Travels with Gunther and Kara

Well, I got nothing else to talk about so I decided to talk a bit about Neil’s bike rides. This is partially to give me something to write about and partially to allow him easier access later to where he rode when and how far.

The genesis of this idea was stolen from a friend travel blogger at http://whatsnewell.blogspot.com. Clark and Elaine (who is known in the blog as TLE for The Lovely Elaine) are retired full timers like us who live full time in a 1982 Newell RV…this is a Class A motorhome with no slides and simple enough systems that Clarke can do most of the maintenance himself. He records and reports on his rides and Neil thought it might be a good idea for him to do the same.

He’s currently riding a … Synapse road bike that he got about a year or two before we hit the road from the REI store in Fairfax Center near our old homestead in Fairfax VA. Before he bought it he test drove a Trek Madone…but at over $6,000 decided it was a much better bike than he needed so he downgraded to the cheaper (although not cheap…about $1,000 was the price) Cannondale. It’s a magnesium aluminum frame with a carbon fiber front fork, 18 speed standard road bike. Over the years he’s ridden it probably 5,000 or 6,000 miles  and other than routine maintenance on chain, sprocket, tires, brakes, and cables it’s been pretty solid mechanically. One thing he learned way back when he started riding a lot was that on a road bike with those really skinny tires it’s essential to buy Kevlar protection strips for the tires to prevent punctures due to the skinny tires. Kevlar protection strips are…naturally…made of Kevlar, the same stuff they make bullet proof vests out of and are simple strips about 3/4 of an inch wide. One mounts the tire on the rim, inserts the Kevlar strip into the tire outer circumference and then inserts the tube so that the Kevlar strip is between the tube and the tire rather than being between the tube and the rim. This essentially gives you a nail/glass proof layer of protection between the tire and the tube…he used to get punctures about once a month but since starting to use the Kevlar strips only gets 2-3 a year. Since a puncture means you’re stuck on the side of the road putting a patch on the tube for 40 minutes or so they’ve more than paid for themselves over the years.

He noticed at the end of 2015 that he only rode 778 miles in 2015…sort of a down year for him mileage-wise but since riding on our trip to Alaska was pretty much impossible. He’s already up to 402 miles for 2016 and it’s only mid February…averaging 16.1 miles, 15.21 mph, and 1:02:15 on his rides so far this year with a fastest speed of 29.92 mph…that was going down the only significant hill here in Fort Myers with a tailwind. Over the years he’s averaged about about 16 mph…so he’s a little down pace wise this year but it’s been a really windy winter and he is trying to up his average miles per ride.

Let’s talk about his riding routes here in Fort Myers…unfortunately there aren’t very many to choose from but he’s developed a series of variations on 2 basic routes you can go from Seminole Campground…either east or west are the only real options. 

The first route he found is what he calls the Pritchett Loop…leaving the campground one goes out to Bayshore Avenue then heads west for 100 yards…turning north onto Pritchett Parkway. This wends north and west on a relatively deserted road before intersecting Slater Road right as it crosses I-75…he then turns north for a couple of miles, then heads back east on Nalle Grade Road and south on Nalle Road which gets him back to Bayshore about a half mile east of the campground. This is an overall ride of about 12.5 miles…and he rode this one almost exclusively the first winter we were here.

Wanting/needing something different he found what he calls the Eco Center Loop. For this one he heads east on Bayshore about a mile then turns north past the Eco Center treehugger center and then back east on a road that parallels Bayshore heading east. That road continues out to US-31 which is the highway up towards Arcadia. There are a couple of north/south roads between Bayshore and the parallel road and he’s discovered that by looping north and south he can make sort of a figure 8 shaped route that varies between 12 and 18 miles depending on how many times he does the north/south part as each of those adds about 1.75 miles to the overall route. Sometimes he continues across US-31 onto a road named North Road which heads out towards the Franklin Locks on the Caloosahatchee River but doesn’t like that way much as it doesn’t have much of a shoulder and the speed limit for cars is 55…so unless it’s a mostly car free time of the day he doesn’t go that way much. Alternatively…sometimes he continues up 31 a ways before turning around…it’s also a 55 mph road with more traffic but has a nice 8 foot or so wide shoulder and he actually feels safer on it than on North Road. Overall though…he prefers not to go on either of those options much as there is traffic and the bike always loses any interaction with cars:-)

Lately he’s added a couple of modifications to the Pritchett Loop that get him up to either 19 or 22 miles depending…the first one he continues west on Bayshore about 5 miles…there’s a nice bike lane on this road before turning north onto a road named Hart Road past the Elks Lodge. From there he wanders north through a housing development before coming back out onto Del Prado where he turns back east and then intersects Slater Road about a mile south of where the original Pritchett Loop hits Slater…then continues up Slater and on around the Pritchett Loop clockwise. The second modification continues on farther west on Bayshore past Hart to Tamiami Trail (US-41)…then north before turning back east on Del Prado…this intersects with the Hart Road modification and then on east to Slater and then around the Pritchett loop.

So…how does he figure out where to ride? Good question. First is how he feels today, how long he has to ride and how far he wants to go. Second consideration is which direction si the wind coming from…one would thing that since most of these are essentially large rectangles that eventually you’ll have a downwind leg but he’s discovered that isn’t necessarily the case…sometimes it’s upwind both ways. Given a choice though…he prefers to have the downwind section towards the end…it’s just easier that way…and most of the routes are loops rather than out an back as he really finds the latter boring. Third choice is what he hasn’t done recently…given all the other considerations he’ll go the way he hasn’t been recently all other things being equal…which of course they’re usually not. Mostly the wind here is from the west and/or north so heading east on the Eco Loop means it’s upwind on the way back…so that usually is reserved for shorter days or the occasional wind from the east day.

Today he did the Tamiami Pritchett Loop extension…21.63 miles in 1:22:12…average 15.79 mph and max speed of 20.74 mph…burning 1216 calories.

He uses an app on his iPhone named Cyclemeter…it keeps track of all this stuff and uploads/emails/tweets it for him along with putting it up on a web site so he can click a link and look at it later. Here’s a sample output…http://cyclemeter.com/a1530d9b4f2c2577/Cycle-20160217-1045.

