Kat’s TravelBlog

I’m not going to say that I’m catching up on this blog again — that’s getting to sound like a broken record (for those old enough to remember analog vinyl audio media). Of course that’s what I’m doing, but saying so is so obvious…

We have been working on the house, mostly, and Kat has been busy in Second Life, as usual. We’re making lots of progress on getting the house fixed up, and thinking of more things to do with it in the years to come. But this summer if we get the closets and bookshelves finished and things put away in them, I’ll be happy.

This holiday weekend we took a bit of a break to run down to Raymore for a party at Phil’s nephew’s. Brian and Debbie put on quite a fun event, with lots of family and friends enjoying the beautiful weather and their lovely house & yard on the golf course. Both of Phil’s brothers and their wives were there, several other cousins, neices & nephews and neighbors; lots of interesting people to talk to, and everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. The food was really great, too, with contributions from many of the guests as well as what Debbie and Brian put together.

We’re going to a movie in a few minutes, so I don’t have time to download and post the pictures I took, but I’ll add some of them here later.

We’re still sitting in the basement talking, but the tornados seem to have missed us and the sirens have stopped. So all clear now, it appears.

While driving across southern Nebraska seems like a good time to start to catch up on blogging. The road (I-80) is a little rough, but not enough to make it hard to type, and there’s very little in the way of scenic distractions aside from the occassional low mesa or wind farm. However, see the image below, which makes a liar out of me. When we were approaching it, we thought the inner or lower rainbow was maybe a dust storm or a wildfire until we got close enough to make out the spectrum. Pretty unusual sight!

This has been a very full couple of weeks. After a short 2-week visit in St. Joseph, we went to Denver and Boulder, where we attended Phil’s great-neice’s high school graduation and a party her parents gave in her honor. Her grandparents, Phil’s brother and his wife from central Kansas were there, as well as her paternal uncle and aunt, and her maternal Aunt Julie and her boyfriend, all from Kansas City. The relative who came the furthest, though, was her grandmother who had just returned from visiting Japan for several months. We really enjoyed seeing all that family, and a lot of their friends as well.

Graduation was on Saturday at the Colorado University field house in Boulder, so afterwards Phil went home with his nephew et al. and I met a couple of friends from Second Life to have lunch and a tour of the CU campus and the nearby NOAA facility, where one of them works. Eric (Hackshaven Harford in Second Life) is NOAA’s official representative in Second Life. He was responsible for the first US Government agency buying an island there, and presently is responsible for 12 of them, all part of the SciLands consortium of science & technology related organizations who have built our islands together. Eric’s dad, Richard, had first shown Eric Second Life, and is the founder of the Boulder Serious Second Life Meetup group.

The graduation party was Sunday, and was lots of fun. Then Monday my brother flew in to spend the week at his new company in Boulder, so Phil and I drove over to meet him for dinner at his hotel, The Boulderado (an historic landmark). After dinner we braved the light rain to walk down the pedestrian mall to the Pearl Street Pub where a jazz bass player Craig had met on a previous trip had a gig with a band he plays with, the Heavy Cats. The band was really, really good! During their break, I showed Mark Diamond, the bass player, some snapshots I’d taken with my iPhone and had emailed to him while they were playing. He emailed me the next day to tell me thanks and that the pix are now on the band’s MySpace page. (Mine are the ones in the slideshow captioned “5/26/08″ when you mouse over them.) That’s cool. The lead vocalist and band leader, Lionel Young, was playing an electric violin, the first one of those I’ve ever seen. He had a huge collection of foot pedals and switches on the floor in front of him (we had seats right in front of the band so we could see all the gear), and he could make that thing do just about anything! It was a very fun evening.

Tuesday we mainly rested, but Wednesday we headed north to Cheyenne for a couple of days to visit Phil’s daughter. Phyllis is doing well, and showed us around the LCCC campus where she teaches as well as getting together with us for several meals, and a very neat trolly tour of downtown Cheyenne. It was good to spend some time with her, too.

After that, we went out to Burns, Wyoming, where a long-time friend of Phil’s family lives with his family. Zack is from Troy, Kansas, where he’d known Phil’s kids when they were growing up, but Zack joined the Navy at age 17 and left home. He retired from the Navy as a CPO after 24 years in the service. However, they’ve kept in touch all these years. I met him, his wife Julie and their three kids for the first time this trip, but we’re planning to visit them again soon. Their youngest, Noah, is going to be playing in a Little League tournament in Omaha in a few weeks, so we plan to drive up from St. Joseph for that since it’s only 90 miles away. Zack and the older kids won’t be there, but Julie and Noah might hang around long enough to visit the zoo there with us. Meanwhile, we enjoyed their hospitality while we dry-camped in their front driveway last night.

Right now we’re stopped for the night in North Platte, Nebraska. Tomorrow we’ll be in Lincoln, Nebraska, then home Monday. Next post I’ll write something about the RV Parks we’ve visited this trip.

