Thanksgiving in Miami

We had the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving in Miami with Shoshana, Mary’s best friend, and the woman who married us. She recently moved from Orcas Island to Austin, Texas, and was visiting her family in Miami for Thanksgiving. We drove down from St Augustine to Shoshana’s mom’s condo in North Miami Beach. The 7^th floor condo is like an art museum, and overlooks the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at Shoshana’s cousin’s house and also got to spend a wonderful evening at her brother’s house on the Intracoastal. He took us out for a very nice sunset boat ride complete with a few dolphins frolicking nearby. We had a great time, and very much enjoyed the warm weather and balmy nights. (Mary is on a diet now to get rid of those holiday pounds.)

Shoshana went with us to the Miami Seaquarium to visit Lolita, the last living orca in captivity from the Pacific Northwest. She was captured in 1970 at the age of 4 and has been performing at the Miami Seaquarium ever since. Lolita is believed to be the oldest orca in captivity. She is in a notoriously small tank with no other orcas, and only a few pacific white-sided dolphins for company. There has been a campaign to try to secure her release for many years, but with no result. We weren’t sure what to expect. Thankfully, she looked in surprisingly good shape (skin, teeth and mouth all excellent). She did a very good job of splashing the audience, and interacted well with the trainers. Mary checked in with her, and she seemed to be resigned to her lot.

On the way back up to St Augustine, we checked out campgrounds for our next stop near Vero Beach. It’s unseasonably cold right now in north Florida (overnight freezing temps), but still nothing like the rest of the country, so we are not complaining.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. We hope you are being spared by the tough weather across the country, and that you have a wonderful holiday filled with light, love, fun and fabulous food. We are driving down to Miami to spend the holiday with my best friend Shoshana who is there visiting family.

Bob and I arrived in St. Augustine last Friday and are loving it. We are grateful for perfect weather in the 70s during the day and low 60s at night. It’s been mostly sunny with only a light breeze. Generally we spend 4 days in a town running around and visiting all the sights, but so far we haven’t even been into downtown St. Augustine. We are finally relaxing and chilling around the campground.

We LOVE this RV resort. It is situated between the Atlantic ocean and the Intracoastal waterway. Each site is private and surrounded with vegetation. We have a nice pool and two restaurants within a block. What more could we ask for?

I’m including photos of the beach we walk on every morning, the entrance to our campground, our site, and myself walking with a high school friend of mine who has a home near here. I think we’re going to have a great time in this area, one of these days we’ll go out and explore it.

Have a wonderful Holiday!!

100th Blog

Wow, is it possible that this is our 100^th blog? That’s what Blogspot says. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been on the road for 11 months and we’re only on the east coast. There is still so much more of this wonderful country to see and explore. It looks like it’s going to take us another six months to get back to Washington.

Bob and I watched the air temperature rise by 20 degrees on the drive from Asheville, NC to Charleston, SC. It’s great to be in a warmer climate. We had a wonderful campsite just 100 feet from a large pond ringed by palms and trees covered in Spanish moss. Just looking out the window made me feel warm.

Downtown Charleston is a lovely old city with many historic buildings. We spent an afternoon walking the streets and along the waterfront where we found many cobblestone and brick roads. The large old homes on Battery Street are gorgeous and the restaurants offer shrimp, shrimp and more shrimp!

We are staying in the Mount Pleasant area and there is a wonderful beach town called Isle of Palms out on the Atlantic coast. Most of the spectacular beach houses must have been built after Hurricane Hugo (1989). The beach is broad and flat and not developed with the tacky boardwalks and businesses that we have seen in other beach areas.

Cypress Gardens is about 50 miles north of Charleston and a great place to spend a day. We chatted with their parrots and cockatoos, visited the butterfly house, toured the Swamparium and hung with their three large alligators. We also hiked one of the nature trails and paddled a flat-bottomed boat through the Cypress swamp. It was great to be on the water and encounter turtles, vultures and even a few wild alligators.

We also visited Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery that was not too far from Cypress Gardens. Bob and I enjoyed the beautiful gardens and quiet, but were too late to get a tour. The monks have been on this 3,000 acre, 18^th century rice plantation since 1949 and in addition to fruit cake, they produce jellies, jams, candies and creamed honeys.

Asheville, NC

The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina are gorgeous. I visited here twice before, once in 1981, and then again in 2000 but Bob had never been to this area. Even though the peak of the fall colors is gone, there are still red and yellow trees scattered throughout the hills. There is something I really like about seeing layer after layer of hills in the distance.

We stayed just outside Asheville and spent time in the quaint town of Black Mountain. We also went hiking with a former dolphin trip participant who lives here. The hike she took us on was on the property of a place where I had attended a silent retreat at in 2000. What are the chances of that? It was a lovely warm day with incredible views.

Asheville is a wonderful town with a vibrant and busy downtown scene. It is known for its Art Deco and Gothic architecture. Bob and I were amazed at the number and variety of restaurants in this reasonably small city. We enjoyed the Friday night community drumming circle in a park downtown and found this to be a very livable city.

Asheville is also known for the enormous Grove Park Inn that was built in 1913 out of huge boulders. It was designed to look rustic, but still afford its guests a high scale of luxury. The walls are lined with photos of famous guests such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Ford, actors and actresses, not to mention many presidents and their wives.

