He was an old man who fished alone in a lobster boat off the Maine coast and he had gone 117 days without taking a crustacean. His luck was not bad, rather his judgment was good (don’t fish the Atlantic in winter). Then he met us and for all I know his luck changed. He is due for a change of luck. Eleven months ago he purchased a new 40’ RV which has now made six trips back to the dealer for repairs. After that he gave up on warranty work (like Van Gogh on his ear) and took his rig to Camping World. Thus we met our buddy from Maine in Foley, Alabama.
The beaches are lovely if desolate. The village of Ocracoke is on the far end of the island away from the free ferry’s dock. (Don’t think you’re going to pedal your cruiser bicycle from ferry to village: that’s a 30 mile round trip.) The village has a dozen restaurants, several souvenir shops, a lighthouse you cannot enter, and a British cemetery where four poor guys sunk by U-boats in WW II will rest until a storm eventually washes the island away.
Some parks advise their visitors to bring lots of insect repellent. Others warn you about extreme winter or summer weather. Hatteras Seashore does none of that, but what the hey, we used to be Tarheels. We know that country. You don’t need to tell us nothin’.
Civil War General J Johnston Pettigrew is buried here. He led one of the three brigades in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, and came back horseless, but unhurt. Two weeks later he was killed in a minor skirmish during Lee’s retreat toward Richmond. Pettigrew, something of a Renaissance Man, was fluent in half a dozen languages, a lawyer, mathematician, fencing master, author, university professor, and soldier, all by the age of 35. And he owned slaves on a farm next to the park.
Kat discovered a neat little Forest Service campground with all the conveniences just south of New Bern (say “Newburn”) NC. New Bern is big enough without being Big. It has a Wal-Mart, a Tractor Supply (for your propane needs), several Laundromats, and two Bojangles biscuit and chicken eateries.
It turned out that Clark and Deb reside in Hilton Head Sun City, a huge development populated by the retired and the long since retired. Del Webb built this and many similar new home subdivisions for seniors all over the warm states. Many were named Sun City;
Our culinary expedition treks on. Amanda and Tim of Watsons Wander blog fame happened to be in the neighborhood, and they invited us over for her famous Company Potato and Roasted Pepper soup to go with some full-time Airstreamer fellowship. The soup was indeed excellent, as was Tim’s local brew, which though quite hoppy, pleased […]
Thursday we bought fifty live Little Neck clams from Bulls Bay Seafood for $3 a dozen. I went to a fair degree of trouble creating a classic Clam Linguine, shells and all, right there atop the pasta. I used bits and pieces of recipes to accommodate missing ingredients, but it turned out more than good enough to serve Salvatore Tessio, may he rest in peace.
Fort Pickens has sun, water, warm winter weather, and well-stocked grocery stores in or near a historic campground with full hook-ups for $10 a night. We have Shelley the camp armadillo, surfers coexisting with surf fishermen (no shots fired yet), plus ospreys, eagles, and willets. Maybe it gets better than this, but I can’t tell you where.
Don’t buy your tickets on-line: there’s a $5 per ducat “service charge” and you can’t tell which seats are shaded and which are in lethal full sun. No, buy them at the box office after you have noticed which foul line already has shade.
The Army made me an infantryman, and motivated me to the point I was slavering to kill old Victor Charles and use his blood as war paint. That motivation evaporated once I got there and noticed that so many of us were going to replace KIAs, or worse.
Beaver Dam campground has just 29 sites, but with so few campers reservations are not really necessary. If you want a lake view, sites 15, 16, and 17 offer the best vistas. We booked 16 and were rewarded within moments of arrival by a flight of white pelicans, and by the time Kat came out with her camera, a bald eagle had wheeled overhead and was already well in the process of moving on.
Ville Platte and Mamou are on the northern edge of crawfish country. If you grow rice it makes sense to raise a few thousand pounds of mudbugs over the winter. After all, crawfish grown on rice are the tastiest.
Onions, peppers and sausages are necessary for gumbo, but the real test of one’s manhood is the chicken chase. 500 plates of gumbo requires maybe 30 chickens to make a hearty one, but if a dozen is all you have that will have to fly.
We both pull our rig pretty well now, but it was not always so. Kat has become an accomplished trailer backer and I have learned how to communicate in ways that will not lead to shoulder bursitis. I can usually eyeball a site and know where and how many levelers to use under the wheels. We’ve mastered use of our generator to preserve battery life while reloading our laptops and phones. Water management has been mastered, and neither of us has crushed a wheel chock in almost two years!
. Kat and Steph raved over their Eggs Atchafalaya featuring poached oeufs with Hollandaise, fried green tomato, and lump Gulf crabmeat. Kevin liked his shrimp and grits, heads and all, ya’ll.
Walter Anderson’s art museum is in downtown Ocean Springs, and although we didn’t go I did Google him. He was quite the watercolorist, and almost as off his bird as old Van Gogh. How off was he? Well, he paid many visits to mental institutions, but escaped many more times than Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. He married a beautiful rich woman but convinced her he was crazy so he could go off and paint landscapes while she supported him. (Crazy like a fox?) He rode out Hurricane Betsy on Horn Island miles out in the Gulf sheltered only by his rowboat.