You may not be interested in this at all…and I probably won’t bore you with all the details again but will put some info into my posts so he’ll have stuff to look at later if he gets bored and wants to do statistics or sumetin.

OK…after all that I owe you a couple of other things.

I mentioned a week or so ago that eaglet E8 had been removed from the nest on 2/9 due to some fishing line wrapped around his legs…he was freed, declared healthy and returned to the nest on 2/12 so all is well. Both E7 and E8 are eating well and both Harriet and her mate M15 are feeding them daily. The eaglets are 20 and 22 days old today and both are eating and growing pretty quickly…they should fledge in another 50 days or so.

Ok, onto a couple of images Neil found on the web this week…

Here’s a kid who got good grades for effort on his test…but the teacher didn’t like the answers.

Coming in from our former next door neighbor Tom we have this startling development about Chinese Submarines.

I sort of thought that was the point of a submarine…but I’m not a naval expert either. Neil is though…and he agrees with me that this headline was probably written by Captain Obvious.

Then there was this giant dog.

And our biggest fears about turing 100 years old…we can’t play Lego any more…bummer.

Finally…Marilyn really hasn’t aged well…but then she is 89 years old.

Cyas.

Well, it’s been a little more interesting the past week or so. Neil won the  drink of the day at the Elks 2 times last week and then we served as cashier and doorman for the Friday Night Fish Fry at the lodge as well. Sold another 112 meals putting about 1,000 bucks into the coffers of the lodge and maybe 600-700 after paying expenses…with another 40something bucks into the Tip basket which goes for the Volunteer Appreciation Meal later on in the spring…hopefully before we leave on April 15. 

Connie’s really been putting in the hours at her job for NVCC both this pay period and last…it’s the busy time of the year with her trying to get clinical sites arranged for 3 classes for the spring and summer. She’s actually going to run out of hours this pay period before the end of the period…no telling whether she’ll actually stop working or not.

Neil heard back from Ann and Roy Brody who are running the NHOG (New Horizons Owners Group) rally in Chattanooga in mid May…he had offered to do a presentation on “how to fix your broken slide bolts when they break” and will be adding a few other relatively common maintenance items that can be easily accomplished if one has even average mechanical skills and save yourself some money. Beyond that…Connie’s been working hard on finding campsites for our upcoming travel season…Neil got the route all laid out and she’s picking campsites and verifying that we’re in each place long enough to see stuff but not so long we run out of things we want to do.

Other than that…pretty much nuttin’ goin’ on. Neil continues to whittle down his winter maintenance list…all the big stuff is done except he has a box of photos that he needs to scan…these are all from the pre-digital camera days so it’s a matter of just repetitively scanning the prints into jpeg files for use online or otherwise.

He also had to buy himself a new Macbook Pro laptop…the old one died on him. It’s been periodically failing to wake from sleep ever since it was new…he always thought it had crashed and just rebooted and didn’t worry about it. Turns out that it’s actually a video problem for which there’s an extended repair program even though it’s out of warranty. He found out by accident last week that it was just the screen not coming up but the computer itself was still running so he could remote control it from his iPad. A little research on google revealed the existence of the repair extension program…so he ordered the shipping box to send it in for repair. However…it takes like 2 weeks and he didn’t want to be out of a computer that long. So taking that into account…along with the old one being 4 years old and having all the letters worn off the key…he just bought himself a new one from the local Apple store. Shipped the old one off today and assuming they fix it he’ll just put it on Craigs List and sell it for whatever a 4 year old MBP is worth and use the money to defray the cost of the new one a little. 

We went over to Gail and Frank’s house (friends from the Elks Lodge) last Saturday…for a Just for the heck of it party. Gail made way too much food…Frank dragged out way too many different kinds of liquor and a good time was had by all. We were almost the last ones that left and headed out at the late hour of 2030…us retired people don’t stay out too late any more I guess.

A couple cute photos we found on the web this week.

Perspective is very important.

Ya woulda thunk that the prophet would know about these things.

And for our friends up in the north land…be glad ya ain’t here. I know there’s a train track under there on the North Dakota plains somewhere.

Gotta tell ya…grand baby Alex is getting pretty smart. The other day while his granny who watches him during the day was in the kitchen…he grabbed her phone and called his grand dad…he knew who he wanted to talk to.

Cyas.

Hiya…Kara here. Since Gunther didn’t have much to say about our ongoing winter stop here in North Fort Myers I figgered I should try to edumacate ya’ll just a bit. Besides…I wuz bored.

Let’s ponder the question of “What’s the fastest manmade object ever?”

Like many of you…I had long thought based on reading it both on the web and in other credible media sources that the fastest objects ever created by mankind was Voyager I which was launched way back in 1977…it’s now past the outer reaches of the solar system in interstellar space and is traveling at 38,610 mph. This was just something I’ve known for a long time it seems like. Then out of the blue…into my email pops a reference to an article about a nuclear powered manhole cover…so I read the reference article and sure enough…it claims that the story is true and that it went down like this.

Back in the early days of nuclear warhead testing…everything was tested above ground…which as you know leaves a lot to be desired as it allows the immediate radiation of the blast to go out and do radiation things to nearby people and/or wildlife. In addition there’s that whole pesky radioactive fallout problem. Short tangential note…most people think that radiation and contamination are the same thing but they are two distinctive things. Radiation is stuff like gamma rays, neutrons, and alpha particles and contamination or fallout is normal stuff that is penetrated by the radiation…this results in what nuclear scientists call activation where the normally non radioactive dirt sucks up a gamma or neutron and gets turned into something that will decay radioactively. It’s a poor analogy…but think of it like poo and smell…the smell is similar to the radiation and the poo is the stuff that sticks to your shoe when you walk through the cow pasture.