By far the most impressive landmark in Asheville is the Biltmore Estate. The 250 room French Renaissance style home was finished in 1895 by George W. Vanderbilt. It is the largest private home in the country and is still owned and managed by the family. The 8,000 acres of the estate (down from the original 125,000 acres) are filled with gardens, trails, a farm, a winery, large inn, restaurants and shops. Bob and I spent an entire day here, touring the house, the grounds, the winery and of course the tasting room. We also visited the house in the evening when its dozens of Christmas trees were lit and the fireplaces burning. The elaborate decorations were really something to see. They said that there was more than a mile of fresh garland in the house, in addition to all the poinsettias, trees, swags, and ornaments. In the grand dining room, the tree was 40 feet tall!

Next stop is Charleston, SC for a few days and then we will be in St Augustine, FL for a MONTH! Looking forward to winding down and relaxing a bit in one place for a while.

Snowin In the Smokies

Mary and I stopped in Pigeon Forge, TN (yes, Dollywood) to visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We arrived with a cold wave, so in order to get a chance to hike in the mountains we had to stay a few extra days. That provided time for us to explore the tourist venues of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. These towns are very touristy, and from the large off-season crowds it was hard to tell that the economy is not doing well. By the way… in a 12 mile stretch of highway there must be 20 pancake houses and 10 “As Seen on TV” stores (this is not an exaggeration)

Our first day was rain and some snow even in the lower elevations of the park. We stayed in the truck, but took a very nice five-mile “nature drive” outside of Gatlinburg and saw a very large Black Bear right along the side of the road. We also saw a wild turkey fly across the road and up very high in a tree. Neither of us thought they could fly that high.

We went to see Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede dinner show. This is usually Dolly’s version of the medieval knights arena show were it’s North versus South in an array of horsemanship events, while the audience dines (with their hands only) on a whole chicken, a slab of pork, potatoes, corn on the cob, soup and an apple turnover for desert. Mary and I saved up all day for this caloric and carb binge. We actually caught the Christmas version of the show, and it was really very nice. We still had the North Pole competing against the South Pole, but the festivities included a flying fairy Nutcracker scene and a Nativity scene with real donkeys, sheep, goats and camels. The horsemanship was excellent and included a woman doing “Roman” horse tricks, which involves standing on top of two horses and moving back and forth from horse to horse. She also straddled a line of torches and jumped through a ring of fire while standing on the horses. This was quite impressive.

The weather did clear up and warm up, and we went over the top of the Smokies into Cherokee, North Carolina. They had gotten about 6-8 inches of snow at the top, and the skies were absolutely clear which is rare here. Most of the fall colors were gone, but it was still absolutely gorgeous. After most of the snow melted off we were able to get onto the Appalachian Trail. The AT here runs along the ridge line of the Smokies, and is also the separation between Tennessee and North Carolina. We hiked along the AT both north and south from Newfound Gap until we ran into too much lingering snow. We also drove and then hiked the ½ mile to Clingmans Dome (6,643 feet), the highest point along the entire Appalachian Trail and the highest point in the Smokies. Another day we hiked to Grotto Falls and encountered a line of 8 pack llamas coming down from the mountain. That was a real treat and a big surprise

We did succumb to pancakes one morning, and we had some killer beer-cheese fries at a pub while watching the Breeders Cup Race on TV (very fun since we had just seen the movie Secretariat and had been at Churchill Downs last week). There have also been some dinners and lunches out at this stop. Our diets are like our hikes….we keep looking for a beautiful level path, but we keep choosing trails with lots of ups and downs.

Next stop is Asheville, North Carolina, then on to Charleston, South Carolina.

Music City

Bob and I rolled into Nashville, TN and set up at Yogi Bear’s Jelly Stone Park. I have been resisting staying at one of these because of the high percentage of children, but this time of the year it’s mainly adults. The big plus at this place is that they do a Christmas light show extravaganza and this week they are testing and putting the finishing touches on it. We have been treated to an exciting light show that is synchronized to music each evening. I do love those Christmas lights, so it’s been a lot of fun.

My Dad loves airplanes, still flies a lot and has even built a few. One of the planes he built is a French plane called a Flying Flea. A few years ago the Flea was purchased by a collector and moved to the Lane Motor Museum here in Nashville. Bob and I made a visit to see the Flea and really enjoyed the whole museum. It was filled with mostly European, unusual cars and motorcycles – and one little airplane hanging from the ceiling.

Nashville has an amazing network of freeways that makes getting around quick and easy. We never saw any rush hour backups like we get in Seattle. We even went into downtown around 4:30 in the afternoon and easily found a place to park in The District. This area is filled with restaurants and saloons where live country music is played more than 12 hours a day. Bob and I were planning to go into a Honky Tonk to feel the local vibe, but here in Tennessee (and also Kentucky) they still smoke in public buildings. It was early on election day and there wasn’t much of a “happening scene”, so we just listened outside.

We also visited the Grand Old Opry that just opened after the flood that filled Nashville six months ago. Many buildings in the flood zone are still closed. Bob and I cruised up and down Music Row and stopped by the Ryman Auditorium where country stars have played for decades

Before this stop we were unaware that Nashville is called the Athens of the South due to its love of Greek architecture. We went to the Parthenon in Centennial Park, which is the only full size replica of the original in the world. We also got in a pretty good 2.5 mile hike at a wilderness park that is located very close to town.

Our final day in Nashville was rainy, but we spent it with good company, a friend and client of Mary’s down in Franklin, TN. It’s supposed to get cold in the next few days, so we’re loading up on propane for our furnace before we head to the mountains.