We have been on the road two years and not yet have I told you about our sweet old dog. Today Pink tells her story. Unlike me, she’s more laconic than loquacious, but she does have a tale to tell. And here she goes.
Airstreamers are a strange tribe. We have an online forum where all things Airstream are hashed out, and occasionally settled. Many of us take perverse pride in how badly we are gouged on repairs and maintenance by RV shops, dealers, and especially Jackson Center ….
On New Year’s Eve we put together a big batch of grillades and grits. This is hard to believe but neither Kat nor I ever had that dish in all the years we lived in New Orleans
On the cloudy days we watched the fog dance with the mountain to the east of Julee’s homestead, played SpotIt and Quirkle. Along the way I came up with an answer to this blog’s lead-in question: Home for Christmas is where
Lex crossed the big waters to visit me a couple of summers in Louisiana, way back when we were teenagers. He soon introduced me to the joys of bovine bestiality and short-term car theft.
I am seeking your consent to present you as the next of kin of my late client; you bear the same last name. I will help you contact my bank and apply for the funds as next of kin. We must act swiftly to beat the deadline escheat date.
Our readers prefer to see ads for high-quality and hard-to-find stuff, like Katherine Hepburn dvds, live Maine lobsters packed in seaweed, and leather bound sets of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. But the link to our sponsor will bring to you a product search engine. Voila! You can find and order out-of-print books, Wagyu beef, Berkshire pork, a Braun immersion blender, and anything else you might think of.
So what will we dine on today? I found some nice lox, and will use some of it in deviled eggs with capers and sour cream, and the rest on sesame cracker canapés with Boursin Chives cheese. The skies will clear this afternoon, and after a late lunch, the trio will take a short walk around the campground. We’ll return ready for dessert.
When it’s this cold nobody wants to go out, or go anywhere. So I try new recipes and try to keep old Pink from becoming too bored. She has, for a dog, a first-rate mind. And I can tell when she’s bored: she wants to walk far too frequently for her biological needs and whines for me to set up the screen door so she can see out. It’s a sad thing, it really is. I hate feeling cold; Pink hates boredom. So we compromise.
China has sold, to their own people, 1) fake milk powder as baby formula (causing heads to swell and bodies to wither), 2) soy sauce made from human hair, 3) vegetables with high concentrations of insecticides, and 4) poultry dead before slaughter from Avian flu.
Bernheim Forest is a research and art arboretum, established with funding from the founder of the I. W. Harper Bourbon distillery. They emphasize sustainability, partly because the forest was planted over an abandoned strip mine (what’s less sustainable than an open-pit coal mine?)
We’re enjoying another slow week in Campbellsville, and I have decided to read or re-read some classics. It is possible to experience too many of the great books too soon in life. I suspect that I did. … I say this because forty or so years ago Gatsby did not impress me.
. It’s probably better to be a disabled veteran on Memorial Day than to be a needy Christian on a Sunday afternoon. My hypothesis: churchmen (and church ladies) are less likely to give when they gave earlier in the day.
Campbellsville is on the edge of their flyway south. I’ve seen several lately, some stopping to sip clover nectar and others to drink water after a rain. They are here today and gone tomorrow: a metaphor for human life.
You thought Lebanon was a mostly Muslim country where they don’t raise no pigs? It is, but this one ain’t. This Lebanon is 20 miles up the road from Campbellsville. Country ham is an acquired taste, and like chitlins’, its odiferous boiling creates that rarest of occasions when the flies on your window screens struggle to get out.
You’d expect tasting booths everywhere, but they all were locked up behind a fence with a cover charge at the gate. Pay the cover and each booth demands a couple more bucks for jus’ a lil’ tase. Few visitors went into that Spirit Garden, possibly on account of the early hour rather than the profit motive, or else they were Baptists who didn’t want to be seen by their neighbors.
In camp we saw three aged rebels (50’s to 60’s?) cooking meat over a wood fire. They were using a steel grill. The meat bore a suspicious resemblance to prime beef. I asked the mess sergeant (the guy wearing three red stripes wielding tongs) “Is that ‘possum or ‘coon?”
The highlight of C’ville’s history occurred in 1864 when elements of the Confederate Army burned the county courthouse which Union troops had occupied as a barracks. The bluecoats must have all been up in Lebanon at the nearest liquor store….
He turned off the electric lights and suddenly it was literally dark as a tomb. You’ve never seen darkness like this. Then he flicked on a Bic lighter, cautioning us not to look at the flame, but to look up and all around. Sure enough, eyes adjusted and one could make out rocks, pits, walls, and floors.
We have had cool A/C every night since Colorado. We paid $15 or less per night at all but one camp, and that was in high cost Dallas where we had to stop for repairs. Our average for those stays, not counting free days hooked up to Bomba the Jungle Boy’s shore power, is under $11 a day.