This is just a very brief note to let everyone know we’re ok, and on the way home to St. Joseph from Denver. Tonight we’re visiting a friend in southeastern Wyoming, and expect to be home by Monday evening. More about the trip and everything else later when I have a chance to write. It’s been a good trip, but very busy!

It’s been so long since I’ve posted to this blog that my Web browser’s cache had forgotten the URL! Shame on me.

We have indeed arrived in St. Joe, and have been pretty busy ever since, getting repairs to my poor little 350Z and to the RV, making (and in a few cases, keeping) doctors’ appointments, and getting things moved from the RV to the house, and of course getting that humongous plumbing job taken care of there.

Good news! Everything is going well! The plumbing wasn’t as difficult as anticipated, since the concrete floor was much thinner than expected, and the crumbling cast iron pipe under it was all within the four walls, so no more extensive excavations were required. There is now a nice sturdy new plastic pipe in its place, along with a new drain next to the furnace for the dehumidifier, replacing an old jury-rigged arrangment that required waste water pipes to be strung along the ceiling and walls in a very unattractive and impractical manner, not to mention a sump pump that will now not be required since gravity will handle the job.

The car is all good as new now, and the tow dolly is in process of having a modification added to prevent a repeat of the disaster we faced in Dallas. The same person who is fixing that also has done a lot of little chores around the RV for us, including recaulking the skylights that suddenly started leaking after we got here. He even washed the big grey hulk for us! The “topper” on the bedroom slideout that was knocked loose when we got lost in Oklahoma on the way to our RV park in Grove is now reattached, and everything else seems to be working properly.

So, Monday we will take off for Colorado and Wyoming for a couple of weeks, gas prices be damned! Phil’s great-neice is graduating from high school there, I have friends to visit, and we’ll go see Phil’s daughter in Cheyenne before coming home again. Then maybe we’ll actually move into the house and start getting things in order there, now that the water is turned on again. We’re looking forward to visiting family and friends (including Phil’s brothers who will probably also go to the graduation), and then coming back for a fresh start on spending the summer fixing up and enjoying the house, as well as spending time with friends and family here.

Yesterday was a disaster.

It started out well enough. We got everything inside put away and secured, then went to put the car on the tow dolly. The road is loose gravel, so when I was driving it up onto the dolly I had to accelerate more than normal, just to avoid spinning the wheels. Unfortunately, the nose of the 350Z is very low to the ground, and in this case it was so close to the lip on the front of the dolly, that something caught, and it ripped the grill right off, also tearing the bottom of the front bumper! Argh!

Well, there was nothing to do about it but go ahead and tie it down, hooking the pieces together as well as we could. There’s a couple of little clips that normally hold the grill on, and those snapped back in place (sort of), allowing us to at least get the safety chains and tire straps on. Obviously we can’t drive it in this condition, though, so instead of visiting my uncle in Tahlequah or Phil’s cousins in Carthage, Missouri while we’re stopped for the weekend in Grove, we’ll just hang out and let Phil recover from a long day’s drive and all the trauma, then head for St. Joseph Monday morning. We’ll try to get out early enough to take the car to the Nissan dealer before we even go to the RV park.

After that, things had to get better, right? Wrong.

The highway from Dallas’s North Central Expressway up to I-44 in northern Oklahoma (US 75/69) went from halfway decent in Texas to downright shabby in Oklahoma, especially after US 75 split off. It was so bumpy that the drawers under the dinette seats rattled open, and even worse, my flatbed scanner,which was sitting on one of the dinette bench seats, fell onto the floor! I haven’t had the courage to try it out yet to see if it still works.

We did get to Grove before dark, but the map I was following to the RV park was a bit outdated, so we made several wrong turns. That can be serious when you’re driving a 38 foot long vehicle and towing a trailer/vehicle behind it. There aren’t many places where it’s possible to turn a rig like that around if you hit a dead end. Luckily, we didn’t actually get stuck at a dead end, although in one place we had to depend on the kindness of [a] stranger who let us drive through his yard to avoid some low-hanging wires and get out of a cul-de-sac.

When we did finally find the park, it was dusk and the map taped to the office door for us was very confusing. I finally knocked on the manager’s door (as invited to do when I’d made the reservations and explained we would likely be arriving after the office closed) and asked for help. The manager and her husband very kindly came out to show us where our site is located, but the roads in the park are very narrow, with many sharp angles. Again, not a place you want to be with a big rig. We did finally get to the site, but trying to turn into it, being guided by the manager’s husband who told Phil to “swing wide”, the back end of the RV wound up “kissing” a tree right next to the roadway!

The tree was right up against the bedroom slideout, on the rear passenger side. Somehow Phil managed to go forward a foot or so to clear the tree, but doing so knocked the end caps off the slideout awning, which will have to be replaced tomorrow before we try to get underway Monday.

