Quest and Venture

  Sachuest Point, Rhode Island   “Did you see that?” I asked of Leo. He was in a grumpy mood, not having wanted to have left the RV. We had already spent a damp twenty-four hours more or less trapped inside the RV, so perhaps that explains why I was so eager to set out despite the moist weather. I get sitrcrazy in next to no time. Twenty-four hours indoor is not easy. “There was a rock wall, pretty cool!” He did not respond to this obnoxiously dad-like comment. We left our campsite on the north side of the same island as the town of Newport, where one can go and see the mansion that Vanderbilts back with the money they did not pay to the railroad workers who made their fortune. Instead of heading to the southwest of the island, we went southeast, for a point that stuck out into the Atlantic, that is a designated wildlife refuge. I was hoping to see a Saltmarsh sparrow and/or a Nelson’s sparrow and was not about to let the rain get me down. The boys had rubber galoshes and ...

"The Great is the Enemy of the Good." Wisdom imparted to me by a dear friend when I asked him if we should go to another bar in Amsterdam or stay at the one we were atm which was in fact, pretty good.  And is not true? How many good experiences do we pass up, so we can wait in line or pay too much money for something we hope will be great?  Try as we might to chase those 'great' 'once-in-a-lifetime' experiences, sometimes that chase leaves us (me) feeling hollow. Expectations are a dangerous thing, and who among us has daydreamed too highly of something only for the reality of it to disappoint? The converse is true as well. Haven't we all turned on some crappy Scifi movie or a Romcom expecting to fall asleep but instead find ourselves enthralled because our expectations were sufficiently low?  Set your expectations correctly and anywhere can deliver a fun-filled day. To illistrate this point, I present to you: Albany, New York Hand Hollow Conservation Area...

 Somehow, I found a worse place worse to bird than the Texas Coast in May. I set out with only middling hopes, so am not to be blamed. There’s a spot near here, Haehnle Sanctuary, that looked decent for birds. I drove the seven minutes it took to get there, listeing to country music and feeling strangely nostalgic for my life just a week ago, when my family and I were driving through the south, trying to  find something on the radio that not country. This time, I didn’t flip the channel, not even when the morning DJ asked people to call in about being lost, and they did exactly that. I pulled into Haehnle and parked. It is a well-maintained space, with signage and more benches than I have ever seen at a bird sanctuary. Some sort of a trap, it turns out. For the moment I stepped from the car, I was completely swamped with mosquitoes. They whirled about me, an irritating, incessantly buzzing swarm landing on the few inches of skin I had left exposed on my hands and face....

  After a week of driving we found ourselves on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Indiana Dunes State Park. We had been driving for more than three hours ( a long time for our two kids) so were happy to be out and stretching our legs. The conditions weren’t safe for swimming, and despite coming dressed to swim (if everyone’s doing it , we can too, right?) we did not venture into the water. No one, in fact, dared to swim.   Instead we piddled around on the beach, tossing rocks into the crashing waves, while I checked every single gull I could. Most of them were ring-billed. One was a herring gull. None were the monstrously large Greater Black-Backed Gull that I so desperately want to see. I mean, it’s the largest gull in the WORLD. How cool is that?  Because we couldn’t swim, I had it in mind that we could climb to the top of one of the dunes (there was a trail, Leo reiterated many times that we were not to walk on the dunes because birds might be nesting there) but it q...

Today marks the end of our seventh day on the road, and we’re still having fun! That said, the learning curve has been steeper than most of the roads we’ve been driving on. Prior to this week, I had towed an RV exactly TWICE, once when we bought it, and a week before our trip when we went on a ‘practice run’ without kids. HO! Like that even counted.  Now that we’ve been on the road for a week, I wanted to share some things we learned this week that might be relevant to other RV newbies. I call this segment TODAY I LEARNED: TIL: Kids Need Practice.  We bought this fancy ‘piggy backer’ for our 20 month old  to use, but we never actually used it. It's just a metal bar attached to backpack for him to stand on and ride as a piggy back. It seems simple and awesome enough (the branding is legit) but Xander doesn’t know how it's supposed to work, so it is a struggle. Our first time using it resulted in tears and tantrums. Our second time ALSO resulted in tears and tantrums, but h...