Anyway…due to the radiation and fallout problems those smart scientists wondered if they could do underground testing instead…thereby keeping the radiation from getting out as it’s attenuated by the dirt and the radioactivity from getting out as it’s buried…well, last least as long as the blast doesn’t open up the surface which is usually the case. The problem is that back in the early days they set off lots of warheads to study how they went off, what sort of particles they produced and other weapons related topics…so they weren’t sure how their instrumentation would work for underground tests or if they needed to build something different. Being good engineers…they decided to conduct some tests…and came up with a series of tests under an operation called Plumbbob. Two thirds or so through the 29 warhead testing series they had a warhead named Pascal-A where they bored a 4 foot diameter 500 foot deep hole and put a small nuclear warhead (well, it was small as nukes go but in real terms was pretty darned big at a yield of 55 tons of TNT). Leaving the hole open they backed away and set it off…resulting in the world’s largest Roman Candle as blue flames rushed out of the open hole. Their instrumentation seemed to work OK though…so they went on and built a larger 300 ton warhead (or so they thought) named Pascal-B.

For Pascal-B they decided to cap the hole since some of the radiation and radioactive fallout came out the shaft…see the world’s largest Roman Candle above. So they lowered the warhead to the bottom of their 500 foot deep shaft, plugged the shaft with a 5 foot thick concrete plug, and welded a steel plate 4 feet in diameter and 4 inches thick to the top of the shaft…the plate weighed about 1,900 pounds. They weren’t sure whether the cap would stay on so they aimed a 160 frame per second movie camera at the plate with a vertical field of view at the plate of about 1/4 of a mile or 1,320 feet. Backing further away than they did for Pascal-A…they again set it off. Just a small amount of smoke and debris were visible coming out of the shaft so they declared the test a success…and went back to the lab to review the film.

Unfortunately…on review of the film it turned out that it showed them exactly nothing. In one frame the cover is there, intact, and no visible evidence of the detonation at the surface is visible…in the next frame 1/160 of a second later the plate is just gone…analysis of the top of the shaft later revealed that the plate was gone. No trace of the plate or the concrete plug which was about 10 feet from the warhead was ever found.

So think about this…what you have here is a nuclear powered potato gun. A 500 foot long 4 foot diameter barrel aiming straight up and set off 300 tons equivalent (it was actually more depending on which scientific analysis of the test you read on the web…it’s a deep rathole:-) of TNT at the bottom. The temperature and immediate radiation of the blast vaporizes the concrete into plasma (really hot gas) which then expands up the barrel toward the cap. Naturally the welded down cap pops off and is propelled upward.

Now remember that the camera was 160 frames per second which means that since the cap was visible in one frame and gone in the next it went a quarter mile in 1/160 of a second. Doing the math this means the cap was doing at least 144,000 mph when it departed the top of the shaft…or 45 miles per second.

I decided to check this out and did a little googling…and I told you it was a very deep rathole didn’t I…there are numerous web pages on the web dealing with both this test, it’s possible speed, what happened to it, did it get into orbit and tangentially what are the fastest manmade objects.

First off…turns out that Voyager isn’t even close, it’s only in 3rd place at best. Both Helios 1 and Helios 2 which were solar probes in the 1970s achieved higher velocities…142,000 and 157,000 mph respectively as they passed perigee near the sun as they orbited it in elliptical fashion. So so much for Voyager’s relatively pedestrian 38,000 mph.

Following the rathole farther…there’s considerable reason to believe that the 144,000 mph speed of the shaft cap from Pascal-B was a minimum speed and not a maximum speed. Because of the way high speed movie shutters worked back then…the difference between the end of one frame and the beginning of the next could have been as little as 1/320 of a second…which would mean that the cap departed the shaft at up to 288,000 mph. The camera wasn’t fast enough to capture the plate in flight so more precise calculations are impossible…so we’ll stick with the speed of the cap (or manhole cover in internet legend-speak) as minimums. Even the 144,000 number is over 6 times the escape velocity for the earth.

Since no trace of the cap was ever found and it was most likely ejected straight upwards…what happened to it. Four possibilities come to mind from perusing the internet…it went into interplanetary space, it went into orbit, it crashed, or it burned up.

Interplanetary space can’t be ruled out except by inference. Recall (or maybe you don’t recall…but it’s readily googleable) that meteors are traveling at about 66,000 mph as they enter the atmosphere and you know what happens to them, right? They burn up…or at least slow way down so that they crash into the earth. Would 1,900 odd pounds of flat plate steel burn up or maintain enough speed to escape earth’s gravity? Nobody knows. Would the friction/air compression deform the plate into a teardrop shaped and more aerodynamic shape so as to cut down on heating/slowing? Probably but again nobody knows. 

Orbit can pretty much be eliminated as the departure trajectory of straight up (or nearly so depending on how it tumbled) is the wrong direction. Orbital launch trajectories go up and then gradually fall over to the almost horizontal so that the velocity at orbit is parallel to the earth’s surface and hence the orbiting object continually falls around the earth.

Crash…yeah, that coulda happened and just nobody found it but lack of finding it doesn’t provide evidence that it didn’t happen.

Burning up/coming apart is the most likely result from analysis of the pages I found…while it’s initial velocity might have been 45 (or 90 if you buy the 1/320 of a second argument) miles per second…but it surely didn’t stay at that velocity very long. Even in the first half second as it passed through the majority of the atmosphere it slowed down a lot and remember it was doing 2-4 times the speed of a meteor and was transiting much denser portions of the atmosphere…most meteors burn up at >50 miles in altitude.

Some of the rathole even suggested that this was the first object in space…thereby beating out the Soviet Sputnik 1 which was orbited later in 1957…but even Sputnik wasn’t the first object in first, it was just the first orbital object in space. The first object in space…generally defined as being above 100 km or 62 miles in altitude…was the German V2 rocket first launched in the 1940s…they reached 170 miles in altitude before crashing into London and the surrounding area.

If you’re really, really, really bored…here are a couple of links you can look at…but I gotta warn you it’s a deep, deep rathole.

http://savvyparanoia.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/

http://themysteriousworld.com/top-10-fastest-man-made-objects-ever/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#Pascal-A

Personally I found the whole exercise intellectually stimulating, educational as I thought Voyager was the fastest object ever, and interesting reading for an hour or so.

You can thank me for the edumacation later:-)

OK, a couple of funnies for ya and I gotta go.

We have eaglets…two of ‘em. E7 and E8 were born on January 26 and 27 respectively and are now being brooded and fed by Harriet and dad M15. I’m sure that the adults are happy that the rainy weather of the past 2.5 days is over and although it’s cool today in the mid 60s…the sun is out and it’s gotta be a lot warmer for the babies. The eaglets will grow quickly and by the time they fledge 80 days or so into life they’ll be physically as large as M15 at least.

