Eight Legs and a Tail- We Made It!

No Wifi!  Where's the power cord?  How about the dog food?  Where the heck did we put our toiletries?      Are those windmills? (that's an inside joke for my Man of La Mancha friends) This was the soundtrack  of the last days of the journey. 

The highlights of the last two days included an impressive  mosquito population in Indiana.  Clearly they have wintered there.  Here's hoping they don't continue the journey back to New England for the summer.  Then we drove by endless burnt fields in Kansas. This must be a Kansas thing as I've never seen a burnt field in Vermont.  My husband, who is a wealth of little known facts, regaled us with factoids on windmills, oil refineries and farming practices in the prairies of the midwest.  The windfarms are quite stunning. No tilting at windmills for this merry band.   We made a quick stop in Sharon Springs, CO for lunch on our last day.  You would have thought the year was 2019.  There was not a mask in sight!  Weird. 

Then we crossed over into Colorado.  What joy to see our two grands.  Everyone was so excited to see us.  Smooch headed right out to the backyard to hunt down the squirrels who frequent the bird feeder.  Mabel is entranced with the Trailer and is signaling that she wants to move in. We all went out for story time after supper.  It's pretty cozy.  We hope to do an overnight or two which will certainly be an adventure.  And Warren, who arrived in December, is now a big, roly poly, happy baby.  If there's anything more joyful than meeting a roly poly grand baby for the first time, I'm not sure what it is.  

So we will be here for a few weeks with a week planned at a campground in Golden, Colorado.  That will give us a chance to really try out the rig for more than a quick stop-over.  We'll see if we can't finally figure out where to put everything where we can find it. 

Thanks all for coming along on our journey.  Perhaps we'll do an update from Golden and later on our return trip home.  Happy Trails!
 

Eight Legs and A Tail- Smooch’s Tales from the Road

Look at that face!  Does that look like the face of a dog who would disappear into the forest in the night? Does that look like the face of a dog who would try to explore every culvert she comes upon?

My Mom has been doing most of the blogging but I thought it was my turn. I thought I should tell you what it’s like for me traveling on this great adventure out to Colorado. 

I have a pretty sweet set up. I have a very comfy bed in the back of the truck and I get to sleep in the big bed with my mom and dad in the trailer. That suits me just fine..

Last night  we camped at Daniel Boone State forest in Kentucky I went on a little adventure. Most of the time I’m tied up at our campsite but once in a while my mom doesn’t tie me up. I sit very innocently on the grass looking like I’m not planning to go anywhere. But last night my Mom and Dad were playing a game inside the trailer and they weren’t really watching me so I thought I would take a little walk-around. By the time they realized I wasn’t there it was dark. I could hear my dad yelling at my mom. He’s such a rule follower and I could hear my Mom calling to me with her flashlight in the dark. She sounded a little freaked out. But I came back soon enough. I also discovered so many amazing culverts. I love a culvert no matter where it is. My Mom didn’t particularly like me exploring in them.  She always says - you never know what you might find in there- especially in Kentucky. But that’s exactly why I do it. You never know what you might find. It might be something awesome.

Today we drove to Indiana. We are at the Harmonie State Park which is actually quite lovely. But here’s the most fun thing I’ve done all week. I got to swim in the Wabash River. Oh it was sweet. After each swim, I would go onto the bank and roll in the mud. That felt sooo good, like having a massage. So now we’re back at our camp- just chillin, getting ready to cook our supper.

Tomorrow I hear we’re going to really  put some miles on. We plan to have two long days on the road before we get to Denver. Boring. But when we get to Denver I get to see my Mabel and her new little brother. His name is Warren and I haven’t even met him yet but I love babies. I am also going to see Sydney, my cousin, the black lab. She and I are great friends and I’m also going to see my Aunt Ames. I’m very excited to see everybody. So that’s my report. See you on the flip side.

 Eight Legs and a Tail-  Take Me Home Country Roads

Day two on our grand adventure.  We arrived at our first stop after dark which was not ideal.  We were also flanked by two gigantic rigs which made us feel downright petite.  In the morning, there were lots of groups of guys playing frisbie golf.  We think there was some kind of tournament.  It actually reminded me of camp.  Being outdoors, lots of people having outdoor sporty fun.  It felt like where I am supposed to be. 

