, before we talked to the ridiculously friendly camp host, who advised us to just grab an open area of grass and relax.  Great idea.  We did as she suggested and didn’t even disconnect the car.  Here’s where we were.  I almost wished we could stay a while.

We fired up the generator, made some dinner, ate, and went to bed.  Nothing wrong with that.

Knowing there was yet another long drive ahead of us, we decamped pretty early in the morning.  We did stop in Nicodemus, however.  Another National Historical Site, and fascinating.  Yet again better covered by Tacco, but my overall impression upon leaving was that Kansas is a pretty cool place, with a solid legacy of supporting those who desire to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  The open terrain can be unforgiving, but there seems to be, and has always been, an aggressive tradition of no-nonsense egalitarianism.  It’s hard not to respect that.

The drive into Colorado was tough.  I mentioned the barrenness of eastern CO / western KS, well combine that with a searing sciatic nerve and brutal crosswinds.  I’ve come to discover that gusty crosswinds are by far the toughest weather conditions in which to drive.  It’s very similar to landing an airplane in that sense.  The last time we had a drive like this was through eastern Texas; these winds were even stronger and required constant, aggressive steering corrections.  By the time we rolled into our campsite in Golden, I was done.  DONE.

Fortunately, it was a great campsite, with full hookups, good wifi, a pool and hot tub, and clean bathrooms.  And we were back to the mountains.  Ahhhhh….

Our plan to connect Appalachia with the Rockies finally coalesced after quite a bit of scenario gaming.  It would’ve been easier had we more time to meander, and I still can’t quite get my head around the fact that we don’t… a year seemed like plenty of time for everything and more in the early dreaming stages.  I can assure you that it isn’t though, and so we found ourselves with some long drives ahead and only a few stops possible.

Not quite making the cut, and with no small measure of regret were:

• Memphis (wanted to see Beale St and try some more BBQ!)
• Nashville (though we did do a quick stop there)
• Hot Springs National Park, AR (looks unique, I’ve never been to Arkansas, and who doesn’t like hot springs?)
• Dallas (family and friends there, but it’s starting to get a little too hot for Texas)
• St. Louis (never been, and the Gateway Arch is iconic, but the idea of driving through busy city streets again is rubbing me wrong)

Ultimately what pushed us over the edge to our chosen route was a desire to see an old Navy friend who happened to be my Flight Engineer for most of my initial squadron time as an Aircraft Commander.

A quick, or maybe not so quick tangent on P-3 Flight Engineers… The Flight Engineer / Pilot relationship in the Navy’s P-3 community is truly unique.  In civilian aviation the Flight Engineer is (more accurately “was” – commercial aircraft that require a Flight Engineer are now all but gone, at least outside of the cargo world) generally the junior pilot on the crew, who sits in a third seat in the cockpit with his/her own set of gauges, monitoring and manipulating various systems.  It’s a stepping stone to “the right seat” (copilot seat) and thereafter to Captain.  In the P-3, however, the Flight Engineer is an Enlisted sailor who generally starts as an aviation maintenance specialist, then at some point applies for and is accepted into the FE program, which is quite challenging, though not nearly as challenging as the extended FE syllabus within the various operational squadrons.  Earning the title of qualified FE is a supreme achievement, and they take great pride in knowing everything there is to know about the aircraft.  In each crew’s cockpit, there are two Flight Engineers and three pilots, with one of the FEs generally being the senior one training and supervising the junior one.  Senior FEs command a tremendous amount of respect.  They sit in between the two pilots in flight, presiding over the center console.  While there are enlisted aircrew working with officers on flight crews throughout the military, I would be very surprised to find a relationship like this one outside of P-3s.  Though the pilots all technically outrank the FEs, everyone knows where the expertise is, and it was common, as a pilot who hadn’t yet earned Aircraft Commander status (which generally takes at least a year and a half) to be quizzed relentlessly, for 4-5 hours out of an 8-9 hour mission, by your FE on P-3 systems operation, performance characteristics, procedures, and minutiae.  They tend to be an extremely tight knit group within the squadron, and they not only police themselves, but they know all the pilots and both their flying and personal quirks.  They’re often cocky, generally for good reason.  They watch over us and mold us, and the good ones take pride in developing “their” pilots.

With the P-8 (essentially a Boeing 737 modified for military use) phasing out the P-3, there are very few Navy FEs left, and they will soon be gone, which is a shame.

At any rate, my friend mentored me well, as all P-3 FEs ought to, but more importantly he’s just an incredible person, and flying with him made some long deployments far more palatable.  For better or for worse, you don’t spend that many hours sitting next to someone day after day and night after night without getting to know them very well, and in this case it was very much my gain.  After his Navy Retirement, he had moved to Cuba, Missouri, on the northern edge of the Ozarks and a bit southwest of St. Louis.  He’s now a pastor there when he’s not riding his motorcycle through the hills or hanging out with his family.

