Kat’s TravelBlog

We’ve waved good-bye to Niceville and Rocky Bayou, and we are on the way to Slidell, Louisiana tonight. It was a pleasant three-week stay but now the weather is starting to get a little warmer and we’re developing itchy feet. While we were there I got some great pictures at Puddenhead Lake on the state park, about 400-500 yards from our RV. Here’s one: Great Blue Heron & Great Egret.

That’s in addition to the series from David’s parachute jump a couple of weeks ago before he left for Germany, when he was supposed to qualify as a senior jumpmaster. I forgot to ask him if he did that, but he did get to tell everyone in his group to go jump, then followed them out the door. Yes, I know that page is pretty funky — just look at the pictures, ok? I’m going to clean it up sometime. I also snagged a copy of the video he mad of his ride, which he took with a helmet camera he’d borrowed from somebody. I’ll be editing that for my Digital Media class video project (with David’s permission, of course) and will post it here when that’s done.

The travel calendar has been updated with our planned stopping points for March. We may stay in the Dallas area another week beyond what’s indicated, but we will be heading to San Antonio before April 10th anyway. After that, we may go on out to Laughlin, Nevada, but nothing definite. Stay tuned!

Click here for images captured during the Ranger School jump last Wednesday. The page is pretty tacky, and I’m planning to redo it, but for now at least the pictures are available. I was in a hurry because we had to go to an internet café to post the files, due to running out of bandwidth on our Verizon AirCard account. I am thinking of buying one of their new no-contract, on-demand wireless broadband cards, but until I do we will just have to conserve our bandwidth better. Meanwhile, enjoy the pix.

I’m posting this from my iPhone. Yes, we have a mobile broadband modem & router, but we’ve used all our allowance for the month — a paltry 5 GigaBytes — and have unplugged it until the 20th, when the account is reset. Thank goodness for smartphones with unlimited data accounts! This is another reason for wanting the iPad, when it becomes available. The iPhone is great, but really isn’t the optimal device for serious blogging.

Anyway, in family news, I heard from David a few minutes ago that his departure won’t be till Monday, so we may have another chance to socialize with him before he goes to Germany. I’ll be driving him to the airport, so will definitely see him again, but don’t know what his plans are for the weekend, if any. He was going up to Ft. Benning today to finish outprocessing, and may have texted me from there.

Yesterday I did get to see the jump where he was going to be getting his senior jumpmaster rating, and have tons of good pictures. I’m working on a dedicated webpage for those, but won’t be able to put them up until tomorrow at the earliest, if I take them on my netbook to Panera Bread, across the bridge in Destin. Phil is complaining about not seeing all the contents of his emails on his iPhone, so it shouldn’t be difficult to persuade him to go over there then. I’ll put a link to the new page here, of course, when I get it online.

We have enjoyed our stay at the Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park so much, that we’ve signed on for another week. So, we’ll be here until March 3rd, when we will start west, stopping in Slidell, Louisiana overnight before arriving at Chicot State Park, in just about the middle of the state. We haven’t been there before, but I expect it is quite a beauty spot, right next to the Louisiana State Arboretum. The only concern I had was whether we can get Verizon Wireless service there. According to their coverage map, there ought to be broadband, but it’s got cross-hatching over that area, and I don’t know what that means. (You can click the map below to see a larger version in a new window/tab.)

Anyway, one of our reasons for dawdling in Florida and Louisiana is to give Dallas a chance to thaw out before we get there. They’ve had a pretty rough winter this year, setting records not just for the amount of snow, but for how long it has stuck around. But by mid-March it ought to be warming up enough for us. Here’s a map with our proposed stop-overs. Again, you can click on it to see a larger version that may be more legible.

That push-pin at Irish Bend-Bayou Teche marks the location of where some of my distant cousins live. Some children of Mary Donelson and John Caffery (parents of my great-great-great-great grandmother, Sarah “Sally” Caffery who married John Walker of Virginia & Missouri) settled there and some of their descendants are still there. While we don’t propose staying there, if I can make contact with them we might take a ride down there one day while we’re in the area. I’d love to see if any of them have more information about Sally Caffery, since I haven’t been able to discover much beyond the fact that she and John Walker lived in Jefferson City, MO when my GGG grandmother, Margaret Courtenay Walker, was born there in 1818.

