6/30/2015 Newport RI, Zoe and Jack

We spent the last 3 weeks of June about 20 minutes north of Newport at Melville Ponds Campground in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.  We were here for a couple of months last Fall and really enjoy this small wooded campground.  John walked down to one of the ponds to fish and got his lure caught in a bush.  Several days later he dons his fishing waiters, climbs in up to his armpits, all for a $5 lure.  

Zoe and Friend Gabe

With the last of her PhD classes over, Zoe has been spending time in the wilderness for pleasure and for wolf research.  Nine mile hikes, overnight backpacking in the woods, looking for animal carcasses as part of wolf tracking (all the while avoiding forest fires), is not my idea of a fun day but she loves it.  She has planted a garden and maybe for the first time in her life

Wolf Pup From Trail Camera

has had ill feelings against an animal.  That being the squirrels, who within hours of planting, have dug up and or eaten much of her toil. Consulting with Aunt Sherrie, who has the most picturesque vegetable garden ever, has resulted in organic remedies which seem to repel but not harm.  Did you know a spray from boiled rhubarb leaves keeps insects off your plants? 

Jack On OCS Obstacle Course

As Vice President of his Company at OCS, Jack earned the privilege of using his cell phone which has been locked up for past 6 weeks.  Although he has little time to chat, it is so good to hear from him now and then.  He is clearly exhausted and has lost his voice from all the yelling they are required to do. The academic phase of OCS ended at week 8 (Jack finished 3rd in his Company) and he has entered the final phase where they start treating them more like human beings (Mom's interpretation, Jack had other words to describe it :)

We Lived In Hawaii in 1999

Although they feed the candidates well, until now they have been denied coffee (caffeine) and deserts (sugar).  Jack says one purpose of this is to give them confidence in how well they can perform under constant high level of stress and lack of sleep without anything but their own physical and mental strength. 

Jack's Destroyer Steaming Out Of Pearl Harbor

The class has been promoted to Candidate Officers (CANDIO) which enables them to receive a care package from home; a.k.a. CANDIO BOX.  Zoe and I each put one together for him using guidelines found on the family OCS class face book page.  What fun it was to gather up some of his favorite things to eat.  Zoe even made energy bars! We included photos depicting the 4 of us when we lived in Hawaii, his friends, his father and both grandfather's naval heritage, and pictures of the Destroyer that he will be stationed on in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii later this year.

Now able to have some free time and  on-base liberty, we see Jack in person and in uniform, for the very first time.  A vision that is seared into our hearts and memory for the rest of our lives.  

Candidate Officer

6/28/15 ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY for FREEDOM FOLLY

Map on side of RV - Places We Have Camped

As of June 28 we have been on this Freedom Folly adventure for one year!  Ironic that we are in Rhode Island for this milestone since this is about the time when we thought we would be moving into the condo.  HA!  It is still just a foundation and we were told to plan on another year before completion!  Not that we are complaining because it has been a blast, but much of our trip to date has felt rushed, we are tired and the thought of planning year two is a bit daunting.   But once we adjusted our expectations and acknowledged yet again that it is always better to go-with-the-flow rather than rail against things you can't (or choose not to) change, frustrations morphed into a greater sense of adventure which is what this FREEDOM FOLLY is all about! 

The truck odometer reads 79,024 as we pull away from Portsmouth RI, finally setting out on the trip we first envisioned for this odyssey in January 2014.  The vision was a one year leisurely meander around the U.S. while our condo was being built.    So here we are one year later still living full time in a cute 340 square foot 1 bedroom RV, 26,000 miles on the truck (16,000 while towing the RV), 25 states, 4 Canadian Provinces, , and we can still stand the sight of each other the vast majority of time:)  Life Is Good.   

Some reflections....

- Easy to adjust to living in a much smaller space, maybe because we have spent most of the time where the weather is nice and have been outside a lot.  2 TV's and a door in between is a marriage saver. 

-Have spent much time this past year with old friends and family and have been so busy moving around and seeing great things that haven't had much time to be lonely.  

-Absolutely need more time between travel days, longer stays at our destinations so less bouncing around AND DAYS WHERE WE DON'T GET IN THE TRUCK TO GO ANYWHERE aka "no truck day"

-When your entire social life is each other, and the being together 24/7 gets tense, I ask myself "would this be bothering me if we were newly weds?"  The answer is almost always NO, so move on and enjoy being with the love of your life.  

-We had the mental and physical fortitude for one year of traveling to strange places all the time and having to plan where to lay our heads every night but we are finding it a struggle to foresee us doing this for another 365 days.  It takes a lot of energy and requires us to be constantly planning especially during the summer when campgrounds are full of families and in the winter when campgrounds in the south are full of snowbirds.  We would rather just drive till we feel like stopping and get back on the road when we are tired of staying in one place.  This summer has meant lots of last minute calls to campgrounds because they are full and once finding space, having to bounce around from site to site because no sites are open for more than a couple of days at a time. To avoid this are trying to make reservations in advance once we figure out where we are going to be (including deposits and tracking when you can cancel without penalty) but most national and state parks have been booked many months or even a year ago. Then after planning so far out, life happens (we feel like staying longer or shorter, truck/RV repair, family situation, weather like tornadoes, floods and fires), and like dominoes, it can affect everything up the line.   

