2020 Update

This Blog documents the RV Travels for James and Monique from 2008 to 2011.  It ended in 2011, and this post is just an update to note that we are doing ok and now living in South Carolina.  (If you call being home bound during the coronavirus “living”.)

As a reminder, the Blog displays the most recent posting first.  So to read from the beginning of our travels, you will need to go to the end and work your way forward.  There are various links shown in blue that originally carried you to other photo albums of additional pictures from the various places we visited.  Unfortunately these links no longer work.  

While working at BellSouth (now ATT), a friend of mine and I got interested in RV’s.  My friend, Ray and his wife Andrea, bought a used RV and really enjoyed it.  So much so that they bought another better motor home.  When Ray retired, they sold their house and started full time RVing.  Ray periodically sent emails about their travels.  It looked like a lot of fun.  Monique and I were thinking that we wanted to downsize when I retired.  So we thought, “why not do the same thing and travel for a few years before finding a smaller house?”  We were living in a two story log house on a very wooded lot in Lexington, SC.  It was a lovely home, but it required a lot of maintenance, like applying wood preservative and painting the trim every 3-5 years.  I didn’t want to keep climbing a very long ladder to do that as I grew older.  So we started thinking about finding a smaller house, but that could be done after we tried the RV full timing lifestyle.  We started researching and reading books about full timing.  We  purchased a used gas powered motor home.  We enjoyed RVing, but decided we would have to find a diesel “pusher” (engine in the rear) motor home.   

I took an early retirement offer in mid-2006. We worked to prepare our house for sale and make plans to travel.  We selected a real estate agent who focused on internet advertising, which was somewhat of a new thing at that point.  His staff took lots of pictures and some videos of our house.  A couple in Bermuda saw the ad.  They were looking for a vacation home in the USA somewhere between Charlotte and Charleston.  (I think they had family or friends in those two places.). The wife flew to Atlanta with her two children, drove over and looked at the house.  She liked it and made an offer.  We were lucky in many ways with the sale, especially because the bottom fell out of the housing market a few months later, and home prices fell dramatically. 

As you will read in the blog, we travelled to Natchez, Mississippi and found a much better used motor home to buy.  We eventually sold our first motor home on consignment via PPL, a company in Houston Texas. 

The blog stops in the summer of 2011.  In August of 2010,  Monique was diagnosed with SLL/CLL, a type of cancer that is not curable but is treatable.  Her cancer did not require immediate treatment, but needed to be monitored every 3-4 months.  We were also beginning to grow tired of some of the aspects of RVing with all the hassles of unhooking and re-hooking the water, power and sewer connections every time we moved.  Plus we didn’t enjoy all the work we did to arrange the RV storage and furniture when we travelled.  We were very cautious about tying down loose chairs and other items so they would not fly around if we had a wreck.  So we decided to start looking for a house.

We liked “Upstate” SC around Greenville.  Plus we knew of a recommended oncologist in Greenville.  So we focused our house search around Greenville, though we also searched the Columbia area.  Ultimately we found our current home which is a small brick patio home.

Monique eventually did need to go through chemotherapy.  It was successful, but there is the potential for the cancer to flare up again and require more treatment.  Fortunately the first treatment regimen was successful, and there are even better new treatments available.  

So, while we enjoyed our travels, we are blessed to be where we are now.  Especially since we now have a 6 year old Grandson who lives nearby that we dearly love to be with.   

2011-07-11 Sunset over Lake Seneca

We saw another spectacular sunset over Lake Seneca at Watkins Glen last night.  The colors were just dazzling!  It was wonderful watching the colors change as the sunset progressed.

One interesting side note about Watkins Glen:

In the photo below you see a tower to the left.  This is the original tower used for salt mining in Watkins Glen.  There is a huge vein of salt deep below ground that runs from just north of the Canadian border down through this part of New York into Pennsylvania.  It is left from some ancient sea.  They "mine" the salt here by forcing steam down into the vein and pumping back up a brine mixture.  Then they evaporate the water away and are left with table salt.  There are two such salt mining operations here in Watkins Glen.  There is also what I think of as a more traditional mine with deep shafts and tunnels about 30 miles from here a short distance above Ithaca.   I believe most of the salt from that mine is used for melting ice on winter roadways. 

2011-07 Watkins Glen Gorge

We will soon leave NY.  We had one last place we wanted to visit - the gorge in near-by Watkins Glen State Park.  It has been so hot lately we held off thinking we would get up early one morning, but that never happened.  So we finally went late Saturday afternoon.  As it turned out, we probably could have gone in the middle of the day.  It is very shady down in the gorge and the cold water makes the walk much cooler, especially when you get hit by the spray from some of the waterfalls.

I'll quote from the park's trail guide:

"The park features a spectacular narrow gorge where you can hike alongside Glen Greek past deep pools, water-sculpted rocks and nineteen waterfalls...Water has shaped the natural landscape of the park.  During the past million years, water in the form of giant mounds of ice, or glaciers, covered New York State several times, dramatically transforming the land in its path.  In this region, the most recent glacier moved through shallow river valleys leaving in its place deep, steep-sided troughs.  When the glacier receded north about 10,000 years ago, water filled these new troughs, creating the 11 Finger Lakes which include Seneca Lake.  Since then water in the form of Glen Creek has poured down the glacially-steepened hillside, cutting away its soft sedimentary rock.  This on-going process has formed this park's rugged gorge and spectacular waterfalls.  Glen comes from a old Greek word meaning "small, narrow, secluded valley.""

Here are a few pictures and short videos from our walk:

This is the first waterfall you walk behind:

This video shows the second waterfall you walk behind and the surrounding gorge:

You can see how we got sprayed with the cool water:

Another short video from another part of the trail: