Perfect moment report! Tracy and I were standing on the mountain ridge at this Airstream campground in southwest Virginia, watching the sun set. Just the right amount of distant clouds were over the Blue Ridge so that soft stretches of orange and pink were occasionally punctuated with striations of neon. Half the sky shifted in […]
Tag: Virginia
My Doppelgänger
I knew something was weird even before I met her. As soon as Tracy and I pulled into this Airstream-only park in southwest Virginia, people who spend their summers here would wave at me enthusiastically. Like, really excited to see me. I thought, “They sure are welcoming here!” But then I noticed that the waving […]
Dipping into a Different RV Lifestyle
We’re at a gorgeous Airstream-only campground (not the one we usually go to, although that’s up soon). This one’s near Roanoke, Virginia, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so the elevation has cured our heat-dome woes for a bit. What an abrupt change in lifestyle for us! It’s not like we’ve come here from months […]
Small Precious Things
We’re such the assholes when we pull into a campground. We leave the diesel truck running in the road while we scope out our site. Once in, we crank down jacks with a drill, set up the starlink antenna, put up the tent, add lights. It’s a lot of stuff we disgorge onto our campsite […]
Guess What, Back to Houston
This is part of a personal/medical series (GDTRx), unrelated to travel. Just a quick update here. I didn’t get an appointment with the Mayo Clinic. I don’t know why I didn’t, because the denial code is in a letter that’s been mailed to our mailing service in Livingston, Texas. As in snail mailed. I won’t get that […]
Navigating a Hipcamp in the Heat
This week we’re parked at one of those brewery/winery/event spaces that are so popular with young, Eastcoast families with disposable income, this one near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and we chose it only because we were pretty desperate. It was a last-ditch plan because it’s part of the Harvest Hosts and Hipcamp listings that drive us bonkers: […]
A True Vacation
You know the background here: after two weeks in New York, we turned south to Virginia to wait on a couple of doctors—which’ll determine where we’re going next—and this change of plans meant we had no camping reservations for the summer. We were in a pickle. When my good friend Mary Margaret offered us her […]
The Absolute Freaking Weirdness of this Lifestyle
This hometown week on the Friends and Family Tour ‘24 has been a honking-big, tangled-up knot of red-hot emotions. It’s not just been about seeing people I haven’t seen in years. It’s been about being struck by aging (and in a flash of recognition that really should be hidden). It’s been about cramming what we’ve […]
Three Days at the Center of the Universe
Years ago when Tracy and I were drinking beer at Center of the Universe Brewing just a little north of Richmond, I looked over at the RV park across the street and thought, “Wouldn’t that be cool to stay there!” And, here we are, not really by choice, but it was where we could get […]
Convalescing in My Home Woods
Good grief we’ve been sick. I’ll have an hour here or there when I feel better, which, you know, gets a person through. Tracy, though. Yesterday, he declared he was going to make lunch (something he does for us every day but hasn’t in more than a week), but when I go inside to check […]