My never having seen the Ozarks made me more partial to taking this route as well.  It’s one of the only parts of the country in which I had never set foot, and considering myself a mountain person, I’ve enjoyed checking out the various American versions of mountain country.  Though even more than Appalachia, calling the Ozarks “mountains” is a stretch.  They’re very much hills, and are referred to as such even by the locals.

I was looking forward to driving through and making a few stops.  Here’s what that looked like.

I need to give a shout-out to Chattanooga, even though we only blew through.  I’ve got a very good friend from flight school and squadron days who has settled there and commutes to Atlanta for his airline job, and we tried hard to coordinate a visit.  We couldn’t quite manage to align our schedules, but in the process of researching where we might stay in/near Chattanooga, I came to the conclusion that it’s one of those very cool towns that flies beneath the radar, or at least the West Coast radar.  I had seen it included on various “Top Ten Towns for Adventurous Folks!” type lists you see in various Men’s Journal / Outdoors-ish magazines.  And to be completely honest, my West Coast snobbishness bias always made me skeptical when I saw towns that weren’t in the “real” mountains.  I figured they were just trying to be inclusive and branch out from Jackson Hole, Telluride, Moab, Tahoe, Vail, etc.  Give the little guy a chance…  But I have to say, from what little I saw and read, they’re absolutely right to include it.  It looks awesome.  River, cliffs, mountains, woods, trails, lakes… and even some history to round things out.  I wish we could have stayed and explored.  Plus I bet you could buy a decent house there for less than a million bucks.  Take that Telluride!

Thereafter came Nashville, and again I had to resist the urge to stop and stay awhile.  Granted, by this point my leg / sciatic nerve was hurting me pretty badly again (it’s not getting better), but more than that it just looked booming.  And it’s another pretty area.  Not to mention I was told it has developed quite the foodie scene.  All that + music and I’m thinking we could’ve easily done a week there.  Alas, not to be.

Though I would have preferred to log more westward mileage since we were somewhat in “go” mode, we’ve decided both for my pain issues and the kids’ sanity to avoid drives longer than eight hours unless it’s absolutely necessary.  This brought us to Land Between the Lakes, which is a rather large area that is exactly what it sounds like and spans the border of Tennessee and Kentucky, though the majority of it sits in Kentucky.  Yet another well-appointed lakeside campsite awaited us there, but we didn’t have much time to enjoy it, as we headed out the next morning.

And at last we reach the Ozarks.  Here’s the description of how the area got its name, which I found pretty interesting.  The area is karst (“a” karst?  I’m not sure about the usage…), which is something else I’ve only recently learned about.  Without getting too geological up in your grill, karsts tend to be quite hilly, but with many, many closely spaced and small hills rather than large ridges or ranges.  They’re mostly limestone underneath the surface, and the water, rather than draining downhill directly into rivers, tends to be absorbed into the ground, only to return to the surface at various springs.  Hence you get lots of caves, sporty terrain, and spring-fed streams and rivers, some of which are crystal clear.  I like all of that.

Then as a bonus there’s the whole Mark Twain / Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn thing, which I know is more about the Mississippi River, but I know Twain was born in and hung out in Missouri, and I always mentally pictured that whole world taking place in a setting like this one.  I loved those books back when I read them.

After departing from Land Between the Lakes, we took a route that brought us to the very southern tip of Illinois, near Cairo, which if I remember correctly, figured heavily into Huckleberry Finn.  What’s cool about it is that it sits at the confluence between the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, which is kind of a big deal, river-wise.  We spent only about 5 minutes and 3 miles in Illinois, but at least we can check it off the list.  Not that we have a list.

Our first stop before turning north to get into the hills in earnest was a National Park Service visitors’ center, at which we were greeted by an enormous black snake that surprised us by climbing a tree to get a better look at us (and to claim the high ground – he clearly didn’t trust us not to mess with him, and probably for good reason).

Just down the road was one of the aforementioned clear streams upon which tubing was evidently popular.  With the temp in the high 80s and the humidity continuing to creep up, taking a long, wet detour was highly appealing.  But of course (again), we didn’t – we had a campground up near Cuba to check into.  Onward.

The family’s opinions on the Ozark roads varied widely.  And by that I mean that I absolutely loved them and no one else did.  Which is completely fair, they were winding and roller-coaster steep.  Short, steep ups and downs and lefts and rights that weren’t long enough to really put me hard on the brakes or gas pedal, and were therefore a blast to drive.  But for everyone who wasn’t concentrating on the road and looking out at the horizon they were essentially a vomit comet.  Fortunately not literally so, but after nearly an hour on a road designated only by a letter, everyone was thrilled to turn onto something big and straight enough to earn a numbered route designation.  And they were even more happy to stop once we reached our destination on the Meramec River.