There are perhaps a dozen spots, each with electricity, set right next to a gem of a baseball field, the home of the Lyons Lions. It’s 350’ to dead center, with dugouts and a dark green batter’s eye…. There’s a community dump station and a potable water source, plus ample shade. You could stay there for up to two weeks, but ‘Hey, Toto: We are in Kansas.”
We lost Robin Williams today. Despite his long and wonderful career brightening the lives of so many others, he could not find enough light in his own life to keep the candle burning. I’ve experienced mild depression, and felt so bad I couldn’t get out of bed for days. Severe depression had a hold on Robin, and it somehow convinced him that not being was preferable to living under that terrible condition.
Robin Williams seemed to have a solid grip on life. He had a bit of religion – “I’m an Episcopal, it’s Catholic Lite. We do all the rituals, but with half the guilt.” He had good friends, lots of them. His first prime time television series was with Richard Pryor. Williams went to Julliard with Christopher Reeve. He promised Reeve that he’d cover his medical bills, for life, and did. Not long after Reeve’s equestrian accident, Williams came to visit him in his hospital room, in disguise as a Russian doctor assigned to his case to perform a colonoscopy. Reeve later admitted “That’s when I realized that I would be all right.”
Williams became a cocaine addict along with the only actor of any note to perform before an audience of just Kat, Jackson, and an unnamed guy from Illinois. I’m talking about John Belushi, on Bourbon Street after doing Saturday Night Live circa 1976. Belushi’s demise helped Williams quit coke, but “So did the grand jury.” Later in life Robin did stand-up with Billy Crystal, and co-starred in Waiting for Godot at the Lincoln Center with Steve Martin. Wouldn’t you love to have seen that one! Does Netflix have that on a disc?
I never saw his Mork character on Happy Days. I didn’t watch Mork and Mindy either, but I remember “Nan-oo, nan-oo!. I just didn’t see a lot of television back then. But Williams must have been good. Between my infantry training for that war, and his great performance as Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam! I could smell the place. After seeing Dead Poets Society I wished I had been English major, money be damned. And I remembered, with smiles and tears, the three educators who had made a difference in my life, and at times came close to being John Keating, “Oh Captain, my Captain!” the new instructor of poetry at Welton Academy.
He was wonderful in The Fisher King, and a lot of people really enjoyed Good Will Hunting where he won some long overdue recognition in an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
But he was human. His three wives helped him spend every dime, and there was some unfortunate overlap between them, as in each leading to the demise of the one before. He was mostly sweetness and light, but you can’t do standup without hurling a few F-bombs. Play this after the chirrens are asleep. It’s a side of Robin Williams you may have missed. It is also a fine explanation of why I gave up golf.
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He had a bit of religion – “I’m an Episcopal, it’s Catholic Lite. We do all the rituals, but with half the guilt.” He had good friends, lots of them. His first prime time television series was with Richard Pryor. Williams went to Julliard with Christopher Reeve.
A rufous hen took over our feeder for several days and did her best to drive off every other hummingbird looking for a drink. She was a normal-sized bird at first, but after hogging the sugar for several days, she became noticeably plump. She got so fat and bellicose that we named her Cheney, after our former Vice-President.
Overlooks are everywhere along the highway and you’ll see amazing beauty from all of them. The air is so wonderfully clean you may see rainfall and lightning strikes on mountains fifty miles away. My favorite sights are those sub-alpine lakes hundreds to thousands of feet below those tundra overlooks. Through binoculars you see that some are lakes with lillypads and trout working the bugs, and some others are just blue pools of snowmelt, cold and sterile as an operating room.
We were frequent tent campers when our kids were little. Our rule was: forget about the weather; if you go, you stay. We had a day just like this in Colorado back in ’91. We ventured outside only to cook, spending most of the day inside our old Suburban. I prepared scrambled eggs, canned corned beef hash, and skillet toast on a two-burner Coleman stove wearing a poncho to keep out the light but steady rain.
After two weeks in Salida we have moved north to the outskirts of Rocky Mountain National Park. Our campground is one of those wonderful old ones built by the CCC 80 or so years ago. It is a Forest Service park, and while not free, Camp Dick (in the Roosevelt National Forest) costs only $9.50 […]
the weather was perfect, and had I felt the urge, I coulda got my face painted for only $10. I thought of having it done for this blog, but what the hey, to paraphrase the immortal Morty Sline, “This blog is yet to gross Dollar One.” Ixnay on the face painting.
My choice for best of show was from the genre of – to my astonishment – photo realism. Typically those skilled at making paint on canvas resemble a good photo lack creativity, and if all you can do is paint something that looks like a huge digital photograph, yo, twig to this, brother: the world already has cameras. But this fellow was clever and inventive in his choice of subjects and in his execution of them.
“You bought eight packs of cigarettes and I only got two!” “Well, divide four into eight, you big dope.” “It still ain’t right … I need ‘em more than the rest of you.” Or “We have $134, two cans of Vienna sausage, and we’re three states from home!”
Life on the Blue Highways 