A Brief Snowbird Adventure - Lessons From the Road

I’d like to extend a round of applause to all of you bloggers who somehow manage to post while on the road.  I truly can’t imagine how you do it.  I’ve often written posts ahead of time and set them to publish on future dates, but I’ve haven’t yet managed to draft and publish a post while we’ve been on the road and on the run.  This time, I went so far as to put my notes and photos on my laptop – and that’s as far as I got.  So, no post for the past three weeks and a well-deserved tip of my hat to those of you who are both road warriors and road writers.

Last year, Alan and I sold the second of two rental properties we owned.  For the first time since we had both escaped the workforce, we were truly free from responsibilities.  Winter travel had always been problematic for a variety of reasons, and this new-found freedom allowed us to enjoy the festivities of the Christmas season in both Pigeon Forge and Nashville, Tennessee, early in December.  Just recently, it also allowed us to escape the cold winter weather that plagues our area of the northeast.  In happy anticipation of wearing shorts and t-shirts, we set out to visit Alan’s brother and sister-in-law, Tom and Joan, in Florida.  We tacked on a few days in Savannah, Georgia, and a few more days on Chincoteague Island in Virginia, and we were looking forward to our first adventure as snowbirds.  Wow!  Did we learn a lot!

A Rendezvous in Daytona Beach

This post represents another installment in The Big Switcheroo series – tales from last spring’s epic journey from the northeast to the Florida Keys and back – involving family, friends and an extraordinary range of adventures.

Throughout the entirety of our marriage, Alan and I have maintained a constantly evolving Travel Bucket List.  When travel was restricted by our employment and the need to plan around an allotted number of vacation days, we added additional items to that list much more frequently than we checked any off.  Alan and I (happily) share the same tastes in travel, and our adventures over the course of 40+ years together have been eclectic, to say the least.  While we have certainly traveled to many places for many reasons, National and State Parks have always represented the majority of entries on that Bucket List, sharing space with tourism hot spots like Myrtle Beach, Disney World, Virginia Beach, Pigeon Forge, Alaska, Hawaii and the Gulf Coast of Florida, as well as quieter, less popular vacation destinations.  As time went on, more and more of the “must see” National Parks were checked off the Bucket List, so that by the end of 2017, the first full year that both of us were retired from the workforce, the scope of our travel plans widened to the point where the focus was not so much, “What’s the next National Park?,” but more like “Where shall we go next and what shall we do along the way?”  Suddenly, the possibilities seemed endless.

Nashville, Tennessee - An Excellent Start to our Music City Adventure!

This post represents another installment in The Big Switcheroo series – tales from last spring’s epic journey from the northeast to the Florida Keys and back – involving family, friends and an extraordinary range of adventures.  The photos included with this post were all taken at Seven Points Campground in Hermitage, Tennessee.

Westward, ho!  The stretch of blacktop between Bush’s Visitor Center near Dandridge, Tennessee, and Nashville would mark the westernmost leg of last spring’s roundabout journey to Florida for us.  As we traveled through eastern Tennessee, we would love to have stopped to meet Joe and Helen Bruner but, alas, the fates would not allow it.  (Joe blogs over at Easin’ Along which is accessible from the list of My Favorite Blogs to the right.)  As it so very often happens with those of us enthralled with the RV lifestyle, Joe and Helen were off on an RV adventure of their own, and we had to settle for waving hello to their empty home as we drove on through to Nashville.

A Tribute to Friendship

Today is opening day of trout season in New York and it’s a bittersweet day for me.  Even though we live just a hop, skip and a jump from a well-known trout stream here in the northeast, I don’t fish, and the season itself doesn’t impact me in any way other than the fact that I’ll notice a number of vehicles parked at the various access points to the stream.  The reason it’s significant is because it was always a special day for my friend Bob.  Bob might possibly have been the first blogger on earth since he was on the job long before the term “blogging” was coined.