I wasn’t familiar with the Meramec before our arrival, but it’s exactly the kind of pull your inner tubes up to the rope swing and take a mad leap before you explore the cave sort of place that I had hoped we would reach at some point in our journey.  Fortunately we hit our campground right before Memorial Day, which is apparently the official beginning of river floating season and quite the madhouse.  We were assured that we would have the run of the campground as long as we checked out on Friday by noon, but that if we wanted to stay longer we would be out of luck.  Truly spoken – we arrived to an empty campground, though we were surprised at how saturated the ground was, pretty much everywhere.  Walking without soaking your shoes was impossible, and some campsites appeared to be the type you would not want to drive into unless you didn’t mind staying awhile or being towed out.  Not having seen much rain in the previous few days, we asked what the deal was, and were surprised to learn that the entire place had been underwater, as in under the level of the river, just a few days prior, and that this is a normal thing in the Springtime.  It even sometimes happens in the Summer if you there’s enough rain.  Wow!

Our Navy friend joined us at the campsite for a bit just after our arrival, and he made plans to join us on our river float, along with his daughter, the following day – perfect.  Tacco covered most aspect of our float well, so I’ll try not to be redundant.

But I do want to emphasize how much I enjoyed it.  Catching up with him, getting to know his daughter a bit, watching Keeper float in his kayak while no-kidding reading Tom Sawyer…

And that spring.  I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that sort of a temperature differential, at least in the cold direction.  You had to know exactly where it was to find it, so it was fortunate we had local guides, but once you knew and began heading that direction on the river, it was as if an air conditioner had been turned on, but out in the open.  The water had been a steady 80-ish degrees, and near the spring it plummeted to about 50, with the air around you cooling as well.  Once we pulled into the spring area itself and explored the cave out of which most of it was emerging, the temperature dropped even more.  It really was amazing.

All told, another outstanding experience and yet another long time friend visited on their home turf.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s trek across Kansas.  Not because I’m anti-Kansas, but because there is just no way to avoid a long drive and the associated leg pain.  I have a two-day trip to fly (commuting from Denver, ideally) beginning on Memorial Day, and for the first time I’m wondering how that will go for me and beginning to consider whether I need to look at seeing a doctor and taking some time off.  So far, thankfully, it hasn’t reached the point it had the first time I experienced it a few years back, in which my foot began to go numb.  I’m considering that a red line, as it indicates the beginning of nerve damage, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others that I don’t yet know about.

Moreover, we’re rolling into Memorial Day weekend without reservations, which is a first for us on any weekend, let alone a holiday.  We have some potential stops marked on the map and are hoping that Kansas is vast and sparsely populated enough to make finding a suitable stopping point feasible.  But, fingers crossed.

She was lookin’ for a soul to…

Nah, gonna punt on that one, there’s nothing devilish about Davista.  Yet.

Unfortunately for me, Atlanta was one of those destinations that I didn’t see much of, due to its easily commutable airport which allowed me to fly a relatively long trip.  I need to remind myself on occasion, when I’m becoming frustrated by the fact that I miss a significant chunk of this adventure due to needing to work, that my having this job is basically THE thing that has allowed us even to consider traveling in the first place.  Short of extreme telecommuting or being independently wealthy, it’s difficult to imagine a profession more suited to this lifestyle, where I’m able to “go to work” from pretty much anywhere, as long as there is an airport with some scheduled service nearby.  So yeah, I missed most of Atlanta, and in fact never made it into the city proper (save for the airport, which is its own city in a way).

The drive down from Great Smoky Mountain National Park was another stunner though.  It passes through Nantahala Forest, which is essentially the far western tip of North Carolina.  Our road followed the Nantahala River, which cuts a fairly deep gorge through the hills, and is a white water rafting paradise.  I would return in a heartbeat.  In fact, despite my fairly lukewarm assessment of Great Smoky Mountain National Park in my last post, I’m realizing that this entire area of the country – by which I mean basically the southern Appalachians, to include parts of Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina – is pretty amazing and worth more exploration.

Atlanta is not the best place to park a motor home, at least not within the city limits.  We did find a military base in Marietta, northwest of the city, but they were full.  And there really wasn’t much of anything nearer to downtown, at least not where I felt comfortable leaving my family for almost a week.  Which led us to Lake Allatoona up in the northwest, about 45 minutes out of town.

This is another fairly unique feature of that part of the country – massive lakes (reservoirs, actually) which are quite narrow, but long and winding, extending thousands of watery fingers into the little valleys.  There are dozens of these lakes (probably more like hundreds), and the houseboating opportunities are endless.  Pontoon boats, too.  You don’t really see pontoon boats in the West, but out there they are the water conveyance of choice, and for good reason.

