It was 13°F this morning of January 17th, 2018 in our RV in Dallas, Texas. We managed to avoid both freezing to death and frozen water pipes. Although it took a trip to Lowes yesterday to get some materials for insulation, it was not an imposition – we saw a good movie and the Cabernet was still at the proper temperature last night. In some respects the past 24 hours was a microcosm of our last 30 days.
We left our RV in Charleston in mid December and drove to Pittsburgh to see Lisa Peters. It was a really nice 3 day stay. We hung with Lisa – as usual she was a great host. We caught up with Jolie and Bobby at a high-end crafts fair and had dinner with them. They are doing fabulous work in pottery and woodcrafts, respectively.
Our next stop was Rochester – this was timed so for a number of appointments, lunch dates, and jury duty for Suzanne. We had Christmas celebrations in Buffalo with Suzanne’s family and in Fairport with mine. Then it got more complicated. We drove to Connecticut where we had Christmas with all of our children and grandchildren, finished building a large table we started in November, babysat the Johnson kids while Sarah and Pete were in an out-of-town wedding, and generally tried to be useful.
We left for Charleston to retrieve our RV just after the 1st of the year, stayed overnight at Jessie’s in Ashburn, VA and arrived just outside Charleston as the snowstorm known as “Bomb Cyclone Grayson” struck. This was one of those storms that, if we had it in Rochester, would have caused us to be 10 minutes late for work. In the Carolinas it was a crisis. They closed I-26 so that we could not get closer than 40 miles away from Charleston and had to get a hotel room in a little town on I-95. The next morning we spent 5 hours on the road to get to our RV and then the campground – despite the fact that nearly everyone was hunkered down in their homes and there weren’t many cars on the road. There are no snowplows to speak of in Charleston and all the packed snow on the roads turned into a 1 inch layer of ice – much of it the “glare” variety. It was a bit scary moving our RV to the campsite and once we got there we decided we weren’t driving the RV until the roads were clear. So we had to spend a few more days, but there are worse places to be. Just to illustrate the snow removal situation: on day 3 after the snowstorm, the main road (Route 17) was being “plowed” by a construction grader. It was literally escorted by two police cars and a Charleston DOT truck. Suzanne and I nearly peed our pants as we watched the spectacle from our car.
In the course of the past 10 days, we traveled west. Our trip across I-20 took us through SC, AL, MS, LA, and TX. In Dallas we caught up with my cousins Liz, Steve, and Ned van Niman. We hadn’t seen them for a long time and really enjoyed spending some time with them. The month culminated with a flight back to Rochester for a few days – that will be a topic of future posts.
Our first “Christmas month experience” from the time we left Charleston on December 11th until today, January 17th in Dallas included stays at 10 different locations and 14 “changes of address”. We traveled via RV, car, and plane. In retrospect it seems like a lot, but it really was a lot of fun. We expect to do something similar in 2018/19.
Tomorrow we leave for Carlsbad, NM to see the Carlsbad Cavers and Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