After a lovely stay in Pine Grove, PA, we got on the road early and headed for West Virginia.  The good news is that it's already summer here.  Well, okay maybe not, but it sure is warmer than in VT.  Now that we've arrived at the KOA campground in Sutton, West Virginia, it is raining.  Yup, having that awning would have been clutch.  But we'll get to it sooner or later.

Here's the really big news.  We had a great night sleep in our big old trailer bed.  In fact, all three of us fit quite happily. Smoochy slept down at the foot of the bed next to me.  She woke me up once or twice licking my legs.  What's not to love about that? But all in all, we were all pleased with our our set-up.  

Highlights of today's journey.  Apparently it's the first day of fishing season in Maryland as we drove by piles of trucks and fisherpeople out in the rivers.  It looked kind of sweet.  Too bad we didn't bring our poles.  And we are, after all, on a mission to get to CO. 

There must also be some kind of motorcycling rally as no less than 100 motorcycles drove by us.  I wonder if they're going where we're going? 

What I am most aware of is that we are finally breaking out.  After a year of staying at home, we are on the road.  We are chatting with strangers.  It is thrilling. I suspect many of our friends are living vicarioulsy through us.  So come along friends.   

 I am going to collect the lessons here for future posterity.  

1. Start the trip with an overnight with your very best friends. (the Hornets)

2. DO NOT drive near NYC on a Friday afternoon.

3. Don’t arrive at a campground after dark when you’ve never hooked anything up before.

4. Do play a fun game when you’ve settled into your cozy rig.

5. Invest in an awning for rainy days.

6. Always camp near kids who will play with Smoochy.

7. Remember that you love your spouse no matter what.

Eight Legs and a Tail - Packing the Rig!

The last road trip that I blogged about was aptly titled- Ten Legs and a Tail.  I traveled with two of my very best girlfriends and my trusty sidekick- Smooch.  3 Women x 2 legs each plus one four-legged friend = Ten Legs. The tail of course belongs to the dog.   On this trip there are sadly no girlfriends along for the ride. There is me, my husband, Michael and Smooch.  So, this saga will be dubbed Eight Legs and a Tail.  

 

This time we’re traveling in our Ford F-150 pick-up and towing a Little Guy Mini-Max travel trailer.   It is 17 feet long but comes complete with a kitchen, a bathroom and a sitting area that turns into a bed.  It’s going to be a cozy bed, but it’s a bed.  Anticipating that we may want to bring our grand-daughter Mabel camping with us in Colorado, Michael has also outfitted the back of the truck with a bed with a very long slide-out drawer underneath it.  This will give us another sleeping space and more room to store things. Michael has named this the dog house. We’ll see if he is relegated to the dog house on the first leg of the trip.

 

We’ve been packing for days. Buying endless pieces of gear for the rig- special tools, storage containers, new pots and pans and hoses.   The list goes on and on. If we learned anything on our first RV road trip, it's that having the right hoses is paramount.  See our famous blog about the big dump. 

There have been heated debates about our sleeping set-up.  I, being the queen of naps, have naturally tried out the bed  and decided that it needed some kind of mattress topper.  I’ve done lots of online research.  There are Facebook groups galore and people are very generous sharing their tips and modifications of their rigs.  There is almost unanimous consensus that you need a little something to soften the bed set up.  But Michael woke up this morning and pronounced that the memory foam mattress toppers were going to be a disaster and we weren’t even going to need them. HA!  We’ll see about that. He hasn’t yet even laid down on the bed.  This afternoon, we plan to bring all of the bed accoutrement to the rig and try them all out.  Not only must we decide if the mattress toppers will enhance the sleeping experience but we need to figure out what the heck to do with them when the bed converts to a sitting area.  

 

Fitting everything in is the supreme challenge.  Mercifully, the refrigerator is a good-size, at least as RVs go. But where to put the clothes, the dog bed, the dog food, the snacks, the toiletries, the towels, the electric bike, the chairs for sitting outside at the campsite, where to put everything?  This is one area where Michael excels.  It must be his architect's brain that allows him to pack things efficiently and neatly. Despite that, we will be packed to the gills for sure. 

Our plan is to leave tomorrow afternoon, do a modest three hour trip tomorrow and spend the night with our dear friends, the Hornets.  Justine was one of my companions on the last road trip so she will have a discerning eye for all things we are bringing along for the trip.  She'll make sure that we have our quiddler game, our wine, our flashlights- the essentials. 

