Waking to another blue-sky day in such a beautiful location;
this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to make the video we had promised
people back home. A guided tour of
Harvey in a ‘Through The Keyhole’ Stylee. I would love to be able to attach said video to this blog because it will save a lot of explanations and
you will be able to picture us in our RV as we continue our travels. However, at over 8 minutes in length I'll have to leave it for now until I can work out the logistics!
Following my directorial debut it was time to spend the weekend relaxing and
enjoying the outdoors lifestyle. Or that
was the plan. I’ve called this entry ‘cabin
fever’ to summarise what I think was going on, with the benefit of hindsight. We couldn’t be tourists every day of the week
– the budget clearly wouldn’t stretch to that and you need some down time to
chill out. We’d found a lovely site to
be able to do just that. But I think we
were both struggling to adjust to the culture shock of our new lifestyle. Having both worked shifts and long hours in
our Policing life we were regularly like passing ships in the night. It is a strange phenomenon being able to
‘miss’ the person you live with, but that is a part of being shift-workers,
sometimes you don’t have a face to face conversation with your significant
other for days. Now here we were,
confined to our new one-bedroom home, sharing the same waking hours with little
or no opportunity for any ‘me’ time, for the next 8 months. I hope Simon won’t mind me saying this, but I
think I’m better at keeping myself occupied.
I was embracing having the time to read, to do puzzles, even write a
little bit of blog (when I could prize the iPad out of Si’s hands). But Si is a much more sociable person than I
am and was starting to miss regular, uninterrupted contact with his closest
friends and family. The contact we could have was also dependant
on whether we had wi-fi access. I’ve
mentioned our data plans on our mobile phones but that won’t last very long
with regular use. This campsite had wi-fi
available… in some areas… depending on where you parked your RV! Today we just seemed to be agitating each
other. I was happy to just do
nothing. Simon wanted to know what we
were going to do and realised that he needed more past-times available to keep
himself occupied. It’s also a strange
feeling not knowing where you are going to be or what you might be doing in a
few days’ time. Total freedom, yes, but
at the same time somewhat unnerving when it is totally out of the ordinary. How we would both adapt to these factors only
time would tell. Cliff-hanger for you
there!
Having cooled my temper after my mistaken attempt to fix my
bike a few days ago I decided, bravely or stupidly, to have another go. I made some improvement but it was by no means
fixed or even back to the gear-slipping standards when it was new! But it was good enough to suggest to Simon
that we could go for an easy cycle into Buena Vista town with the purpose of
finding ourselves some more entertainment/hobbies. Cycling into the town was quite shocking,
sadly it was an example of a town with more shops boarded up and run-down than
open…. and this was on a Saturday! A bit
of a ghost town. And here is an example
of a sign we have been seeing a lot of….
 |
| Sculpture and sign in a scrap yard |
So many more Trump signs than for Clinton. With the election in just over a week’s time, is this a reliable sign of things to come? The British media hadn’t reported on how much Hilary is hated and mistrusted by so many this side of the pond.
Anyway, we did find an Amish shop (Amish Cupboard) open so
we thought we would support them - but the only thing we found that we needed
was a spare red tea towel! We then went
against our best intentions as the only other place we found was Dollar
General, which are open EVERYWHERE.
Sorry, Amish Cupboard but you didn’t have drawing paper & pencils or
DVD sets containing four films at once!
Saturday evening we went for our second back-to-back BBQ and
had this little visitor…
Sunday was more of the same, relaxing and enjoying the
outdoors. We did some planning – looking
at places we could stay when we reached Dallas and over the next few days.
I also created another list – well, it had
been a week or two so it was time – this was a check-list of things to be done
before driving off! We’d somehow avoided
disaster a couple of times so far.
Arriving at the park and ride in Philadelphia we found that we had left
our TV aerial up – adding a couple of feet to our clearance height! I’m sure we’d been under a couple of bridges
with 14” clearance warnings and, as our normal height is 12” we must’ve been
close to ripping the aerial off and potentially damaging our roof. There’d been a couple of times when we’ve
been sat in the front seats, engine running, ready to go and one of us has said
‘did you unplug the electric cable?’ and the other has replied ‘No, I thought
you’d done that’. So, a list was
definitely required and has pride of place in the dashboard for every time we
are ready to depart:
1)
Lowered aerial?
2)
Detached electricity/ water hose/ sewer?
3)
Tidied loose objects? (bottles in shower, all
washing up away, doors to cupboards, inside & out, closed)
4)
Turned off gas/water? (on console – mustn’t have
pilot light lit whilst travelling)
5)
Brought in slide-in?
I took myself for another bike ride and found some other
residential parts of Buena Vista that weren’t as desolate as the town
centre. I enjoyed checking out the
Halloween decorations – here’s a good example of a homeowner taking the newer,
inflatable decorations to a whole new level:
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