Cyas.

I gotta tell ya…it’s been raining an awful lot since the New Year down here in sunny SW FL. Lots of high wind numbers too…in the previous 3 years we’ve stayed here we’ve had to bring in the awning maybe 3 times total but we’re already up to 3 this year alone and still another 2.5 months to go. We’ve also had at least 2 tornados on the ground near us the past month and another half dozen tornado warnings/watches a bit farther out. They do have some tornados down here in the summer usually…but in the wintertime they’re pretty rare around these parts…I have no idea what’s going on.

Other than the weather…we’ve pretty much just been doing daily life with nothing really important to talk about…about the only different thing is that Harriet and her new beau M15 mated and laid 2 eggs back in mid December and the first one hatched yesterday with the second one apparently in the “imminently hatching” phase. You can check out the progress at the SW Florida Eagle Cam.

Anyhoos…we’ve also been down to the Elks a lot the past couple of weeks…what with chicken on Monday night (we ate once and cashiered another night), Bingo on Tuesday, Connie had her regional meeting down there which had her down on Wednesday and Thursday and fish on Friday (again ate once and cashiering this week). Tacos tomorrow night maybe as well. The good thing is that Neil keeps winning the free drink ticket, they drew his letter L for another free drink one day, and he keeps getting freebies for schlepping empty beer kegs to the back and bringing full ones out. Brews at the Elks are cheap already and all the freebies lower the average cost as well. 

We did get a couple of cute photos comparing human kid Bryan and grand baby Alex yesterday…in both of these Bryan is on the left and Alex on the right at about the same age. I guess it’s pretty clear from these photos that (a) Jen wasn’t foolin’ around with anybody else and (b) Jen, like her mother in law Connie…was just a vessel for the cloning as Neil’s baby picture looks pretty much the same. As Darth Vader would say (cue deep breathy voice here)…”The genes are strong in this one Luke.”

Clearly in this first one each of them got caught (again!) doing something they know they’re not supposed to be doing.

Bryan’s here was taken in our backyard in San Diego I’m pretty sure…his favorite tree is out of frame to the left.

We had Gordon the RV repair guy by earlier in the week…our toilet seal started leaking and since Neil “doesn’t do plumbing” we farmed that job out to him. He did a minor repair job to the underneath of our bedroom near the kingpin…we banged it into the bedrail on BAT in Tennessee of all places…all the way through Alaska with no damage other than the expected minor paint/fiberglass dings on the lower front but in Tennessee we were making a sharp turn in Cove Mountain campground and dropped the inside wheels of the trailer off the pavement and onto the grass…maybe a 2 inch drop but it rocked the rig enough so that with the truck cranked way around to get around the curve the underneath hit the rail. New Horizons sent us a replacement piece…which UPS damaged even though the shipping was more than the cost of the part…but we got it refunded and New Horizons settled up with UPS…Neil was able to rescue enough (about 6 inches) of the twisted into a pretzel shape new part to cut out and replace the damaged piece on the old part. It’s just a trim strip between the main body of the rig and the nose cap…mostly it’s there to cover the seam and keep water out and it looking purdy anyway. The repair doesn’t look nearly as nice as the whole new strip would have looked…but that’s life I guess. One would think that the 8 inch diameter half inch thick cardboard shipping tube that New Horizons packed it in would have survived the package smashing machine…but one would think wrong.

Our travel plans for this season are well underway…we’ve got our route planned out and after leaving here mid April we’ll end up in Chattanooga for the New Horizons Owners Group rally in mid May…then onward via Midlothian VA (grand baby Alex time for grandma) and Manassas VA (dental, eye check for Neil and meet with the financial guys) to upstate NY, Boston, and Boothbay ME to Nova Scotia. We’ll spend 2.5 months up in the Maritimes checking stuff out before returning to the US just before Labor Day…then heading southward again.

Cyas.

We continued our visits with Bill and Linda over the past week…alternating cooking dinners and eating out at a couple of local hangouts…the Nauti Parrot and the Elks Lodge for the fried fish dinner. Neil made a scrumptious scallop dish for us one night out of scallops we hauled back from Alaska and Linda really outdid herself last night with a grilled pork tenderloin and baked taters. We polished off the entire thing and then had Italian Wedding Cake from the Publix supermarket bakery…I tell ya Neil slaved over the hot stove for hours making that thing:-)

Last night was the National Championship football game between Alabama and Clemson…and as expected the Tide came out on top again. We definitely won the fourth quarter and while Clemson’s quarterback threw for a bunch of yards and a few touchdowns…at the end our D was just a little better than their offense was. Add in that Clemson really had no answer for our Heisman winning back Derrick Henry;they stopped him on some plays but he ended up with 158 yards and three scores…and the 3 long passes for 2 scores to our tight end and we came out on top 45-40 and it was actually 45-33 until Clemson scored in garbage time at the end of the game. Henry’s third score with under 2 minutes in the game and a near 100 yard kickoff return for a score earlier in the 4th quarter were the difference.

The bookies had it just about right…the line on the game was Bama by 7 and we won by either 5 or 12 depending on whether you count the  garbage time score. We’ve got a couple of jerks at the Elks that were all over being Michigan State fans last week and Clemson fans this week…so Connie and Neil are going to Bingo tonight in full Tide regalia just to rub it in. We promise to be nice about it…not.

It’s kinda nice to have another football season end with the Tide on top…and talk about first world problems, here’s one for ya.

Bill and Linda headed off this morning for Tampa to see the RV Show there and also a couple of old friends. Then they’ll head generally back home to NC…we’ll see them again in mid May at the New Horizons Owners Group (NHOG) rally in Chattanooga…and depending on their caravan schedule for the Canadian Maritimes we may cross paths while we’re up there separately from the caravan.

Couple funnies for ya today.

Neil found this list on the web as well last week. We’re big fans of NCIS…Gibbs actually started as a bit character on an earlier program named JAG before his character was spun off into his own show. Ya know how Gibbs is always quoting “the rules”? Well, here they are…somebody compiled them for us.

Anyhoos…that’s about it for now. Just wanted to post something so ya’ll would know we’re still alive.

Cyas.

We’ve been hanging out with our friends Bill and Linda the last couple of days…they arrived on New Years Day and came over for some grilled Polish Sausage from Delta Meats up in Alaska and football. We grilled, chatted, ate and polished the evening off with some caramel pecan brownies that Neil made.

Saturday they came over again and we did some work on both our 5ver and then went over and did some work on theirs. Replaced door locks on both, fixed a bad water valve on ours; and took a look at their sticking bathroom door but decided we didn’t have the right tool (a plane) to properly fix it. Neil and Bill did talk about what he needed to do but he’ll have to get some help from a woodworker friend back up at their home in NC. After that we had some grilled steaks and the rest of the brownies over at their rig which is about a mile east of us in Upriver Campground.

Sunday afternoon they came over again and Neil made some gumbo…he had used the remains and bone from our Christmas Honey Baked Ham to make some excellent stock. A little onion, celery and bell pepper, some flour and olive oil to make a nice roux…a couple of sliced up Andouille sausages…and then added the stock, some extra chicken stock…and a couple of tablespoons of file powder of course since it wouldn’t be gumbo without file…and let it simmer awhile. Served over rice with some nice Merlot and ice cream for dessert and it was pretty good.

Monday we had arranged to go see the new Star Wars movie Episode 6: The Force Awakens. We saw the first 3 movies released in the franchise…the original Episode 4 and also Episodes 5 and 6…but had not seen Episodes 1 through 3. The Force Awakens is Episode 6…essentially the whole franchise is a trilogy of trilogies with the middle three being issued first and covering a net time period of about 10 years or so. Episodes 1-3 were released next and are set about 60 years before the original Episode 4. Episode 7 picks up about 10 or 15 years after Episode 6.

What struck us most was the that Episode 7 is almost a remake of the original Episode 4…the names and characters are different but largely the plot is the same as the original. The original Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker make appearances. Same scrolling credits back to the background…same great music and lots of stuff getting blown up.

I don’t to have too many spoilers for those of you who may not have seen it yet…but at the last scene Chewbacca and the Millennium Falcon jump at light speed to a distant planet in a galaxy far far away…and land on this small island. As the aerial shot zoomed around the island…Connie and Neil turned to each other and said “we recognize that island”. After the Falcon landed the heroine went climbing up these stone stairs and we said “we have climbed those stairs”…and then there was the climactic scent at the top with the heroine and somebody you will recognize from an earlier episode…and again we said “we’ve stood right there”. Sure enough…the final scene was filmed on Skellig Michael off the southwest tip of Ireland…as you’ll recall we visited it in summer 2014 on our Ireland travels. The monastery, the stone steps, the beehive huts…all were very familiar looking to us.

Here’s where the final scene was filmed. The two shots are taken from opposite sides of the same little grassy area…the first one is looking north towards Little Skellig Michael and the second one was taken with Neil standing right at he bottom of the wall you can see in the first shot.

For the climactic scene…the camera was positioned a little to the right of where this shot was taken from with the heroine up by the wall and the character you’ll recognize from an earlier episode was standing near the wall to the left. Connie was really impressed that we had already been there.

Tomorrow Bill and Linda are seeing some other friends while Connie works…then we’ll do the normal choir practice/computer club thing on Tuesday afternoon and then Bingo. Wednesday we’ll meet up with our friend Sandy from the Alaska trip along with Bill and Linda for dinner somewhere. Don’t know quite yet what the later stages of the week will bring…but we’ll figure out something.

Cyas.

Well…another travel season is in the books…our longest yet. We’ve now been on the road 4 travel seasons and are in the midst of our 4th over-winter at Seminole Campground in beautiful North Fort Myers.

This area has really grown to be a favorite of ours…after our first winter with Connie singing in the choir at St. Andrews and finding the director a little free form for her taste we moved the second year over to St. Therese parish which is closer anyway and she likes the choir director much better. In addition…the pastor is nicer and it’s much less of a mega-church feel than we had the first year. We went ahead and joined St. Therese this year as parish members since we found out that they were happy to have part time residents as members. What with the church, Neil joining the Elks Lodge here instead of maintaining membership back in the Fairfax VA lodge it’s really more of a winter home while full timing than just another place to visit.

When we departed here last April 1…we journeyed up the east coast with stops in Jacksonville; Parris Island, SC; Camp Lejeune, NC: and Dam Neck, VA…all at military base campgrounds…before arriving in the Richmond VA area where we stayed at Pocahontas State Park again…and visited grand baby Alex along with his parents for a few days. From there it was off to the RV-Dreams Reunion Rally in Marion NC before we set off our trip to Alaska.

After the really we headed up through NC and WV to Elkhart IN for some trailer brake repairs before heading up through Illinois and Wisconsin to Minneapolis NN…where we stayed at the KOA for a few days and visited Minneapolis and St. Paul. From there we continued into North Dakota with a stop at the Teddy Roosevelt National Grasslands near Medora ND…boondocking at a very nice park near the river than continued north into Saskatchewan Canada then made our way westward through Edmonton to the starting point for our 60 day Alaska Caravan in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Along the way we met up with our friends Bill and Linda Napier in Langham SK and traveled with them for the remainder of our transit to Dawson Creek and then on the Alaska caravan.

We spent the next 60 days traveling about 5,000 miles in total through Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon Canada as well as Alaska…we had a total of 8 border crossings to/from Alaska and Canada while on the trip. For those of you who’re considering taking an RV trip to Canada…we can highly recommend it. However…before you decide to go on a caravan or go on your own there are a couple of other things you need to take into consideration.

The first decision is whether to even do it with a caravan. The pros of doing so are that you’re not completely alone on the road and that somebody else has made the campground reservations for you. The cons of doing so are that you end up traveling a high percentage of the time…for our trip it was 32 travel days out of the 60 total…and since you have a schedule to keep staying longer in one place just isn’t in the cards.

The second decision is which caravan company to go with…we went with what is supposedly the least structured caravan company in the business and it was way, way too structured. In addition…in our opinion the trek master (who was also the company owner) played favorites with campground site assignments and did not really do enough to justify the hefty profit margin he collected.