Various friends are placing bets on when Michael will be sleeping in the truck or better yet, when we will give it up and check into a motel along the route.  I am more optimistic.  I think we are going to have a blast, make some new friends along the way, and see the country.  After all, what awaits us at the end of the journey is our sweet Mabel and her new brother Warren who we have not yet met.  I can put up with alot of discomfort, knowing those two morsels are at the end of the rainbow. I hope to continue blogging and share the adventure.  Stay tuned for tales from the road and as you settle into your own cozy bed later this week, think of us and wish us sweet dreams. 

What Joy to Sing Again

After the longest, most challenging year in most of our lifetimes, a group of We the People actor/singers and various and sundry friends gathered in a snowy parking lot in Hanover, NH.  Thanks to the clever technology developed by the Denney family in Massachusetts (#drivewaychoir) and thanks to the generosity of the Choral Arts Foundation of the Upper Valley who purchased the gear and is providing it to local groups, we were actually able to safely sing together.  It was glorious! It was thrilling! It was heartwarming! I am running out of superlatives. 

Our wonderful piano man, Matt McGrath, was inside on the keyboard.  He had even brought his sound effect machine so that we could hear thunderous applause after some of the songs.  I stood out in front of the building, looking down at the 20+ cars that had gathered and did my best to lead the singing.  I am no conductor.  At best, I'm a camp-style song leader, but I did my very best to keep us together. There were kids and dogs in cars and friends who had come along to listen and enjoy.  And then there were my intrepid singers.  We had sent lyrics sheets in advance of the songs we planned to sing and most people had them on iPads or printed in their cars. Each car was given a headset and a wireless microphone to sing into. This allowed the group to stay safely sequestered in their cars while the full sound was broadcast back to the headsets and/or the car radios. We weren't perfect. We forgot some of the trickier bits of songs and our pitch might have wobbled once or twice. But no one cared! We pressed on even through the most intricate songs. "One Day More" from Les Mis comes to mind. What a stirring song with multiple parts overlapping, sometimes in counterpoint.  Much to my amazement, we got through it with aplomb!  Then there were the more sentimental songs that fit the time we are in.  

"The sun will come out tomorrow, Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, they'll be sun" (Annie) 

"Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow" (The Fantastiks) 

"Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune, and no one will suspect I'm afraid.   (King and I) 

"Kiss today goodbye and point me towards tomorrow, we did what we had to do, and I won't forget what I did for love, what I did for love." (Chorus Line)

We soldiered through some of the songs from our last three shows.  We sang songs from Working and from 1776.  Then we were all granted an enormous treat when our own Don Quixote, Ham Gillett, lead us in singing The Impossible Dream from Man of la Mancha, the production that never quite made it onto the stage a year ago.

Don Quixote speaks- "It is the mission of each true knight... His duty... nay, his privilege!.."

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go;
To right the un-rightable wrong.
To love, pure and chaste, from afar,
To try, when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable star! 

You know the rest. I trust that you are singing along by now. Fortunately, I was far enough away from the assembled crowd so that no one could see the tears in my eyes. Even though our production was cancelled a year ago, on this day, in this place, with these people, we were singing our hearts out again.  Our driveway choir gave each person the joy of seeing dear friends, even from behind masks, and of singing together. It brightened a gray day on the cusp of mud season after a year like no other.

And finally "Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes. 525,000 moments so dear. 525,600 minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?" (Rent)

How can we measure a year like the one we have had? It will take a long time for many of us to leave it behind. We will move slowly with caution and undoubtedly will feel awkward as we try to get back to our friends and our fun. But there is one thing that is for certain. There will be music and theatre at the end of the tunnel. I hope many of you will be in the audience.

Don't Mope, Make Something

 I woke up on Sunday morning feeling decidedly blue. It was gray and snowy outside and there didn't seem to be any good reason to jump out of bed. The list of things to feel blue about is long and I won't go into them here. It is the dead of winter after all. There are health challenges aplenty amongst people in my life and my own health feels more fragile than it should. This pandemic has certainly created enormous mood swings for many. But is it possible to go from 0-60 in under an hour? I'm happy to report that it is. Back to my story. 