All told, from morning to night we did what may wind up being several thousand dollars worth of damage to our vehicles. I wonder if the insurance companies will count running into a trailer and a tree as collision damage?

Oh, and once more we’re in a place with almost no phone reception, so we can’t even call people except using Skype. Phil has gotten text messages, which don’t require as strong a signal as voice, but not many of our friends and relatives use that means of communication. I guess we’ll be in everyone’s doghouse for not being accessible tomorrow, since we usually talk to family on Sunday afternoons and we won’t be able to this week.

We’re on the final leg (or next to last one, anyway) of our current migratory path. This trip, since leaving St. Joseph around the first of November, has covered about 4,500 miles and 10 states. We’ll be back in St. Joe next week, after stopping in Grove, Oklahoma. That’s a good midpoint between my aunt & uncle in Tahlequah and Phil’s cousins in the Joplin area. We’ll park, then just take the toad (our towed 350Z car) to go visit people.

The red line is where we have yet to go to get from the Dallas area to St. Joe.

The wind has picked up, and the good folks at NOAA have issued a wind advisory for north Texas through Thursday night, so we decided to stay put for another day (and night). So, the plumbing problems in St. Joseph will have to wait. In the meantime, I’ve got work to do on the ISM website and maybe I’ll get some pictures posted here from New Mexico, that haven’t made it onto this blog because of losing that post while we were in Carlsbad. Stay tuned!

We are still in the Dallas area, just northeast of the city in a very nice RV Park, quiet with free fast WiFi and friendly owner/manager. We’re staying an extra night after deciding that trying to get to Omaha by Saturday was just pushing too hard, and we’d rather visit family on the way anyway. So, tomorrow we’ll go up to Grove, Oklahoma and stay through the weekend so we will have time to see everyone.

Last evening we had a delightful visit with my cousin, Charles and his wife, Dunja. I had never actually met them before, but Charles and I have been corresponding for years after we both had been doing some genealogy research on our Cashion family. Aside from the research, during which we decided we are 5th cousins once removed, we kind of hit it off. Charles added me to his email distribution list for his “Adventure Reports” about their travels back and forth to Croatia, where Dunja’s mother and other relatives live, and I helped him get his website set up on my webhosting server before their first trip to Croatia, so he’d have a permanent email address as well as a place to post pictures for friends and family. So finally meeting them in person was wonderful, but I already felt like I knew them. It was a very enjoyable time. Phil especially enjoyed getting Dunja to talk about Croatia and her feelings about the future of the countries in that area. Both she and Charles think things are getting better, especially if Croatia gets into the EU and develops its tourism industry. Apparently it is a very beautiful place, and quite charming. Dunja’s mother has a summer house on the island of Cres on the Adriatic Sea, where they spend a lot of time when they are not in Zagreb. Both places sound perfectly wonderful from Charles’ descriptions.

It’s hard to believe, but by this time next week we’ll be home in St. Joe. It’s been a really good trip, but I’m a little anxious to spend some time getting the house fixed up and getting used to staying put for at least a few weeks.

Phil’s daughter Cheryl reminded him this morning that my blog is out of date, so she didn’t know where we were or what we’ve been doing. Sorry, Cheryl! I had actually written a post a few days ago, when we were in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but somehow it got lost. I thought I had published it, but when I looked for it in the site it wasn’t there. I must have accidentally deleted it instead of posting it. The new version of WordPress has a very different user interface that I’m not used to yet.

Anyway, yes, we did visit Carlsbad Caverns, and when we get to our destination tonight (just NE of Dallas) I will rewrite the story and try to get it online this time instead of dumping it into the bit bucket again.

Since leaving New Mexico we have been making our way slowly across West Texas. We got away from the Guadalupe mountains just in time to miss the big wind storm, with 75 mph gusts. Where we stopped (Big Spring) the front came through overnight with 40 mph gusts but luckily it was mostly over by the time we got back on the road. If it was still blowing like that we probably would have stayed over another day, but the weather has been sunny and cool since then, breezy but not bad driving weather.

Right now we are between Cisco, where we stopped at a campground that I hope we never see again, and Ft. Worth, where we’ll turn north to go around the DFW metroplex. Tonight and Tuesday we will stop at Hidden Acres RV Park in Princeton, Texas, just east of Plano. I have a distant cousin whom I’ve been corresponding with for several years who lives there, and we will finally meet him and his wife tomorrow. They have graciously invited us to have dinner with them.

When we leave there, we’ll head north to NE Oklahoma, then on to Missouri. We might just go right on through St. Joseph, stopping only to pick up the mail, and head on up to Omaha for a few days before coming back to face the plumbing problem at the house. If you recall, we just turned the water off and left fore the winter after not being able to get anyone out to fix it before we left. Something to look forward to!

Anyway, it’s been a wonderful time here in Texas, and we plan to come back next year to do and see all the things we missed this year.