16/10/2007
I've done little on the news front this year. We have travelled through
Canada and New England and I have been less diligent in my maintenance of the
web site. We did a year in 2005/6 and really had had enough travelling after
nine months. This time we came for six months and felt we had had enough after
four months. Perhaps we are beginning to see repeats a little too often. The
fall is very attractive, but you can only stand so many trees. Next time we are
currently planning only four months.
The Insurance company is being a pain. If we store our RV in a warm barn in
northern New York they will not cover us. If we store it in a cold wet field in
Ohio., it is no problem. This is a strange country!
The weather this year has been good to us, we have had almost perfect weather
for the whole trip. Only in the last week has it turned and become seriously
cold. It will be a hard winter. We are ready to go home.
Watch out for the 2008 tour and watch the root
website in case we get up to anything else.
06/07/2007
I've just about got the site up to date although days in the cities will lead
me to fall behind again. We have now started phase two and returned to Canada,
this time for an extended period, until early August. We are heading east to the
Maritimes before returning down through New England. Sites are quite expensive
here but are well set out and some, like this one in Montreal, have WiFi. We
have discovered that our phone works for making both outgoing and incoming
calls, although we do have to pay roaming charges. It doesn't, unfortunately,
work for the internet. But then I suppose you can't have everything, and the
weather is being pretty kind.
06/06/2007
At least I can't get that date the wrong way round. We are back in the USA
and have been since the end of April. The website updates have taken a little
while to get off the ground. Also I must apologize to those who followed our
European travels in 2006 and discovered that the updates stopped rather
abruptly. That was because we started looking at houses in France and I did not
feel it was right to show other people's houses particularly on the inside and to
add disparaging comments.
However then we found a house we liked and we became rather preoccupied with
buying it and moving and then refurbishing it. More details on that will follow
in due course. Suffice to say we have come back to the US for a rest.
We found the camper pretty much as we had left it. It had been garaged over
the winter and our friends here did use it on a few occasions last year, but
they have to work so...
We spent a couple of weeks with them, sorting the camper out and catching up
on news and sleep. Then we headed south to our friends in Shepherdstown WV where
we had left our scooter to be sold (successfully). This year we are reduced to
travelling by bicycle. It is supposed to be good for us.
We also wanted to pick up where we left off last time in Colonial
Williamsburg which we did not have time to visit. So we headed there, obtusely
via Gettysburg and Cape May. This enabled us to add Delaware to our collection
of States visited. We have now also added Kentucky which only leaves Minnesota
and Wisconsin left of the lower 48. They are targeted for next year.
We only plan to spend six months here during this trip since the immigration people don't
like us staying longer, plus the weather severely limits where we can
practically live in the RV in the winter. Besides we have phase 2 of the French
Connection to work on. Having said that, the immigration folk seem to have
undergone some customer care training and now seem a little more human and
welcoming.
Two dollars to the pound is good for us (up from $1.75) in 2005. Gas at $3.25
a gallon, up from $2 in 2005 is not. Otherwise not much has changed. The 2008
presidential election is already in full swing with plenty of candidates
jockeying for position and the
political landscape in tatters with democrats courting the republican religious
right, and republicans trying to distance themselves from George W and his
religious support. No one has a clue which way it will go. However 3 of the 10
Republican hopefuls don't believe in evolution which I find really scary.
Creationism believes that the world was created 6000 years ago and a museum in
Kentucky can prove it scientifically! As I said, not much has changed.
So watch this space as we visit the north east corner of the US and Canada -
anywhere with 'new' in it - or a folk festival in Canada which is where we are
headed right now. |