Our Lake Allatoona campsite was lakeside (and incidentally, we had at least a dozen campgrounds from which to choose up there), and we decided that a day on the lake in a rental pontoon boat would be the best use of our time, at least for a day.

Great call, despite the weather only marginally cooperating.  Hot and sticky with thunderstorms is the summer pattern in the South, and it’s just beginning to take hold.  But the rain managed to hold off for most of the day, and frequent jumps into the comfortably cool water took the edge off of any heat.  I had never previously imagined being able to tow a tube with a pontoon boat, but I was assured by the folks at the marina that it’s SOP.   I was also told that the boat would do 50 mph over the water, even towing a tuber.  That claim I regarded with deep skepticism, but nodded and smiled anyway.  It turned out that by “50” she meant “about 15-20.”  Which was a bit slow for the really fun kind of tubing where you bounce off waves and flop around like a rag doll, but probably just about right for our kids, or at least the younger ones.  Actually what she (the marina worker) did was confuse RPMs for MPH, which I clarified with her afterwards.  All good, we had a blast and got to explore a gorgeous piece of Georgia from the water.

Check out this guy…

He was one of quite a few unique ducks/ducklings/geese/goslings who inhabited our campground.  I guess technically it’s theirs, and we’re the interlopers.  Anyway, he liked to hang out underneath Davista and then waddle over near my feet when I would sit down.  I wasn’t sure why until I brought my breakfast bar and coffee with me outside to sit and enjoy the morning with.  Seeing what he had evidently been waiting for, he made an aggressive play for the breakfast bar, which I was only able to narrowly keep out of his beak.  He almost ended up in my lap in his attempt to take what he clearly thought was his rightful breakfast.

The other highlight, and really my only experience in Georgia, was a visit with some old squadron friends whom we hadn’t seen since we left the squadron back in 1999 (2000 for TACCO).  They live in a lovely suburb and have two brilliant sons, one of whom is nearing college application time and likely Ivy League or Stanford-bound.  He (my squadron bud) and I, when we first met, had squadron jobs that required us to spend far too much time in a windowless, secure, vault-like room with not much to do other than verbally spar, an undertaking in which he excelled.  We would argue politics (squadron, national, and world) and fiscal policy, quote movies, but mostly we would just talk smack.  He was both better at it than I was and more inclined to just sit and chat, whereas I tended to be engrossed in studying for my progress through the squadron’s plane commander syllabus.  It was fun, though, and I wish I would’ve engaged more, because we had quite a few non-obvious things in common and could’ve become much closer friends through the process, rather than the kind who have a great mutual respect but don’t see each other for 19 years.  I think this is something we both recognize, and we have found it interesting to watch, aided by the tangential contact of social media, our worldviews converge as we grow older.  We’ve become very like-minded and share a somewhat unique combination of introversion and extroversion.  Though being an avid runner, mountain biker, and vegan, he’s in far better physical shape than I, despite having a few years on me.

It really is a shame we can’t hang out more.

Despite his dietary habits, he smoked an absolutely mouthwatering (and enormous) filet of salmon, which he informed us had been termed “My Magic Fish” for our family dinner.  We even had leftovers, which we ate for a few days.  The kids played together in a nearby park and the four of us got to spend a bit of time catching up and reminiscing.  It was over far too quickly, as those types of things always are, but having almost missed Atlanta altogether, I was incredibly grateful that we carved out the time to see them, and hope we’re able to do so again, maybe out West.  We have some mountain biking to do!

From here we head west in earnest, and there are several options on the table for how to do so.  Essentially we need to get to Colorado in time for my next trip, and can take several routes to get there, all of which have much to offer.  We’ve been debating a southern route that takes us through Hot Springs, AR.  And then there’s a northern route that involves a stop in St. Louis to see the Gateway Arch.  But the front runner has us more or less splitting the difference and heading to visit more old squadron friends in Cuba, Missouri, at the northern edge of the Ozarks, which is an area of the country I’ve never seen but would very much like to.  Unfortunately that will require blowing through Tennessee, which was not my initial intent – much to see there as well.  But we have to pick and choose.

My sciatica is becoming more of a factor as well.  Driving more than a few hours is getting excruciating, and only laying down affords me relief.  Ibuprofen keeps it palatable if I know I’ll need to sit, but I really don’t like to ride painkillers if I can avoid it.  Flying (for work) is a concern as well, but I found on my last trip that I could keep it at bay by moving around more and standing up on occasion, options that driving Davista doesn’t give me.  My hope is that I’ll be able to get ahead of it before long – we still have quite a bit of road ahead of us.