- For the past 6 months our spending has averaged $45 a night on what we call housing expenses.  Included in this figure is park rent, fuel for the truck, RV and truck maintenance/registration/taxes. That's $2,500 a month which is lot more than we thought we would be spending. Didn't think we would be spending $75 to $110 a night on Florida campgrounds in the winter. Not a whole lot cheaper than mortgage, maintenance and taxes on our Virginia house.  

- HOWEVER, to offset all this; this country is soooooooo beautiful we are constantly amazed and filled with awe and gratitude that we are able to see it in such a personal way and to reconnect with so many family and friends.

6/5/2015 Vermont And New Hampshire On Route Back To Rhode Island

Newport, Vermont

Campsite Lake Memphremagog

Milestone - This is the first time we have camped with the RV in Vermont and New Hampshire so we get to add theses state stickers to our map!

Just over the Canadian border on Route 91 is the small town of Newport, Vermont.  Located on huge Lake Memphremagog, the rail road went through town in the mid 1800's and tourism flourished.  Not much more in this cute downtown today than there

was then according to all the historical placards and photo's around town. Bought some delicious beet greens and rhubarb at the farmers market.  The plan is to make Deb's dad's mom's recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie!  Walking by the lake near our Prouty Beach Campground, we saw beaver and deer and a brown mink like animal.  

On the Green, Dartmouth College

A few hours down the road we stop in Hanover, New Hampshire where John attended Dartmouth College for his undergraduate and Masters of Engineering degrees.  John was in the NROTC program there during the Vietnam War when the military on campus was highly unpopular.  While walking through Thayer Shool of Engineering, we came upon a hall of class photos.  On one side of the hall was a photo of the Master's Degree Class of '48 which included John's father.  He attended Dartmouth for his undergrad and graduate civil engineering degrees as part of the V12 program after serving as a Navy signalman in WWII on the island of Espiritu Santo in the South

Plaque at Dartmouth Campus

Pacific.  We still have some of the signal flags  he sewed which he used for controlling ships coming into the harbor.  The V12 program was set up after the war to educate returning vets.  On the opposite side of the hall was a picture of the Master's Degree Class of '72 which included a photo of John.  Father and son were practically looking at each other. John still finds it odd to see so many women on campus as it was a men's college until shortly after he attended.  He remembers a couple of women exchange students on campus.  In particular, one in his Russian class named Meryl Streep (future actress).  
Walking through Dartmouth's Baker Library, we

Baker Library

remembered a visit there long ago. We lived in Newport, Rhode Island when the kids were little (they were born there) and we used to spend time in New Hampshire at our camp at Ephraim's Cove on Lake Winnisquam. On a visit to Dartmouth when Zoe was about 4 years old, we walked into this beautiful, quiet library where many students were studying and Zoe loudly pierces the solitude with "Look at all the beautiful books!" We and the students had a good chuckle.  

Lake Mascoma Campsite

 Lake Mascoma Campground in Lebanon, New Hampshire was our next stop.  While kayaking on this crystal clear lake we noticed few houses and the thick surrounding forest grew right down to the lake shoreline.  It reminded Debra of a camp her grandfather Vernon  had on Loon Pond in New Hampshire when she was a kid.  Oh what fun we had there with no running water or electricity, an outhouse, and wood stove for heat and cooking.  She remembers brother Steven taught her how to play black jack, grandmother took a piece of wood and chased a bat out of the loft, had to stay inside one day because a bobcat or mountain lion roamed through camp, fishing and picking blueberries.  

Deb was driving through New Hampshire at 65 miles an hour when a tire on the RV blew.  We heard a pop sound and Deb saw debris flying all over the road. Not just tire debris but other stuff as well.  Good thing we have two tires on each side of the

RV since it was barely noticeable that we were riding only on one.  We found a very safe place to pull over.  Boy were we surprised to see the damage to the RV from the tire that look like it had exploded.  The under flooring above the wheel well was ripped out which accounts for all the pink insulation and wood debris flying across the road, but also two steel wheel well reinforcements were mangled.  Amazing what 80 pounds of pressure in a tire can do!  A few minutes after we stopped a New Hampshire DOT pulled in behind us with their flashing lights.  Two guys jumped out and got right to work helping us with the fastest tire change in history.  We were on the road in no time thanks to these wonderful ROAD ANGELS.  Deb wrote of letter of thanks to these two gentlemen which was posted on the New Hampshire DOT website :)