Anyway, we’re having a good trip so far. I’ve even been keeping up with my school work! I turned in my first project, on digital imaging, a day early this weekend, and feel like it was a good job; I expect to get an A on it. Next assignment is on digital audio, so maybe after learning something about that subject, I’ll start posting audio clips here, or even start a podcast, who knows?

A rainy day in (not Georgia)…

Waiting for the rain to turn into snow, as promised by the weatherman, buttoned up in the cozy motorhome, we are parked for the next two weeks in one of my favorite RV parks, Rocky Bayou State Park in Niceville, Florida. Phil is catching up on DVDs and email, I’m finally blogging here (now that we’re traveling again), and Buddy is cuddled up in a warm spot.

Last evening David came by and took me to dinner. He’s gone to New Orleans today to drop his car off to be shipped to Germany, but maybe we’ll be able to get together again over the weekend. Otherwise, it will be Wednesday before we see him again, since he has to run up to Ft. Benning Monday to do some outprocessing there. I’ll try to have pictures of his last jumpmastering run here Wednesday. He says he doesn’t expect to do much with that skill in Germany & Afghanistan (although you never know), but if all goes well this time out he will increase his rating to senior jumpmaster, which will serve him well in the future from a résumé-rounding-out perspective. He actually leaves on Saturday, the 20th, unless there’s some last minute glitch trying to outprocess from down here, in which case he says he’d just go up to Benning to get it straightened out and leave from there. We will hang around here until the 24th, and then either go back south to Lazy Days to get some work done on the RV, or head west toward Dallas and points beyond.

While we’re here, I’ll be applying to a different school at Mizzou. After two semesters I’ve decided that Journalism just isn’t the program I ought to be in, but I do still want to get an Masters degree. Right now I’m taking a class called “Introduction to Digital Media” from the School of Information Sciences & Learning Technologies (SISLT) in the College of Education. It’s a really great course, and while I do have a lot of background in the subject already, I am learning a lot as well as having a good time brushing up on the technology. So, I’m planning to try for a transfer to that school, to get an MEd in LSDD (Learning Systems Design & Development). Yes, I can do almost all of that online, too. There is one course that has to be taken on campus in Columbia, but we can handle that.

I’ll also put some of the time to use writing up yet another response to questions from the IRS concerning the ISM Corporation’s application for tax-exempt status. The International Spaceflight Museum has been moving right along, maintaining a level of donations that let us avoid begging for last-minute salvation every month, thanks to an anonymous donor who is paying the rent on Spaceport Bravo. While I can’t spare the bandwidth on our Verizon AirCard mobile internet connection to go into Second Life (where the museum exists), unless we find an internet café somewhere here, I am still actively working for the musuem in the background, and keep up with what is happening there by reading the meeting chatlogs.

So, even though it’s a lazy day today, we have lots to keep us occupied while we’re here. C’mon, snow! Do your worst! We’ll enjoy watching it from our toasty-warm enclave.

After being caught in a weeks-long cold snap here in east central Florida, when temps got as low as 21° Farenheit, the weather is finally acting more like normal and warming up a bit. It wasn’t too bad. At least I had a chance to wear the heavy wool hooded sweater-jacket I bought in Ireland a few years ago, and last night Mom wore her mink jacket when we took her and Dad to dinner last night. It was their 64th wedding anniversary, so a very appropriate occasion for something like that. All of us “kids” — my brother, sister and I, plus a couple of spouses and grand & great-grand kids — enjoyed their company and the steaks, champagne & strawberries.

We are truly blessed as a family. Over Christmas, both my sons and granddaughter got down here to visit, all too briefly but fun while it lasted. Marti (my sister) and Craig (my brother) live here year ’round, and of course we are here for the winter holidays every year, so Mom & Dad are surrounded by their whole flock this time of year. We will be here for a couple more weeks, until early February, when we take off for our usual westward trek. This year we plan to stop in the Florida panhandle for a week or two, to visit son David before he leaves for three years in Germany & Afghanistan. He’s been stationed at Camp Rudder for two years as a Ranger School instructor and now staff member. While there he’s added a few more accomplishments to his résumé by participating in last year’s Best Ranger Competition and going to Jumpmaster school. If he gives me permission, I’ll post a photo of him here, pushing somebody out of an airplane, taken recently by an Air Force photographer and included on his Facebook page.

