Sun City West – Home is the Sailor, home from the sea

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Spent the night of 9/1 in Gallup NM, a nice city with a lot of rich Navajo heritage and that I’ll visit again, but you can’t get a good night’s sleep in Gallup because the town runs West <-> East on both sides of major railroad tracks that are busy 24-hours a day.

On the last leg to home I stopped at the Petrified National Forrest and the Painted Desert, just short stops because I was really getting tired of sightseeing and wanted to get home and relax.

Ending mileage 18,198, and enjoyed it all the way because setbacks were really only minor.

Palo Duro Canyon & Cadillac Ranch

WED September 1

Before this stop in Amarillo TX the picture that came to mind was of lots of flat land; the Spanish explores called the area Llano Estacado or the Staked Plains because there were no landmarks to set your bearing on so they put stakes in the ground as course markers. Also to me Amarillo was a place to fill up with gas and in 1965 on my way from San Antonio to Denver a place just outside of Amarillo where I took a short-cut and got caught in a flash-flood of the Canadian River and was washed into a cotton field. That soaking ruined the electrical wiring on my Alfa Romero and I had to stumble into Denver where high school friends, the Carlins, worked on it for me.

Anyway, on this trip I discovered Palo Duro Canyon and Cadillac Ranch. I knew Palo Duro was there but I had never been there and it is truly a beautiful canyon system and I’ll have to go back sometime for about a week and do some hiking.

And Cadillac Ranch is so Texas, loved it.

Lake of the Ozarks & National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

Monday August 30, 2010

Driving south through Missouri past the capital at Springfield and past Ft Leonard Wood which as I remember was Forrest’s first stop in the Army in where 1997 they were going to make him an engineer, read “how to blow up things” and other assorted support tasks, before he convinced some Sergeant to have him transferred to Ft Benning NC for Airborne training.

The Missouri Lake of the Ozarks area is BOAT COUNTRY; offshore racing boats, drag boats, ski boats, bass boats, house boats, pontoon boats, canoes and kayaks, lots of boats. And if wives don’t want to join in on all the testosterone there are the outlet malls and at night there are the casinos. Lake of the Ozarks is a happening place.

Also the guys around here like high-rise diesel pick-up trucks with twin chrome dump exhausts going straight up in the truck-bed.

Close to Springfield MO I stopped at the Historic Route 66 Welcome Center and I got closer to Oklahoma City I started seeing and hearing names I remembered for my childhood when I played cowboys and Indians all the time.

It was hard to find a place to take a picture of the St Louis Gateway to the West.

Tuesday August 31st and today I am in Oklahoma City at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. This museum presents a history of the west through the Mountain Men, the western Army and the cowboys. There are also beautiful sculptures and paintings. I would rank this museum very high and recommend a visit if you are in the area; but watch out for the rough roads in the OK City area.

Massena NY & Niagara Falls NY

FRI August 27th

Massena is a town in northern NY State and is nicknamed "The Gateway to the Fourth Coast". The population was 13,121 at the 2000 census. The town of Massena contains a village also called Massena. The town and its village are named after a hero of the Napoleonic Wars.

Drove over to Massena NY and to the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the Eisenhower Lock where Dad had a job in 1957-1959 as Marine Superintendent. They only had half-day school in Massena at that time because of the large influx of workers for the Seaway and Mom said I needed the benefits of full-day school so off to Denver I was sent for my last 2-years of high school. [And the recent 50th anniversary celebration was a hoot!]

The Seaway was/is a big engineering feat and unfortunately ocean cargo carrying ships have gotten larger and larger and so now only the smaller ships and ships specially designed for the Great Lakes use it; but still a lot of tonnage pass through its locks.

Forgot, on my way to Massena, I drove over the Erie Canal, another example of how important moving material by water is.

There are a lot of hippies in northern NY, long hair & headbands, clothes right out of the 60s with the women in peasant blouses.

Listening to the radio you don’t want a DUI conviction in NY State. The announcement on the radio said if convicted, every car you owned, or drove, had to be equipped with installed breathalizer connected with a no-go switch for the car’s ignition; passed the breathalizer and you can turn the car on and drive, don’t pass and you can’t start the car. Plus you are subject to random checks and at anytime you are found in non-compliance it is back to court. Don’t drink and drive in NY.

From Massena drove southwest to Niagara Falls roughly paralleling the St Lawrence River and through the Thousand Island area, very pretty but I also saw lots of firewood stacked for the winter.

Niagara Falls was pretty awesome also; lots of water and the noise broadcast the power and might of the moving river.

It has been cool with off/on showers the last two days but luckily the showers have been when I was asleep or driving the car.

When passing through Buffalo NY I noticed figures of Buffalo at the Interstate exit to the airport and I remembered the Bronco statue at the Denver airport. Is this a thing that I am not aware of re the NFL teams or is it just these two cities? And what came first, the chicken [Buffalo] or the egg [Bronco]?

SAT 8/28. Shawn, in Columbus OH on I-270W about Exit 17B there is a big Cardinal Health building; in case you need that information.

Steering West Sou’ West and heading home. . . eventually

TUE August 24, 2010

Steering West Sou’ West and 14,639 miles since I left Sun City West 3+ months ago; heading back, but remember rule #1 for this adventure, NEVER IN A STRAIGHT LINE.