Had you asked me before our trip which was the most visited national park in the country, I would have stalled with “that’s a really good question,” and then mentally shuffled through about a half dozen parks, trying to figure out which one would be the most popular and why.  Yellowstone and Yosemite would be in there, probably the Grand Canyon too.  And eventually I would’ve given the wrong answer, because I hadn’t even considered the actual most visited park, which is Great Smoky Mountains, spanning the border of eastern North Carolina and western Tennessee.

And here I thought I was pretty good with geography and stuff.

I can tell you that this surprised me, for several reasons, most of which I’ll hopefully flesh out in this post.  It also created some high and likely unfair expectations for our visit.  Having grown up with Yosemite, Sequoia, and the Grand Canyon, and having recently visited Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Zion, I guess I subconsciously expected that sort of grandeur out of a park that was “number one” above those others.  When in truth I now suspect that its number one status has much more to do with ratio of people to national parks in that part of the country, combined with accessibility.

To be clear, it is a beautiful place.  The Appalachians in that region reach 6,000’-plus, and combined with the lushness of that area of the county, you get an incredible variety of biomes within a very small area, with the attendant diversity of flora and fauna.  Crystal clear streams are abundant, and seeing black bear wandering through the trees and lazily gnawing on berries is almost a certainty.  We saw and greatly appreciated all these things.  And yet after a few days, we decided that we’d seen much of what the park had to offer, and rejiggered our schedule to leave a day early for Atlanta.

First, though, the drive.  The Blue Ridge Parkway’s southern terminus is in the park, and it passes just south of Asheville, about two miles from where we camped.  We could easily have simply taken the Blue Ridge all the way from Asheville to GSM, and I was tempted to, just to say we had.  Fortunately I resisted that temptation though, as it would have at least doubled the driving time, and “easy” is not the proper adjective for driving a fully loaded motorhome towing a car though narrow, winding mountain roads for four hours.  I think the novelty would’ve worn off after about 45 minutes, and I’d have been left with four carsick family members and some shot nerves from all the precarious curves, drop-offs, and tunnels.  We took the highway instead, followed by a secondary road that brought us to the town of Cherokee, at the park’s southern border. 

While Cherokee is reservation land and has the bilingual signage to prove it (side note: have you ever seen written Cherokee??

It’s somehow more confusing than Chinese or Arabic or Hindi because at first glance it looks just close enough to something familiar to make you believe that you can, or should, be able to understand it.  But you can’t.  You definitely can’t.), the vast majority of the Cherokee people were driven out of the area in the early to mid 1800s.  The story of the Trail of Tears, which I had heretofore only had a vague knowledge of, was both heartbreaking and fascinating.  I was encouraged by Firebolt sharing both my view and my interest in the subject.  She has become an even more voracious reader on this trip, and one of her favorite stories of late tells about a fictional Native American girl who is separated from her friends and family but is able to, over many years, make her way back to them.  So reading tidbits of some actual stories really struck home with her.

I had tried to make reservations at the Smokemont campground, which is the main campground within the park on the North Carolina side.  Surprised to find that sites were not reservable until the week after we would be there, I steeled myself to scrap over the first-come-first-served sites with the throngs of visitors.  Wrong once again – as it turns out, there really is a significant off season in GSM and even with mid-May’s perfect weather, we had the campground more or less to ourselves.  We chose a site right across from the gurgling stream, in hopes that we’d be able to leave some of the windows open and have its sound lull us to sleep. 

The stream bed also made for a perfect wandering area, with the best skipping rocks I had ever seen.

The girls were less happy about the millipedes, but I thought they were cool.

We opted to drive up to the top of the park on our first full day, figuring we could do some hiking and see a bit more of what’s around.  It was my first real exposure to Appalachian terminology for some of the mountain features I had thought I was already familiar with.  “Balds” for instance.  There are quite a few “balds” on the tops of the mountains in GSM.  What I assumed they were were areas above the tree line.  Not so – they are treeless areas covered in grass, but they’re not technically too high to support tree growth.  I’ve read that there’s actually no consensus on why trees grow on some Appalachian peaks and not others, which is interesting.  I’d have thought that question would have a pretty straightforward answer.  “Domes” are another.  When we heard that we should visit Clingmans Dome, which is the highest point in the park, I pictured Yosemite’s granite behemoths.  At 6,643’ it’s pretty impressive, elevation-wise, at least for the eastern half of the country, but there was no granite to be seen up there, and not much to distinguish it from the other peaks in the area, other than a vaguely Jetsons-looking concrete observation tower at the top.

The view was nice, if not breathtaking, [Late edit: I just re-read Tacco’s post and saw that she did indeed call the view “breathtaking.”  I guess some breath was taken away, just not mine] with the interpretive signs describing what you’re seeing also devoting significant verbiage to air pollution and the likelihood that you wouldn’t be able to see things too far away because of it. 

We did, however, see a few black bears during the hike up and on the drive down.  Not quite as imposing (and traffic-clogging) as Yellowstone’s bison, but cool to see.

As the Appalachian Trail follows the spine of the mountains in GSM, which is incidentally also the Tennessee / North Carolina border, we figured we would hike a bit of it in search of a suitable picnic lunch area, just to say we did.  Again, not the most impressive trail we had seen.  It just sort of meandered through the trees a bit, with the occasional view of the other mountains.  It was a nice picnic though, and off we went back to our site.

The following day was also Mother’s Day, so Tacco had her choice of activities after the kiddos presented her with the gifts they had bought / made for her.

The weather took a turn toward summer heat as well, which is tricky when you’re dry camping (i.e. no hookups), since you need the generator running to fire up the air conditioner, and national parks in particular are quite strict on their generator policies.  Having just written that it strikes me as sounding ridiculously soft – “The horror!  We’re camping and we can’t run our a/c!” – but I have to remind you, and we often need to remind ourselves, that this is our home, not a weekend campsite, so we tend to cut ourselves a little slack when it comes to wanting some creature comforts.  Where I was going with that, though, is that with the hot and sticky creeping up, we decided to try to get into a river at some point during the day.

That translated to a waterfall hike just outside of nearby Bryson City (which is a very cool little town, incidentally), followed hopefully by a float down the Tuckasegee or Oconaluftee river.  Love those names.

The hike was short but sweet, other than Woodsprite’s getting stung by a bee.  Lots of flowers.  Tacco mentioned the wild boar stampede, that was an eye-opener, and a new experience for all of us.  We also got to see Juney Whank falls.  Juney Whank??  Hm.  OK.

Our floating plans began to morph as the hours of remaining daylight shrank and the now-familiar logistical challenges of river floating with only one small car reared their heads again.  We just weren’t familiar enough with the area to choose a good put-in and take-out, and I didn’t trust myself to hitchhike again.  Renting tubes and floating the creek below the waterfalls we had hiked to was another option, with several takers from among the locals… it appeared to be quite the popular weekend activity.  But once again the logistics proved daunting, at very best.  No good way to get 5 innertubes from a rental site to a creek put-in with only a fully loaded Subaru and no pump.  What we could use is a pickup truck.  Ah well.  So we settled for dipping our heads in the cool water and watching the tubers enjoy themselves instead, followed by some playtime in the stream just across from our campsite upon our return.

So yes, mixed feelings about Great Smoky Mountains NP, likely colored by high expectations brought on by the discovery of its extreme popularity.  We had a thoroughly pleasant visit.  And I bet it would be stunning in the Fall.  But it wasn’t enough to bring us back, I don’t think.  The kids seemed to agree.  It struck me as an excellent, and quite easy, long-weekend getaway for the millions and millions of folks in the South and on the Eastern Seaboard, but not the kind of place you would necessarily travel across the country to visit.

Unless, of course, you were living in a motorhome, in which case game on.

I first heard that term from a salty Flight Engineer in my first squadron, in response to “where are you from?”  He was (is) deeply Southern and sharp as a tack, with a thick accent that tended to belie, or at least distract you from, his depth of knowledge and skill.  I’m pretty sure he did it on purpose; he liked to keep people off guard.

“South Cackalacky” sounded to me like a deliberate play on the redneck thing.  Owning it and throwing it back at you with pride.  Or something like that.  It wasn’t his invention of course, I’ve heard it used by many people in various contexts.  On the other hand, it’s not that old a term either, probably no older than the ‘70s/’80s.  A brief internet search on the term didn’t net much, other than the fact than older North/South Carolinans aren’t familiar with it, and no one’s sure where it came from, but there’s at least one hip hop reference from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, and a hot sauce named “Cackalacky,” whose owner said something to the effect of “there’s no single word that conveys the nature of the South better.”

Does it though?  I’m not sure.

In my mid-twenties and largely ignorant of the South other than my relatively brief stint in Florida, I didn’t know exactly how to take it at the time.  Brimming with my own West Coast quirks, northwest Florida (which is really southern Alabama) was essentially foreign to me.  Frankly I’m still not sure I have a handle on the South as a region, but I can tell you that the impression I refined on this trip is heavily positive.  Both Carolinas, especially, strike me as places I’d like to spend more time exploring, and that most everyone would find a way to fall in love with if they visited with an open mind and didn’t mind a bit of humidity.  Unfortunately we DO mind a bit of humidity, so other than an hour or so we spent entertaining the prospect of setting up shop in Asheville or Raleigh, this part of the county is off the where-do-we-settle list.

Anyway, the Carolinas didn’t seem very “Cackalacky” to me.  But I’m from Southern California and spent most of my adult life in the Pacific Northwest, so I’m not to be trusted.

