Kat’s TravelBlog

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:

This weekend we got the RV out of storage and headed off on a short trip to Columbia, Missouri, home of the Univ. of Missouri’s School of Journalism. One of the required courses for my Master’s program is to attend a one-hour, weekend-long seminar on campus, and this was the time I chose to do it.

This is the outside of the Reynolds Journalism Institute, and the sallyport that marks the traditional entrance to the J-School and historic old university quad:

The seminar, with 15 students and almost as many faculty participating, was a great success, and while quite intense was also very enjoyable. Meeting classmates and professors was the highlight of the session, of course. As well as those directly involved in making presentations to the class, I had made advance arrangements to meet a few others. It was a very productive weekend.

It finally happened. Phil bent over to pick something up in the kitchen (which has a very unforgiving ceramic tile floor), and his iPhone slipped out of his pocket. This was the result:

He’s been almost as broken up over it as the phone’s screen itself.

All is not lost, though. We were planning to go to Kansas City this week anyway for a doctor’s appointment, so I made a reservation at the Apple Store to get the poor thing fixed (replaced, actually). While the screen is shattered, the phone does still operate, so we were able to back up his data and forward his calls to my iPhone. He’s using mine until his gets replaced, and I’ll just get by with Skype.

Ah, technology!

That’s what the nurse advised after the x-rays showed I had not in fact broken my leg or kneecap. Coming up the stairs earlier this week I was almost at the top when I came around the corner landing and something went “crack” in my knee. I collapsed in pain and couldn’t put my weight on my left leg. Phil had to help me the rest of the way up the stairs.

Apparently I’d rotated my knee a bit too far rounding the turn, and either sprained it or a tendon got twisted around or something, according to the nurse practitioner. It’s getting better now after several days of following her advice and taking big doses of ibuprofen and staying off my feet. Friday I was even able to walk a few feet without the crutch or too much pain, so I guess I won’t need to go to an othropedist after all. I’ll continue to take it easy for awhile until it’s all better.

This episode was inconvenient, but Phil has helped as much as he could, running errands (I can’t drive the car with a clutch when my leg is acting up) and generally taking care of me. He’s a sweetie! Being mostly confined to my chair isn’t that bad, though. I’ve used the time to get ready for the Fall semester, which starts next week. The course syllabi were posted Monday, so I now have all my reading materials collected and assignments loaded into my database and (computer) file folders in an organized way, and have started on some of the lessons already. Being organized is going to be a real necessity this term, since I’m taking a pretty heavy class load. One course in particular, called Mass Media Seminar, is reputed to be a killer, with a lot of reading and reporting. From the looks of what I’ve seen so far, though, it will also be very interesting, so I ought to do fine. The first week’s assignment is to explore the vast online resources available at the MU & J-School libraries, including a bunch of really fascinating databases and full-text collections of journals. The hardest part of this class may be just in staying focused on what I’m supposed to be doing, instead of getting lost in browsing all that information.

We’re also making plans for our autumnal travels. Yep, it’s approaching that time of year when the snowbirds will head south for the winter. After a week in Columbia, MO for a weekend seminar in mid-September, and a few scheduled checkups in October, we will close up the house, stock up the RV and start out toward the east Florida coast to share the holidays with family and friends.

What are your plans for the Fall? Will we be in the same places? Drop me an email or tweet me, or leave a comment and let’s see if we can get together!

This summer is really going fast! If you’ve been reading my tech blog, you already know about the Online Journalism class I took online. I not only feel like I learned a great deal, I met a bunch of great people and even got an A for my time and trouble. Several of my classmates have joined an email list I set up to help us keep in touch, and about half the people from the class will be taking an on-campus seminar next month, so we’ll be meeting face-to-face then. This outcome seems very appropriate for a class that spent a lot of time discussion community-building.

That brings us to the “travel” part of this travel blog. While we have just parked the RV this summer, next month we’ll take it out and drive to Columbia, Missouri, home of the University of Missouri School of Journalism for a week.

After that, we’ll return to St. Joseph for about a month full of appointments and school work, then close up the house for the winter and head south. School starts again for me on the 24th, and I’m taking three full classes in addition to the weekend seminar, so it will be a busy time. But then, we seem to keep busy no matter what.

Happy summertime, everyone. We’re still alive, if a bit wilted from all the heat. The temperatures and humidity have been fierce here for the past week or two, with heat indices over 100°F. Thank goodness for air conditioning, but I shudder to think what our electric bill will be this month.

School is going reasonably well, although I felt compelled to drop one of the two courses I was taking because with everything else that’s happening I couldn’t keep up with it. The one I’m still in is going quite smoothly, though. I have an A in there so far, and it is very enjoyable. There is a lot of back and forth on the class bulletin board, which makes it interesting, and since the topic is online journalism, we’re all supposed to blog and tweet, which is fun.

If you read my other blog, you know we got new iPhones, which is also skads of fun. Phyllis should be here this weekend, and we plan to go down to Kansas City for a family get-together on the 4th of July. So we’re having a good summer. I hope you all are, too!