I stopped first about 48-km outside of the park in Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada to have the electrical problem fixed and the tech found a blown fuse on the Tahoe that he suspects then lead to an overload of an electronic breaker inside of the trailer power converter. The blown fuse in the Tahoe cause the car not to be able to charge the 2 trailer batteries and the popped electronic breaker in the trailer power converter meant that when I plugged into shore power the converter couldn’t step it down to the 12-volts that lights run on; etc, etc, etc. He believe what caused the problem was the electric hitch I had installed on the trailers’ tongue so I wouldn’t have to crank the hitch; he told me in the future just to disconnect the trailers electric connection to the Tahoe before operating the electric hitch.

I am back in the USA tonight and heading for Massena NY and its great to have light in the trailer.

Fundy National Park, New Brunswick, Canada

SUN & MON August 22 & 23, 2010

A pretty day for a short 19-mile drive up the coast of Maine to Prospect Harbor; my last duty station before I retired from the Navy was with the Navy Astronautics Group, Point Mugu CA, we were a satellite navigation command for the fleet ballistic missile submarines, and we had a detachment in Prospect Harbor. Generally once a year we did an inspection of NAG’s detachments and the last time I was in Prospect Harbor was 1985. The gem of the place is a set of guest quarters called Gull Cottage, it a cottage and a lighthouse; one of those nice little places that not many people know about, and hard to get a reservation for.

After Prospect Harbor I continued eastward driving past cranberry bogs and blueberry farms into Canada to Fundy National Park and it started to warm up.

Starting SAT, cell phone service for me started to get spotty and I don’t like that and then I remembered that Forrest would soon be going overseas again so in Calais ME before crossing the border, I stopped at the local fire station and asked where pay-phone was. After getting the crew of 4 together, they thought there was one at a store in the Wal-Mart shopping center. Yes there was and I called Forrest and told him to keep his butt in the ditch and be safe.

Can a cell phone accept a collect call? That’s something for you folks, and me, that are cellphone only to think about.

So here I am pulling in to Fundy National Park and finished getting the camper all settled in and relaxing after supper when I noticed that the lights seem not to be as bright as they normally are. In checking I find that my trailer house-battery system is registering low, it usually reads fully charged, and that is soon emphasized when my propane gas alarm goes off to announce that it is receiving less that nominal power. Out I go to check wiring connections as best as I can for the batteries and leads to the trailer, I find nothing. I start reading the trailer manual and decide to check the power converter and don’t really know what I’m looking at. Bottom line, turn off all the lights and go to bed because it’s dark. No power, no heat and I add a sleeping bag as an extra blanket. Thank goodness the fridge can run off propane.

The campground is only a couple of miles from the Visitors Center that is the hub of all the roads and the village outside of the park is only another mile so I was planning on riding my bike but then I saw a road sign that posted steep and twisting roads because of hills, maximum speed of 40 km/h and suggested low gear; would have been fun going down but then one has to go back up, doesn’t one; change of plan.

Fundy is a beautiful and wonderful park that is well manicured and I mean just that, they aren’t letting the people areas go to natural setting the way U.S. Nat’l parks are, there is even a solar-heated saltwater swimming pool. And the campgrounds have emergency exits that are really car trails cut through the trees in case a forest-fire cuts off the paved campground road. And it is a park designed for hikers with many many trails and a wonderful trail-map that gives trail difficulty and distances in kilometers, 1 km = 0.62 mi; I would describe what I did more as hard walking rather than hiking, fun and beautiful.

And the tide range is what people come to see. I had heard 14 feet but a postcard I looked at said 9 meters.

They clean the showers and bathrooms here twice a day and I have NEVER seen that in a US park.

Saw a soda machine that said “Sorry this machine takes only loonies and quarters; I surmised that a “loonie” was a dollar coin and when I asked, yes it was, and there is also a tooney, a 2-dollar coin and I’m not going to make a joke out of that. Had a great late lunch in the village of Alma and the best fish chowder I have ever had, so good in fact I ordered a take-out of the same chowder for supper.

Spent a second night in the dark reading by flashlight and in the cold, this is not my Idea of fun.

Acadia National Park

SAT August 21, 2010

Friday moving from Boston to Acadia National Park, for lunch I stopped by Boothbay Harbor ME; Boothbay Harbor has grown since I was last there about 1966 and the price of the lobster roll sandwich has gone up in price triple but it is still just as good. I had just about given up on having lunch because I couldn’t find a place to park; lots do not have hourly rates, the rate is for all day, $20.00 for a RV or trailer, and they were full, just about given up and was effectively heading out of town when I found three parking places together, glad I had my bike because I was no longer near the center of town.

By the way, weather here was 53 deg when I woke up this morning and went to shower and it reached all the way to the low 70’s during the day.

Acadia National Park is just like you see on film and in brochures, lovely. The ocean and the granite cliffs present a magnificent picture; I walked, I hiked, I biked, I kicked back and had lunch and I took a mess of pictures. Beautiful and relaxing.

Mid afternoon I went into Bar Harbor and acted like a tourist, walking around and shopping but not buying anything, lots of Japanese and Italians and other accents heard, nice.

Bullets:
• See as many self storage places in the woods of Maine as I do in the larger cities
• Impression of Bar Harbor, basically built up in the 50’s but everything is painted up and fixed up, guess its “quaint” here in Downeast Maine.
• This is granite country and 9 or 10 foot granite blocks are used for curbing instead of concrete
• On this trip I notice a lot of second childhood stuff, old men and old women on motorcycles
• You should see the stacks of firewood the locals lay in for the winter
• That reminds me, “winter” begins here September 1, you see it on the rates charged for rooms and other things
• Mel Brooks, “It’s nice to be king.” and you can see that at the Bar Harbor airport, lots of big private jets
• When in Rome: for dinner I had lobster and it just tasted better on the Maine coast than it does from Red Lobster in Arizona or California, followed by Maine Blueberry pie