Here’s an image you may have seen before.  Maybe not.  I can tell you that it was new to me, but I happened to see it on a pilot colleague’s luggage about 2 weeks before we entered South Carolina.

When I saw it, I asked him what it meant, because it looked somewhat mystical.  Like a secret society type of thing.  “uhhh, the South Carolina flag?” he answered, with more than a little befuddlement.

Of course it is.  And we saw it EVERYWHERE once we entered South Carolina.  There are states (most of them) whose flags aren’t particularly distinctive, and whose residents likely don’t have much knowledge of it.  Growing up in California, I knew vaguely that there was a bear somewhere on it, and I’m pretty sure the background is white.  Living in Washington I had no clue what my state flag looked like.  In fact I still don’t.  And then there are a few states who go absolutely nuts with their flags.  In my very limited experience (i.e. this trip), here they are, in decreasing order of hysteria:

•    Maryland.  (No kidding, the Maryland flag is everywhere there, and people wear Maryland flag socks, shorts, shirts, etc. and don’t seem to know that this is outlier behavior)

•    Texas.  (This is probably unsurprising.)

•    Colorado.  (This did surprise me. Coloradans, much like Canadians, seem very much to want others to know where they’re from.)

• South Carolina (see above)

There may be more.  I’m just saying that these four have stood out heavily.  I could also speculate that these states’ residents don’t realize that all the other states’ residents aren’t particularly state-flag-centric.  Coloradans might.  Actually, Texans might too, but don’t care.

Our drive up to Charleston from Savannah was pleasant, and not too long.  We ended up at a state park just outside downtown that was exceptionally well appointed, though the on-site water park was either not open yet, or just not open.  The kids loved it though, as did we.

We didn’t have much time there, so opted for a distilled schedule.   On night one we headed into town for a Ghost Tour, which seems to be a common draw for tourists, though the quality thereof, we’ve discovered, varies pretty widely by both city and tour guide.

First impressions:  Charleston is gorgeous.  Wow.  They call it “the Holy City” due to the concentration of impressive churches there, but that’s only a very small part of the story.  Most of the downtown is lit by gaslamps, and has an almost European feel to it.  It’s hard to come up with a comparison because I’m not sure I’ve ever been somewhere similar.  It’s entirely unique.  Great food scene too.

The Ghost Tour was not the best.  In fact it might have been the Ghost Tour that stops us from doing any more Ghost Tours.  But we did get to stroll through downtown at night and see some interesting sights; it’s a great way to see a downtown, if nothing else.

On the next day, after a slow morning, we headed to town in order to catch a ferry out to Fort Sumter in order to continue our Civil War education.  I hadn’t known much about it, frankly, before our visit, and the stories about how the Civil War began are enthralling.

Fort Sumter is actually quite a distance from Charleston, protecting the bay entrance from a small island between the long barrier islands on either side.  It’s tenuously connected to the barrier island to the south at low tide, which was another strategic stronghold, but it’s otherwise isolated.  It was commanded at the time of the Civil War’s start by a Major, which blew my mind a little, particularly when I read about the negotiations that went on before and during the active fighting.  While I certainly had some great responsibilities when I held the Navy’s equivalent of his rank, they pale in comparison to what he had to deal with on his tiny island in the Bay.  Interestingly, no one in the fort was killed during the 34 hour shelling.

What was most fascinating for me was to read about the extent of the tensions at the time, while trying to relate it to the present day.  It’s one thing to live in a time of dramatic political divisiveness, and (hopefully) quite another to live in a time when those divisions erupt easily into violence and outright warfare.  It’s difficult to imagine what would drive you to that, but I can certainly understand the “slowly boiling frog” aspect to it, where each step leads pretty naturally to the next and only very rarely does anyone step back to look at the big picture and ask the tough questions.

The girls powered through the Junior Ranger program, with a bit of help from one of the on-site Rangers.  Keeper, on the other hand, took notes for his History course, which Tacco recently discovered as part of the National Park Systems’ websites.

We also took a little detour to check out the dead horseshoe crabs on the sand bar.  I’ve only ever seen those on East Coast beaches – they’re downright prehistoric looking things and I wouldn’t want to have one crawl up my leg.

We opted for a Low Country dinner that evening, at a restaurant on the water.  Wow was it dense.  One staple is “She Crab Soup,” which takes its name from the fact that crab roe is mixed into the soup, which has a cream/sherry base to which crabmeat is added.  It was delicious.  No doubt.  We all agreed.  But it’s hard to imagine eating more than a “cup” of it.  In fact none of us was inclined to have more than a few spoons full.  That’s how rich it was.  Kinda like [spoon 1] “That’s GREAT!”  [spoon 2] “hm, still good, but man that’s heavy.”  [spoon 3] “uhhh…  I like that still, but I’m done.”