The end of the holidays means another semester is starting at MU. The syllabus & assignments for one of my classes were posted yesterday, and I expect the other class will have the same available in a day or two. This term I’ll be taking “Qualitative Research Methods” (J-8008) and “Introduction to Digital Media” (IS LT 7361). Since I didn’t do very well last term, I’ll be doubling down this semester to get a couple of As to resurrect my GPA, so don’t expect very many updates on this blog for the next few months, sorry.

OK! We finally got all the paperwork straigtened out and new tags on the RV, so we’re on the way south at last. It’s really frustrating to sit around two weeks after getting into the RV, burning through our travel budget while we’re still in town, all because of some bureaucratic screw-up, but that’s what we’ve done. It is quite a relief to have that over with.

The full story is that two years ago, when we bought our house in St. Joe and registered the vehicles there, the license bureau apparently did something wrong and although we got tags for both the car and the RV, neither one of them ever actually was registered. They have a law saying your title must be held by the state of Missouri, but both our vehicles had been originally titled and registered in other states: the car in Florida (where I was living when we got married, and where we traded in my old car for the little Z-car), and the RV in Kansas, because Phil’s old RV had been registered there and when we traded that in we didn’t have a permanent address and just used Phil’s sister’s.

Last year, when the 1-year car tag expired, we went through some contortions to get the title moved to Missouri, but of course we weren’t going anywhere. It still took inordinately long for what should have been accomplished with a fax or two (the leinholder has to fax a form to Missouri, who then send it to the title-holding state, so they’ll send them the title), but we got it done. The RV had a 2-year tag, so it only expired this Fall. We’d bought the RV in November 2006, so we thought the tag woudn’t expire till end of this month, but I guess we’d gotten the Missouri tags in September because that’s when they were marked for expiration.

Anyway, the people at the Missouri license office were very confused about not being able to find any information in their database about our old tags (as were we), and that started the whole folderol. First, they said we’d have to get the RV safety inspected. Do you know how difficult it is to find somebody who will do an inspection on a vehicle this size? It turns out there’s exactly one place in town (actually just outside of town) who would do it, a tire company. But by the time we got that done the rest of the gears were in motion to deny us new tags. They needed the title before they would budge. Keep in mind that we were already packed up and staying in the RV by then, and had planned to leave the weekend before that Monday but decided to get the new tags first, just to be legal.

I called our lender (USAA Federal Savings Bank) to get their fax number so they could fill out and return the release form, that Missouri would then send to Kansas to get the title. While I was sitting there they faxed it to the bank, and we figured the title would be there in a day or two. So we got a site at our friendly neighborhood RV park, and used the extra day or two to finish cleaning up the house for closing it up, and working on papers for school. But it didn’t come, and it didn’t come…. Finally, this Monday Phil called Kansas to make sure they’d gotten the form and sent the title, but they still hadn’t gotten the request from USAA! So he called USAA, and while they’d received it the previous Monday, they still hadn’t done anything with it! Phil has been doing business with USAA since the 1960s, but never had something like this happen before, where they just fell down completely. There’s always a first time, but why now?

To make matters worse, when Kansas finally got the request faxed from USAA, they just faxed it to Missouri, even though the Missouri office had already filled out their portion. I guess they wanted it faxed to them from Missouri, and getting it from USAA didn’t count. So, Missouri faxed it back, and we just had to wait for Kansas to mail the title (which they are very proud to say is filed electronically in their system, not on paper in a filing cabinet somewhere). Of course, Wednesday was Veterans’ Day, so there was no mail, and it didn’t arrive Thursday, but finally Friday we got a call saying Missouri had received the title and we could finally get our tags. By that time, of course, it was too late to pack up and leave so we stayed one more night.