For our money…you’re better off going on your own…particularly if you’re capable of changing your own flat tire on the trailer or truck if need be and if you’re a reasonably experienced RVer…I would say that if you’ve been full timing for 2 years you have plenty of experience to take on this trip on your own. The roads are actually pretty good…much better than some RVers who had not been to Alaska warned us about. Gas/diesel fuel, campgrounds, groceries and internet availability are generally available pretty much everywhere.

The biggest drawback to the caravan style is that it’s much more of a “If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium.” sort of tour and not a leisurely trip in your RV. Sure…it’s a lot of miles and you will have to travel more than you really might want to in order to get the miles done…but of the 32 travel days we had the about 20 of them had the problem exacerbated by scheduled afternoon and evening activities. This meant that if you weren’t on the road by 0830 in the morning the tail gunner was knocking on your door telling you that it was time for you to get on the road…with a pretty good number of rigs being out of the campground by 0630. If you want to be able to enjoy your coffee before hitting the road…then maybe a caravan isn’t for you. A goodly number of these scheduled activities turned out to actually be no cost activities…but then the various operators want you to think you’re getting more for your money than you really might be.

When you add in the hectic pace, the site assignment favoritism, and the seemingly random assignment (when favoritism didn’t rear it’s head) of rigs to sites with no thought to putting big rigs in big sites and smaller rigs in the smaller sites…well, one of the things you figure you’re paying for with the caravan is to solve those sorts of problems.

Nonetheless…our operator was clearly less structured than most…we met another caravan that had assigned leaving times in groups of 3 for the various rigs and a third caravan that left all together and proceeded in a long line down the road…yuck.

To do this trip…all you really need is a copy of the Milepost magazine and a reasonable amount of RVing experience…our recommendation is to skip the caravan. There was more than one couple on our Alaska caravan that cancelled plans to go to the Canadian Maritimes in 2017 with the came company.

Anyway…our caravan came to an end 60 days later with stops throughout the Yukon, the southeast quarter of so of the Alaska landmass, and the Alaskan panhandle that extends down the Canadian coast…we hit most of the high points tourism wise in that portion of North America…Denali, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Chicken, Dawson City Yukon and ended up in Prince George.

After a resting weekend we pressed on eastwards to Jasper AB for the Tour of Alberta bicycle race then back down into the US with stops in Great Falls MT, t the Little Big Horn National Monument in Hardin MT, Devils Tower WY, and Indianapolis IN before getting back to the Richmond area for the 2015 Cycling World Championships and more grand baby Alex time.

After the World Bicycle Championships in Richmond…we headed south with a stop in Knoxville to see Neil’s sister, a few days outside Pigeon Forge TN at Smoky Mountains National Park, a stop in Coffeeville AL to visit Sunflower where the Laubenthal Land and Timber Company owns property that is harvested for timber, and Foley AL on the Gulf of Mexico before arriving at our final stop for the season once again at the Low Key Hideaway in Cedar Key FL for a glorious week of Tiki Bar and doing nothing…then headed on to North Fort Myers for the winter.

Pro RVing tip…if you’re traveling through West Virginia on I-64…just pay the toll. We normally keep our GPS set to avoid tolls since BAT and the rig normally are pretty expensive on toll roads. Looking at our route the night before…we saw that it was going to detour us onto a couple of US highways around the WV Turnpike and figured it would be just fine. Well…we got a ways down the non interstate and started hearing banjos…it was the worst US highway we’ve ever been on…narrow, curvy, tight overhead and road side trees and in the mountains to boot. Turns out that it looks us 3 hours longer to get where we were going in Grassy Meadow WV and we saved a whopping $7.50 in tolls. So…next time we’ll just pay the toll. Actually this isn’t just an RVing tip…unless you’re really interested in the scenery…which admittedly would have been pretty nice if we weren’t in BAT with the rig in tow…take the WV Turnpike in any circumstance.

Fun fact about Alaska that you might not know…there are a total of 7 ways to cross the Yukon River over it’s 1,982 mile length…4 vehicle bridges, 2 pedestrian bridges, and 1 ferry. We used every one of these on our trip except for the bridge on the Dalton Highway up to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields…and we flew over that one.

Another fun fact you might not know…those Alaska reality shows are really, really fake. Connie likes the one called “Alaska The Last Frontier” which follows the Kilcher family outside of Homer and she was all worried last winter about the family member who was pregnant being all alone when she delivered her baby. Turns out that they live 5 miles or so from downtown, about 1/2 mile off of a paved road with a power line going down it, and if you continue out of town another 5 miles past their property you get to a brand new elementary/middle/high school…so they’re really not out in the boonies at all. If you were to look the other way from their beach (not the way the TV cameras always look) you can see downtown.

Statistics:

• Countries visited: 2 (US, Canada)
• States visited: 18
• Provinces visited: 4 (Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon)
• BAT Miles: 17,839
• RV Miles: 14,845 on 66 towing days
• Average towing miles: 224.9 (high of 402.7 and low of 77.6)
• Car Miles: 10,030 (we didn’t have the car from May through September…it stayed with the kids)
• Campgrounds stayed in: 66
• Average stay length Alaska Caravan:  1.8 days 
• Average stay length non Alaska Caravan:  3.8 days (5.0 days without overnight only stops
• Number of RV travel days: 66
• Northernmost and southernmost points reached: Anaktuvuk Pass AK 68.15ºN and Key West FL (southernmost point in US) 24.54ºN
• Easternmost and Westernmost points reached: Dam Neck VA 75.96ºW and Anaktuvuk Pass AK KS 151.62ºW
• Photographs taken: 11,600 frames for 416.6 GB
• Photographs published: 1,256
• Blog posts published: 92, Tuesday was the most prolific day with 22 posts
• Blog views: 4,700, busiest day was June 14 with 197 views. 
• Countries that visited our blog: 84; top visiting countries were the US followed by Germany and Brazil
• Most viewed blog post: Garden of the Gods, Pikes Peak, and Other Fun Stuff from May 2013
• Most commented on post was Transit to and Stuff in Jasper AB from September 1
• Blog Champion Commenter: Neil’s sister MJ (again) with his brother Ron in a distant second place

Cyas.