We enjoyed the dinner greatly, but it was one of the only times when not one of us suggested looking at the dessert menu, and we hadn’t even finished the food on our plates.  That’s telling.  If you’re going to live in the Low Country you probably need to ensure you’ve got a solid exercise program.

After another short stroll through Charleston’s quaint downtown in order to shake off some of our dinner-induced lethargy, we headed back to our campsite for our last evening.

Charleston, as it turns out, is another inflection point for us.  Though it’s not our furthest east point (that honor is reserved for our starting point in Annapolis), it is the point at which we turn west for the last time, which is somewhat poignant.  For so long this adventure has seemed more or less endless given how much more travel time we had ahead of us, but suddenly we have an indication that we’re approaching something resembling a final stretch.

Our next stop is Asheville, NC, which is only the second destination we will have found impressive enough to visit twice.  Technically our first visit was part of our “shakedown” trip and not the actual year’s journey, but it left quite an impression.  Tacco’s was different than the rest of ours (and is fascinating in its own right) but we all left Asheville the first time with a desire to return.

First, though, we stopped at Congaree National Park, southeast of Columbia, SC.  Never heard of it?  Neither had we.  This was another target of opportunity foisted upon me somewhat last-minute-ish by Tacco.  Remembering what I had resolved after our last minute agenda changes in Florida, I did my best to suppress my “BUT OUR PLAN WAS TO KEEP DRIVING…” instincts and assented to the stop.  And I’m glad I did.

Though it wasn’t the most impressive National Park we’ve seen (I get the impression it’s most effectively explored via canoe), we took a thoroughly pleasant hike on a raised, wooden path through the tidelands.  Amusingly, there is a “mosquito meter” at the trailhead which gives you an idea what to expect from blood-sucking pests along the way. 

Fortunately we hit it at the right time – the dial had been set to “Mild” for our hike.  I’m not sure we’d have gone through with it had it been higher.

It was an excellent way to break up our drive and spend an early afternoon, and we learned about skinks (one of whom is pictured below), crawfish chimneys, and cypress knees.  Entirely worth it.

Another factor is creeping into our travel decision-making, however, and it’s not a welcome one.

I suffered from a bout of sciatica a few years back that quickly turned me from feeling 100% fit and healthy to staring down the barrel of partial disability.  It was disconcerting, to say the least.  I began to notice a pain in the back of my leg that was exacerbated by getting into certain positions that I wasn’t always able to reproduce.  That wasn’t overly concerning, but it devolved relatively quickly into a searing pain down my leg and up into my lower back, which sitting for long periods (i.e. flying, driving) made significantly worse.  I was able to function, but I couldn’t really exercise, and once it got to the point where part of my foot began to get numb and a sneeze or a cough would just about bring me to my knees in agony, I took action.  My primary care doctor’s first response was “well ok, let’s get you on pain killers then.”  Um, what?!? That was not what I expected.  I wanted to fix it, not mask it, and I certainly wasn’t ready to be the old guy with the bad back yet.  I appreciated her desire to help me feel better, but no, that didn’t jibe with my plans.  An MRI revealed my L5-S1 disc bulging out to the right side (which was likely the cause of my pain, but not certainly), as well as considerable asymmetrical core muscle atrophy tied to the car accident that had nearly taken our (Tacco and my) lives back in 1999.  So I saw a different doctor, a D.O. this time, and opted to attack it from multiple angles, including diet, hydration, physical therapy, acupuncture, and rolfing.

And it worked!  I was only out of work for about 6 weeks, and the improvement came pretty quickly.  I was never certain whether one of the angles worked better than the others, but was thrilled with the results.  Never got the pain killers.

It did rear its head again once more about a year after the first time, but not nearly as severely, and with a few visits to the rolfer and some renewed attention to my posture and gait, it disappeared quite quickly.

Well, it’s back.  The good news is that it’s not as severe as the first time, and is only in my leg (not my back), so exercise and activity are still very much on the table.  In fact being active seems to be the thing that makes it feel the best.  The bad news is that sitting for long periods seems to be what’s bringing it back and making it worse, and this lifestyle doesn’t really provide me any way around that.  About 5 or 6 hours driving is all I’m beginning to be able to manage without undue agony.  Flying is better, as I’m able to adjust my position often and don’t need to use my feet except when on the ground or takeoff/landing.  But driving hurts.  Plus I can’t just make an appointment with my rolfer this time unless I want to fly back to Maryland.  I do have Tacco and her acupuncture needles and healing skill, however, which is a blessing.

We’re both watching this closely and hoping it’s something we’ll be able to beat back.

Now it’s back to the other Cackalacky, and cheery, beery Asheville in the hills.  Or the mountains, depending on who you’re asking.  We’ll see how Cackalacky they are.  I’m ready!