But now we are driving through Kansas City (around it, actually), on the way to Carthage, where Phil’s cousin Anna Mae, lives). We’ll stay there tonight and hope to see Anna Mae etc., then hot-foot it across Missouri, the Mississippi river, and down the middle of Tennesssee to Marietta, then over to Columbia, SC for a few days. The oldest son of one of Phil’s best friends, Zack, is graduating from Army bootcamp. Benjamin is going to San Antonio after that, to medic school, and then will be in the Reserves while he goes to college back home in Wyoming, then he hopes to go to the Army’s medical school. Anyway, it’s been a couple of years since we’ve seen Zack’s family, and they’re coming down for the ceremony, so it should be a good visit. Then we’ll go back to the Atlanta area, where my older son and his daughter live. We’ll stay there to visit, then go back east to go see Beaufort, SC and Hunter Island lighthouse before heading south to Florida for the holidays. Thanks to all the tag mess, we will not make it down there for Thanksgiving, but if James & Katie won’t be in town for that (they had planned to go to his dad’s), we’ll just have our own turkey-day in Beaufort. If they will stay in town, of course, we can celebrate with them, but either way it’s a good start to the festive time of year, and we are looking forward to it.

Happy trails!

Yep, we’re still in St. Joe. It’s a long story, but to avoid tedium I’ll just mention the high (low) spots. When we took the RV out of storage, we noticed that the tag had expired, so we stayed over till Monday (which was a good idea anyway since I wasn’t finished cleaning out the fridge and doing all the last minute house-closing-up things), and I took all our paperwork to the license bureau. Well, it turns out that they had no record of our ever getting the plates 2 years ago (it was a 2-year license — we weren’t that late renewing!) and the title is still in Kansas. So, rather than ask someone here to go get tags and mail them to us once the title arrives, we decided to just stay since the clerk said it usually only takes a couple of days. That meant moving into the RV park, since we didn’t really want to impose on WalMart’s parking lot for more than one or two nights while we moved stuff from the house to the RV. The title still hadn’t arrived as of today, so we will stay here another two nights, and hope it arrives tomorrow.

So, the Travel Calendar has been adjusted to show the newly revised schedule. We still hope to get to Palm Bay in time for Thanksgiving, but we won’t stop in Nashville as long as we’d planned. The good part of all this is that we’ll be in the Joplin area over the weekend, so have a better chance of seeing more cousins there who work during the week.

At least the weather is decent, if cold. Today is clear and bright and crisp — a perfect Fall day.

Since we’re staying put for longer than originally planned, I’ve dragged out my big computer to work on. Here’s a picture showing the difference between the size of this big iMac and the little netbook I’ve been using for the past couple of days.

The little guy is fine in a pinch, but for serious work of course the big machine is much nicer, and has all my favorite apps on it. Getting to my data isn’t a problem since I keep most of that on an external hard disk I can plug into Phil’s MacBook Pro, and access from the netbook over the local network, but since I’m running Ubuntu Linux on the netbook, the apps don’t work there. I try to save whatever I can in cross-platform formats, like OpenOffice and JPEG/PNG, but there are a few things I really have to do on the Mac, like mindmapping. But that’s a story for my techie blog, not here. It’s enough to say that the netbook works quite well and I’m really happy I got it, especially since I got quite a deal on it from Woot.com, which had them on a one-day special for just under $200! (Full retail price was about $300.) Besides, their website always has some really funny copy, anyway.

So, now I guess I finally need to finish that refrigerator and turn off the water at the house. We’ll get out of here some time, I’m sure!

Oops, ignore that map I posted the other day. Plans have changed. Instead, we will be taking the eastern route this year:

With possible spontaneous variations, the dates and destinations are now posted on our travel calendar.

We had thought about leaving earlier, but between grad school demands, doctor appointments and just plain not being ready, the first of November seems to be the soonest we can get moving this year. It won’t be a moment too soon — the weather here has been pretty nasty already, and we’re ready to go chase the sun.

If all goes according to this plan, we’ll be in Florida in time for Thanksgiving, after doing some serious sight-seeing and visiting with friends & family along the way.

This will be a very short post, since I’m just snatching a few moments away from studying, but I wanted to update our Fall travel plans here. We hope to get started on our snowbird migration by November 1st or so. This is our proposed route: