"What a long strange trip it's been." The Grateful Dead
Carol writes: In many respects, five years of traveling together in an RV seemed to go by in a flash. We were extremely fortunate that our trusty Entegra Anthem motorhome lived up to its great reputation and that there were no major mechanical casualties that would have derailed our travel dreams.
We pretty much had a 5-year plan from the start, although we may not have recognized those term limits as such when we left Colorado in April 2015. Nevertheless, we did time our circuitous cross-country route twice so that we would be in Cincinnati, Ohio, in August 2016 for my 50th high school reunion,
High school classmates Sharon and Vija
then in Annapolis, Maryland, in October 2019 for Al’s 50th class reunion at the US Naval Academy..
A map of our travels surprised even us! We had visited 36 of the 50 states!
Every dot represents a campground
Admittedly, some state visits were little more than a flyby, but the reality was that moving every 2-3 weeks over 5 years simply was not enough time to see everything. Often, however, when asked about our plans, my reply was,
“We haven’t seen everything, but it’s on our list.”
Hands down, the state among the 36 we visited that held the most surprises was Michigan! Having grown up in Ohio, how did I not know that the unique state of the double peninsula had such charming towns and a stunning coastline?
Plus, there was that magical day spent on Mackinac Island at the junction of the two peninsulas where its people were still in the thralls of fascination with a lifestyle from a time long ago.
Somewhere in time on Mackinac Island
Favorite hikes? Three stand out above all the others:
The trail through the ever-shifting sand dunes in the early morning hours at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico,
The Point Reyes National Seashore Tomales Point Trail overlooking the Pacific Ocean in northern California,
The trail to Blue Lakes where we saw a wildflower super-bloom deep within the heart of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
There were so many surprises, although some of them shouldn’t have been… like the sad Native American story that we had previously known about only in bits and pieces. Native American tribes had a present-day or historical presence in every state we visited! In well-documented museums, we read many sad histories of not-so-proud events. The extreme poverty we saw as we motored through many reservations only emphasized the magnitude of past and present-day mistreatment.
I am sad to say that Gatlinburg and Great Smoky Mountains National Park was slightly disappointing for us. Gatlinburg tourism just wasn’t our style. Maybe we were spoiled by the natural Rocky Mountain grandeur that had surrounded us in Colorado for 25 years. As mountains, the Smokies just seemed ordinary to us. Admittedly, the peak fall colors during our visit were rather impressive,
Fall colors in the Great Smoky Mountains
but not so much the massive traffic jams we had to navigate to get anywhere.
We visited a lot of national parks, and most of them showed countless signs of being loved to death. I foresee lots of changes coming in the future in order to manage automobile traffic in the superstar parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, etc. Fortunately, we were able to time our visits to minimize peak crowd size. We also found that if we ventured 100 yards down most trails, the big crowds disappeared.
We had some other random observations that were not all that surprising:
- Americans are very patriotic
- our big cities are very crowded and traffic is challenging
- fire is everywhere out west, and it is the new reality
- in the toxic political environment of 2015-2019, most people had a great reluctance to express political opinion
- the bigger the dogs, the smaller the rig
Truthfully, by the end of 2019 we were longing for more permanent roots. We would have been hard-pressed to come up with another year’s travel plan that didn’t repeat previous routes. New England was a major omission in our travels, but reports of very narrow roads and congested small towns discouraged us from driving our 45-ft bus into that corner of the U.S.
No road trip goes on forever, so it goes without saying that for five years we were subconsciously scouting for our next home. Over 25 years, cold and snowy Colorado winters had lost their appeal.
Practically year-round massive fires out west that resulted in maddening smoky skies and suffocating foul air pretty much ruled out settling in our beloved West. We had experienced enough weeks of smoke-filled air quality in Washington, Oregon, California and Wyoming to convince us we needed to embrace a new lifestyle in the east. Mt. Rainier would have been so much grander without a pall of smoke obscuring the background…
We did love the winter we spent in Florida… and our daughter seemed pretty settled down in the Florida Panhandle, so after reunion festivities had played out at the Naval Academy in October 2019, we headed south to Pensacola, Florida, to check things out.
Fast-forward two months and we had found the perfect new place to call home in St Johns, Florida, midway between Jacksonville and St Augustine. Selling the motorhome was challenging and required lots of patience. We eventually made the sale to a very appreciative couple from North Carolina who were eager to start their travel journeys. As we waved goodbye and watched the Entegra taillights fade into the distance, we smiled at each other and let out a huge sigh of relief.
Bye-bye...
During 2020 Covid conditions, we weathered new home construction while living in an apartment in Jacksonville for four months.
Fittingly, we spent the first night in our new home on July 4, 2020, as fireworks lit up the sky that evening for a very different celebration.
So, we have come to the end of the chapter that gives an account of our travel love affair with the United States. We have learned to appreciate the subtleties of our great history that is filled with stories of our many heroic founders. The end of the trail for explorers Lewis and Clark—where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean in Astoria, Oregon—was particularly meaningful.
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We have taken time to marvel in places where grand chapters in our history played out, and have listened carefully and watched with open eyes at places where events fell far short of any kind of celebration.
Above all, we savored our country’s rich natural beauty in many locales where iconic scenes engendered feelings bordering on the spiritual.
We started our 5-year odyssey on the grounds of the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the city we called home for 25 years.
Fittingly, we ended the travel section of our journey with a month in our nation’s capital,
spending our final minutes on the grounds of the US Naval Academy at the gravesite of Senator John McCain,
a graduate of the US Naval Academy and a man who knew the meaning of sacrifice for country. The start and finish locales resonated with me as cosmic bookended symmetry for a gigantic undertaking during which we traveled 30,000 miles in a motorhome.
And so readers, while we feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment that our blog “Catching the Tradewinds” has thoroughly documented the European and USA chapters of our travel adventures, it’s a little sad to contemplate goodbye. Let’s just say that for now we are looking forward to having a more permanent locale for the next chapter of life in the land of palm trees and sunshine.
Perhaps, once Covid has worn itself out, there will be new travel adventures in Chapter 4. However, these two well-seasoned senior travelers won’t be staying in any campgrounds, and we plan on a few more creature comforts to soften the journey.
“The greatest danger in life is not to take the adventure.” George Leigh Mallory
THE END… for now
Carol Galus
Photo-Blogger