Figured I would post again…mostly because I found a little more holidays related humor and thought I should post them before we got too far past Christmas.

It continues to be hot here…Neil did a long bike ride today…19.3 miles in 1:11:25 for an average speed of 16.2 mph…and again just like the other day the wind which was advertised as being from the east was actually from directly ahead of him no matter which way he went. Going east was worse but north, south, and west were definitely not downwind. Oh well…that’ the way it goes I guess.

On to holiday humor.

We had a note from our friends Bill and Linda who went with us on the Alaska caravan last summer…they’ll be here in North Fort Myers just a couple miles down from us at Upriver Campground for 2 weeks starting Jan 1…we’re looking forward to seeing them again and both Bill and Neil have a couple of projects around the rig that we’ll collaborate on…it’s just easier with 4 hands a lot of the time.

Let’s see…Christmas. Neil got some new slacks since his waistline has grown and none of the old ones fit…no weight gain but what he has sagged a bit. Also a nice electric screwdriver and we got a few things for around the rig on his side. Connie got some new neck pillows, 3 tops to match stuff she already has and some other stuff for around the rig. Mostly we get what we need/want when we need/want it so since we hit the road full time we just continued that mode…with limited storage anyway we tend to not buy a lot of stuff unless we get rid of corresponding broke or worn out stuff.

Cyas.

A Politically Correct
Christmas Greeting
Best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most joyous traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, but with respect for the religious persuasion of others who choose to practice their own religion as well as those who choose not to practice a religion at all;

Additionally,
a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the generally accepted calendar year 2016 AD, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions have helped make our society great, without regard to the race, creed, color, religious, or sexual preferences of the wishees.

(Disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and no responsibility for any unintended emotional stress these greetings may bring to those not caught up in the holiday spirit. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Do not remove tag on penalty of law. Sentiments expressed herein represent the opinion of the author and in no way reflect the policies or are endorsed by any employer, government agency, or political party.)

Seriously though…happy holidays to everybody from our winter home. I’m sure that all of you (well, at least some of you I guess) are having a white Christmas complete with gently falling snow, Frosty the Snowman, sleigh rides and all that jazz. Meanwhile…down here in southwest Florida we’re having to suffer through warm weather…heck, we even had to put the A/C on this week as it’s just too hot to do our preferred natural ventilation thing.

We had a nice time yesterday at midnight Mass…which is actually celebrated at 1600 here due to all of the old people that live in Florida…they have a hard time staying awake that late and don’t drive in the dark anyway. Connie’s choir had a nice concert for 30 minutes before Mass started, the church was packed, then we came home and Neil made a nice plate of linguini, Italian sausage and tomato sauce for us for dinner…pretty yum. She’s off this morning again to sing at the 0800 Mass and while she’s gone Neil will whip up a batch of Blueberry Crisp for dessert today…dinner today will be Honey Baked Ham with Neil’s mom’s brown sugar mustard sauce, baked sweet potatoes, and corn/chili casserole. We’ll wash it down with a nice bottle (well, a cheap bottle anyway…it’s Barefoot which is an Australian winery but it’s actually pretty good and only 10.49 for a 1.75 liter double size bottle) of Pinot Noir.

We had a nice FaceTime phone call with Alex, Jen and Bryan yesterday evening…so Connie got her grand baby fix for the holiday…the little guy is walking pretty much normally now and they’ve found out that babies are a lot faster than ya think once they start walking.

I can report that we have Eagle Eggs in the nest…Harriet laid 1 each on December 19 and 20 in the late afternoon. Incubation period for bald eagles is 34-36 days so we’ll expect hatching about January 24 or so. I’ll send Neil down there today or tomorrow and try to get some pictures for ya.

Everybody needs a little humor today…so here’s a couple of contributions for ya’. I have a really good one about a wrapped vacuum cleaner…but this is a PG rated blog so I had to leave it off:-)

And I know you’ve all been wondering about this for years…maybe decades even…so here’s your answer. Our great national national nightmare is over…bears do ^%#&%^#% in the woods.

For our RVing friends who worry about things like low overpasses and such…no you don’t.

Merry Christmas ya’ll. Don’t ferget to watch the College Football Playoffs on New Year’s Eve…Alabama and Michigan State. Roll Tide!!.

Cyas.

So…what have wee been up to? Not much I tellya…not much. We did get our slide topper fabric replaced…slide toppers are those little awning things that unroll over the tops of the slides as they extend…they keep leaves and such out of the seals and hence out of the inside. They’re going on 3.5 years old and are just dry-rotted from the sun. The parts were about 850 bucks and Neil paid the RV tech here in the park to install them…he helped as two bodies are needed but now he knows how to do it so the next time we’ll just order the parts and do them ourselves…I can see Bryan helping him out next time they need doing…or maybe our friend Bill if we happen to be co-located when they need doing, you have to have one person at each end of the slide out to take them off and on.

Here’s a shot of our setup in site 101…you can see the slide topper over the top of our living room slide (Ed. This is a shot from a year ago when we arrived…Neil took a shot but it was after we put the awning sun shades up and you can’t see the slide toper on it…so I cribbed this image from last year. This year’s setup is identical with 2 small changes. First is the Alabama Crimson Tide garden flag that he has up near the corner of the patio. Second is that we switched the parking places for BAT and the Mazda so BAT is backed in here the Mazda is in this shot. This gives us more of a little sitting area on the gravel between the front of the rig and the car where we can have campfires and visit with folks.). You can tell it’s an old shot since there are no solar panels visible on the front of the rooftop.

We ordered and received a replacement trim strip for under our bedroom…it got damaged not on the caravan to Alaska but in TN way afterwards. We went around a hairpin uphill turn on the way to Cove Mountain Campground in the Smoky Mountains and bumped the strip onto the top of the bed rail of BAT. The part/painting was $85 and the shipping was $130…UPS really gouges you for long packages and the total trim strip is 8.5 feet long. New Horizons packed it inside an awning shipping tube…but UPS proved up to the task of breaking even the most durable package and bent the new strip into a pretzel. After a couple of back and forth emails with New Horizons Neil ended up just asking for a refund…the only solution they had was to build a wooden packing crate…and at $130 to ship a 12 pound cardboard tube he doesn’t even want to know how much shipping a crate would cost. He will just look locally and find someone to form/paint one for us.

