Working the dream life for 16+ years.
Jim Jim and Rene touch down at Jetty Park in Port Canaveral, FL about ten miles south of John F. Kennedy Space Center to view the Space Shuttle Atlantis Launch on December 06, 2007.
Fair Warning: This one gets rather technical. But if a PHP Neophyte like me I can figure it out, anyone who has installed their own WordPress blog should be able to handle it.
Here’s a nifty new product that should lighten the load of any fellow avid readers out there who have packed up their library with them and brought it along in their rig: The new Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device
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If you’re like us, you had a hard time deciding which favorite books to bring with you on the road. Or, you are often leaving books at campgrounds and purchasing new ones along the way.
Either way, there is likely still a stack of books taking up valuable storage space in your RV. Well, this lightweight portable e-book reader
I don’t mean to sound like an Amazon
We’re always on the lookout for remote off-the-grid state and national parks where we can boondock, but have had a hard time finding any since we left Wisconsin’s tornado country.
It seems like there was never a problem finding cool places to boondock out West. We often went without hookups in California, Utah and Colorado. But even here in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp we have water, power, paved roads and a few neighbors.
I’ve determined that if I don’t write something short and quick with first impressions about new places we see, I never will.
There is so much to see and do on this journey – as I told a Canuck fulltimer yesterday – we could stay on the road for the rest of our lives and never see the entire country. And if I don’t jot down some basic observations about where we’ve been soon after we arrive, I will forget if there is any reason to return when the time comes to plant some roots again.
With that said, I go Pogo … we have made it to Okefenoke Swamp. And we have officially reached the South.
We’ve been looking for a great image manager to replace the current gallery solution provided by our host, so I checked out Christophe’s travel blog. Chris informed me that the NextGEN photo gallery plugin has improved since I last gave it a try. Indeed it has.
Let’s take it for a test run here. If it works out to everyone’s delight, you may be seeing some major changes to our roadtripping fulltimer photo gallery. Hopefully the NextGEN photo gallery, albums, and slideshow integration will help us save time and improve this blog. Please let us know what you think.
That is what Rene has been proudly calling this year’s feast. My answer is that every Thanksgiving dinner is a vegetarian banquet. It just happens to also traditionally include a large stuffed bird roasted to juicy perfection. Alas, not this year … and while our big dinner date was a day late this year, it was still delicious!
We’ve been doing our best to eat local
A while back, one of our readers declared that the RVer’s National Anthem should be Hank Snow’s I’ve Been Everywhere
“I’ve been everywhere, man
I’ve been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I’ve breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I’ve had my share, man
I’ve been everywhere“
Well, I finally got around to adding this to our cross country road trip soundtrack of travel tunes. While I was at it, I put some elbow grease into the page and added an interactive slideshow of CDs available from Amazon that include the songs we’ve added to our list. This way we’ll be able to update our soundtrack easier and more often.
A while ago, my sister Mariclair sent me a link to this manual for a Telescoping RV Tower. Rich, who together with M.C. runs O’Connell Solar – and designed our own RV’s solar energy system – had just spent three days at Southwest Windpower and thought it would be cool fodder for the blog. Cool indeed.
I looked into it further and discovered the tower is designed for using the Air X Marine small wind turbine with an RV.
Then when we were getting a tour of Tugboat Margot from my brother in law Tim back in Troy, NY, I noticed an Air X mounted on a boat docked nearby and filmed it in action.
While this particular tower mount wouldn’t work with our rig without some serious modification, seeing the wind generator do its job got me thinking…
After driving for thousands of miles over the past few months, I have to say that one of the most vital accessories we purchased for this cross-country road trip has to be our iPod. We got a used 40GB iPod on eBay that has a good dent in it, but it was a deal!
I spent many a late night transferring most of our CD collection onto it before we left, and it was time well spent. I only wish I had copied all of our CDs.
While you can always find classic rock somewhere on the dial, much of this country has really, really bad radio. That’s why I was happy to find out that Amazon is finally offering MP3 downloads!
Carol would call this one a Back Track … one of the hardest things about trying to blog about our travels is trying to keep everything current when there is so much to see and do. Hell, there is still stuff I could write about from way back in Colorado. At least this one only goes back a few weeks to my birthday dinner.
Rene got off easy this year. I was a cheap date. All I wanted was a to take the day off from driving and do nothing, other than barbecue myself a steak. So the day before – on Halloween – we went to the Blacksburg Farmers Market for some fresh produce, in search of some local meat. Having never seen cattle ranchers at a farmers market until we got to the East Coast, I was feeling lucky. And I struck gold, or black rather, as in Angus.
By the time I was about to write about dropping off my Powerbook at the Charlotte Apple Store for repairs, they had already called to say it was ready to be picked up. This came as a pleasant surprise considering they said it would take five to seven days to be fixed at the service center in Texas.
So our stay in Asheville – a few hours away, in the Smoky Mountain foothills – was cut a bit short, but the couple days we did have there was plenty to get a feel for the area.
This little wrench in the works also gave us time to realize we never care to live our lives along an interstate corridor. As we criss-crossed North Carolina, the incredible population density and mass consumption of this country became remarkably clear.
Jim reviews Famous Anthony’s restaurant in Christiansburg, VA and reflects on his stay in Virginia
Jim discovers there is no Wawa store in Mawah, NJ.