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Well, we got away on schedule...almost.
Here's the bus all hooked up and ready to roll. As you can imagine, it takes the cooperation of our neighbors and the Homeowners Association. Northbound on I-95 is something we have done innumerable times before. This time our first day had a very pleasant diversion from the usual interstate/cruise control day.
Over the past several months I have been working with a widow (whom I had never met) of a classmate to jointly create a Memorial Article for her husband to be published in the upcoming issue of Taps. There were innumerable back and forths until we decided we were both happy with the write up, and it was time to go to press. She lives in Fayetteville, so we agreed to meet for lunch at the local Cracker Barrel. Of course, it was a two hour lunch that really wasn't long enough. We'll have to get together again... perhaps southbound in the Fall. The lady's name is Lyn Whitehead. Here's a picture.
We stopped for the night at a convenient KOA in Enfield, NC. I sat down to hook up the computer for the first time on the road this year. I thought that I had organized all the cords and non-cords to resume normal operation. Everything seemed to work except the mouse. Having discovered from son, Mark, that only one dongle supported both the wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, the next possibility was mouse batteries. Given the complete new organization, coupled with the fact that the mouse worked fine yesterday, batteries seemed an unlikely solution. Guess what? It was the batteries. So you get to see a blog tonight after all.
If my count is correct, this is blog number 600. I hope you have enjoyed them as much as I have.
Well, we're getting ready to head north. The dining room table is covered with "stuff" that we have to find room for somewhere. Tomorrow we go grocery shopping. The loading begins. I went over to check on the bus today, and hooked up the Jeep in order to fix the trailer lighting connections. The new inverter is working just fine. It ought to for $2.9K! We'll pick the bus up Friday and park it in the driveway to begin loading. This week has been a long list of doctor's appointments as we juggle our travel with the "two per year" routine visit limit While I have been looking forward to the trip to have some blog material, this evening some blog material wandered into the back yard.
This is NOT one of the neighbor's house cats. I never saw one of the frequently-spotted cougars when we were in Colorado, but I have seen a Canadian lynx in the wild while fly fishing with my father between the 1st and 2nd Connecticut Lakes. I'm 99% sure this is a bobcat.
Durelle spotted him, and I grabbed the camera. Neither of us have eyes good enough to make a real determination unaided. My only hope was that the telephoto and the computer enhancement would permit a good identification. I think you'll agree that this is not somebody's pet. He surely saw me come out, but he did not spook and head into the bushes. AND he looks pretty well fed.
There is nothing for scale, but I feel sure that he is a foot and a half high. He(?) is a handsome thing without an apparent enemy in the world.
We are fortunate to have an assortment of critters in our back yard. Here's one more picture to prove the point.
Soon this will once more be a travel blog.
Signs of Spring. The alligators are coming out, it's Easter and Durelle has started packing by loading up the dining room table. As you know the Pecks are enjoying the use of our bus until next Sunday when they'll have to haul their well-warmed bones back up to Maine. So that they would not go to Subway for Easter, we asked them to join us.
It was a simple dinner of a ham off the Treager grill, Durelle's mother's potato salad, and a butternut squash. We'll be eating ham for a while.
There are a lot of "critters in our backyard, but when the weather warms up you can count on the alligators showing up. The first picture was taken before I could get to the fence to take his picture.
This is why we have a fenced in backyard for Baxter. As I approached the fence he scrambled into the water. He came back out of the water a few minutes later, and Durelle was able to take another picture over the fence.
He's not a huge fellow, but he is about eight feet long.
In a couple of weeks or so we'll be pulling up stakes and heading north. Therefore the beginning of the collection of "stuff" to be loaded into the bus is starting to materialize on the dining room table. I sure hope that it is also warming up in Maine.