Here’s what the busted strip, package, and replacement strip look like.

Damage is limited to the strip and really only about a foot of it needs replacing.

This used to be a straight cardboard shipping tube.

This is supposed to be a long straight strip with each end bent 90 degrees for about 5 inches. It’s good for nothing now.

Other than that…we’ve not really done anything. Neil keeps checking the eagle cam to see if Harriet and M15 have eggs yet…they keep mating like…well rabbits but they’re eagles but you catch my drift…but no eggs yet although she is keeping close to the nest and M15 is bringing her food so the ‘experts’ on the eagle cam blog say she’s gettin’ close. Bingo (Connie won last $50 night), bike rides, work for her, and various small projects around the house for him is about it. 

Travel planning

• I have been in many places, but I’ve never been in Kahoots. Apparently, you can’t go alone. You have to be in Kahoots with someone.
• I’ve also never been in Cognito. I hear no one recognizes you there.
• I have, however, been in Sane. They don’t have an airport. You have to be driven there. I have made several trips there thanks to my children, friends, family and work. It is located at the bottom of a big depression, so not always easy to climb back out.
• I would like to go to Conclusions, but you have to jump, and I’m not too much on physical activity anymore. I have also been in Doubt. That is a sad place to go, and I try not to visit there too often.
• I’ve been in Flexible, but only when it was very important to stand firm.
• Sometimes I’m in Capable. I go there more often as I’m getting older.
• One of my favorite places to be is in Suspense! It really gets the adrenalin flowing and pumps up the old heart! At my age I need all the stimuli I can get!
• I may have been in Continent, but I don’t remember what country I was in. It’s an age thing. They tell me it is very wet and damp there. ….and not far from Constipated on the map.
• I have been to the state of Confusion many many times! Easy to get to, but hard to get out of that state at times!
• Seriously though…just what are our plans for the upcoming year.

The only thing we can absolutely guarantee is that it won’t be 17,000 miles like it was in 2015…thatsa long way ya know.

Currently the Jello lines up like this…subject to being stirred of course

April 15 – Depart North Fort Myers with our first planned destination the New Horizons Owners Group (NHOG) in Chattanooga TN from May 16-20. We actually have some tentative plans for the intervening month…but they aren’t firm yet and if I told ya about them then I would have to kill ya…and that would be messy. For now…let’s just say there is a minor change coming (Ed. Nothing serious of course says Neil. But until things are firmed up a little more mums the word.)

May 16-20 Chattanooga Rally. After that we’ll head across to Midlothian VA to see grand baby Alex and parents for a week then after a few days stop in Manassas VA to see the financial guy, eye doctor, and Connie’s work we’ll head north about June 1. We’ll spend a little time in upstate NY somewhere and then along the Maine coast with plans to cross the border into New Brunswick Canada about June 20.

June 20 – Sep 1. Tour through the Canadian Maritime Provinces. We’ve already been to Halifax back in the spring of 2012 so will concentrate most of our time in other parts of New Brunswick and 3 weeks over on Newfoundland. We (Ed. Well, Neil will anyway.) will have a week or so in the Halifax area while Connie heads off to her ASCLS Annual Meeting…flying out of Halifax will make her connections easier and she’ll spend less time on the plane and in airports that way.

Sep 1 -Nov 1. This part is almost completely unknown at this point…we will need to stop by Northern VA again for dental cleaning…we’ll be due by then and going back to our old dentist is easier than finding one on the road at random. We’ll also visit Alex/Bryan/Jen again but have no real firm plans beyond that. My guess is that we’ll spend a few days in the Boston area as it’s about 2 days travel south from coming back across the border then another 2-3 days to get to Manassas then another day to get to Midlothian. That puts us somewhere in the vicinity of Sep 25 leaving to head south for the winter. We have plans for a week in Jacksonville again at the Pelican Roost RV Park on Naval Station Mayport and then the last 10 days of October in Cedar Key at the Low Key Hideaway before arriving back in SW FL. Once Neil starts to do the miles/days/detailed planning we’ll pick some places. Connie really liked Parris Island SC, we both like Charleston (although we’ve been there many times) and he’s toying with the idea of Savannah for a few days as well. Mostly we’ll just be moseying south at that point.

I can tell you that we won’t be doing the death march thing like the RV caravan’s tend to do. Looking at the geography of the Canadian Maritimes…the mainland portion is maybe 300 miles by 300 miles and the northern third or so is pretty sparsely populated. Rather than the drive 2 days out of 3 we’ll plan on staying fewer places for a week at a time and during each week we’ll do Fun Stuff© within about 75 miles or so of the campground. Neil’s parceled the stops out so that the circles around each one cover most of the land mass. Newfoundland is about 125 miles each way and we’ve got 3 weeks slotted in for that portion of the  trip…again with probably 3 or 4 campgrounds spaced around so that we’ve got easy day trip drivability to most of the island.

Total mileage for these is about 9,000 and only about half as many campgrounds as we had this year since we’ll be staying longer instead of caravanning.

Neil’s working on some statistics for the travel year for me…I’ll have my usual end of the year summary post up later on.

No post would be complete without some photos…and since I don’t have any new ones here are a few from our 2015 travels that ya haven’t seen yet.

Piston and piston rod from a diesel engine out of some engine…the pistons are about 15 inches in diameter and 3 feet tall.

One of the many glacier silt laden rivers…you can tell by the milky color…might be the Yukon pretty far upstream where it’s still pretty narrow but I can’t remember as there were a bunch of them.

Only in Canada…

This looks much more like a southern FL swamp than a Hyder AK swamp…but it’s actually from the latter…Great Blue Herons and everything.

Not Ozzie or Harriet…but it is a nice eagle shot. He/she was giving Neil careful scrutiny even though there was about 30 yards of rushing river between them. You’ve seen some other shots of this particular specimen in flight earlier in the year…but he spotted this staring shot as he was looking for something new.

One of Neil’s fave shots of the year…in the Smoky Mountains in TN on the way south. 

Sunset over the gulf…aaaahhhhh.

Cyas.