I stumbled downstairs for coffee and the Sunday paper and then decided to take matters into my own hands, to send my gloom packing. I put on my coat, summoned my trusty companion, Smooch, and headed for the woods. I brought with me some clippers, normally used in the summer and fall, and began to look for interesting bits of flora and fauna. I had a project in mind and was ready to tackle it.

Of course the woods are full of beautiful collectibles, if one only looks for them. I found some of those lovely red branches that people use to decorate their homes for the holidays. I found some pine cones and some different kinds of pine branches. On my way back into the house, I spotted our Christmas wreath still hanging by the door and harvested some bright red berries from it.  

I laid out all of my treasures on the kitchen counter and began to compose a wintry picture. I must give credit at this point to a wonderful company, Tinkergarten, whose mission is helping get children outdoors with fun, educational activities. I had spotted this idea on their website and filed it away for a day when I would be inspired to do it. 

I found two large horizontal trays in my lower oven drawer, each with about a one inch lip. I made my design on each tray and then filled them with water. The trays were then delivered to the table on my screen porch where the temperature was around 10 degrees.  In this kind of weather, it didn't take long for the trays to freeze solid. I must also confess at this point that I don't think of myself as a visual artist. I am a theatre artist and my medium is people, gloriously complex, flawed people who are brave enough to bring themselves to the stage and share who they are. Having a visual eye is certainly essential in the theatre, but I never really studied visual design. I have been lucky to work with wonderful designers who bring their craft to the stage. But here's the point, we can all make things. Am I an artist? Hmm. Maybe not. Maybe I'm a maker. I'm someone who decided to take an idea and do it. Nobody was going to give me a grade. I wasn't going to sell this creation. In fact, one of the things about this project that is kind of special is that it is impermanent. When the temperature goes above freezing, my creation will begin to melt away. Perhaps that's one reason why I am immortalizing it here on this blog. 

Once I had taken the frozen sheets out of the pan, it was time to set them up outside. I have a plant stand that turned out to the perfect vessel for my artic windows. I wired them to it and hung my bird feeders all around the windows. Voila! Joy! Suddenly I was energized and happy! YAASSS! 

There was a lesson in this experience. I went from feeling very glum to feeling extraordinarily happy in a short amount of time. It only took a short walk in the woods and some natural materials. I was thrilled with my creation. I shared pictures of it online and was delighted when people asked how I did it. Even a day later when we got almost a foot of snow, my arctic windows still look fabulous and the birds are loving it as well. 

So my new pro tip to combat the pandemic and the ineveitable shades of blue that winter can bring, is to just simply make something. Maybe it will be an artistic creation. Maybe a loaf of banana bread. Maybe a phone call. But whatever it is, it will make me feel better. I suggest everyone give it a try. 

My brain loves a good nap

In praise of the noble nap.  It turns out that our brain loves a good nap. For those readers who have followed my life over the last several months, you know that my brain was giving me some trouble last summer.  It was kind of letting me down.  It was making me lose my balance and fall down; it was making me feel very fuzzy about a lot! It was creating some other indelicate issues that I won't go into here, but suffice it to say, I had become a "hot mess". So I did what all of us should do when things do not feel right and I went to my Doc. Together, and with help from a range of specialists, we began to figure out what was up. 

In late September, I had brain surgery to relieve the hydrocephalus that was causing my problems. This, by the way, in the midst of a pandemic. I won't go into the gory details here but it was a success and after three weeks in the hospital and subsequently rehab, I was sent home to continue healing and to continue "remembering Perry'.  This last expression was coined by my daughter who chronicled much of the saga and was inspired by our watching  the wonderful Disney movie, "Finding Nemo". 

When people ask me how I'm doing, I tell them that I nap a lot.  If ever there was a good excuse for napping, recovering from brain surgery is surely on the list.  And surviving a pandemic should be on it too. And let's add living in Vermont in winter when the days are cold and night falls early.  We are pretty much locked up at home.  The best I can do to feel like the extrovert that I am is to zoom with friends.  I do get outdoors every day, often walking in the woods with Smooch, my trusty sidekick.  I've been playing brain games on Lumosity.  The rehab doc, who I saw a few weeks ago, told me that the first six months post brain surgery are the time when the most healing happens so we need to "throw everything at it".  So I am exercising my brain and my body.  And I'm napping and dreaming of the day when I'll be able to lounge in my camp tent and after my nap, I'll be able to have dinner with friends. Now those are sweet dreams.