Category: Travels

I know … I know. Seriously? Back to Disney? Again? At your age? Really?

Actually, yes. But it’s not that weird, at least not inside the deep recesses of my psyche. As we’ve said countless times before, there’s something about this place that’s rejuvenating. (Now that I think about it, I wonder if “rejuvenating” is etymologically related to “juvenile”? Better not go there. Where was I? Oh yeah … Disney …) Just being in a place where everything is geared towards perfection is, what’s the word?, uplifting, encouraging, revitalizing, renewing, something. It’s like that scene in Wizard of Oz where it’s a black-and-white world of storms, and tempests, and destruction, until Dorothy opens the door and walks into a world of color. That’s what Disney is for us … a respite from a world of black and white turbulence into a moment of renewal.

Disney Springs. I know there are things about Disney that make people cringe. Like “commercialization.” As Alfred (Miracle on 34th Street) said, “There’s a lot of -isms in the world, but the woist is commercialism.” And it’s true. We decided to take a free afternoon to check out Disney Springs. If commercialization were a theme park, it would be Disney Springs. If you think “shopping” is a mundane and unfortunate diversion from actual life, you should see a place designed for people who want to immerse themselves in, bathe in, luxuriate in the shopping “experience.” And it’s not just snooty, overly indulgent items that constitute the shopping gestalt. I mean, there’s actually an M&Ms store (no kidding), with lines of people waiting to get in!

Just as one example, it’s actually possible to buy a pair of Mickey-shaped small plastic boxes filled with M&Ms for, get this, $40!

And so it goes. Over 160 acres of stores, bars, shows, and restaurants. But here’s the deal: so what? I understand that, among young people, “hanging out at shopping malls” is their favorite pastime. And yes, there was a time when I thought bar hopping was pretty much as good as life could possibly get. And our own grandchildren relish going to restaurants where the decor features jungles and dinosaurs. Would we go to Disney Springs again? Never. Well, maybe. All bets are off if a grandkid insists. But in the grand scheme of things, there are worse things in life that a family yucking it up because they just got their picture taken with a giant M&M. And even Disney Springs, as raw as that is, does nothing to detract from the world of color at Disney.

EPCOT. Although we spent five days at Ft. Wilderness, we only did one theme park, but given that it took 20,000 steps to do it, that was about all our rapidly deteriorating bodies were in the mood for. And it was worth every one of those knee-pounding strides. Three things stood out.

In my mind, Guardians of the Galaxy is by far the best ride at Disney. And that’s from someone who knows nothing about Marvel characters and cares even less. But the ride is great even without the comic book overlay. It’s a “roller coaster” of sorts, I suppose, but it’s really more of a speed run, fully enclosed in a dark building, featuring cars that rotate 360-degrees as they bank and drop racing along the tracks, making six different drops, several which of produce negative g’s. All of which occurs surrounded by amazing special effects and accompanied by Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears). Totally amazing. While the ride is thrilling and unbelievably well done, it’s not particularly intense, at least not by roller coaster standards, and we saw numerous children in line for the ride. I would have said that it’s a perfect ride for everyone, except that Wendy, who loathes roller coasters, hated the whole ride and wouldn’t speak to me for a couple hours, not only because she thought I duped her into going on the ride, but because she was struggling not to upchuck the roast beef lunch we just had.

The ride is so popular that one has to participate in a “virtual queue,” and even jumping into the process at the first available second (literally), I was still in “Group 90” and we didn’t get on the ride until 5 hours after signing up!

Special experience number 2: dinner at La Hacienda de la Angel. Although the campground was basically empty, and our week at Disney occurred (mercifully) without any school/college spring break crowds, all of the restaurants were booked solid. So, having a full day planned at EPCOT, we took the only slot we could get: an early dinner at La Hacienda de la Angel. Wonderful. Actually, amazingly wonderful. It seems like most of the Mexican food we get along the east coast is “Tex-Mex,” which is OK, but it’s not the kind of gourmet Mexican food we grew accustomed to in California. But gourmet style fare is exactly what this restaurant provides. After starting off with hand-made guacamole, Wendy had spiced shrimp served in soft tortillas, and I had the carne asada. This is definitely our new favorite restaurants and will be our first choice for EPCOT days from now on.

Special experience number 3: Luminous. At 9:00 pm, in the large lagoon at the World Showcase area of EPCOT, there’s a fireworks and fountain extravaganza that Disney calls “Luminous: The Story of Us.” I think there’s some insipid “why can’t we all just get along” back story to the production, but what makes it memorable is that the word “extravaganza” doesn’t even begin to do the event justice. The “set” for the show consists of a large barge in the center of the lagoon, surrounded by maybe a dozen smaller barges, all of which serve as launching pads for hundreds of fireworks, dozens of illuminated fountain effects, and criss-crossing searchlights, all of which are coordinated and set to the music, in such a way that the display literally fills the entire sky. I couldn’t get a decent picture myself, so here’s one swiped off the internet, but even this fails to capture the full effect:

And that goes on for nearly 20 minutes! I can imagine there may be folks who, after 12 hours dragging the little darlings around EPCOT, wonder if staying around for a “fireworks show” is worth it. The answer is yes; “worth it” is an understatement.

So, after a brief three-day stop at another ham radio thingie, we’ll be heading over to the Space Coast, another of our Florida favorite stops. Stay tuned …

After the family left the Lake George RV Park, we took a couple days to mosey eastward. The first stop en route was Dolly Copp campground in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, which was significant because it was exactly the same area we spent our honeymoon 51 years previous!

Of course, back then we were tent camping …

And where we were in New Hampshire in 1972, we were actually backpacking through these mountains! (Let’s say that now our standard for “roughing it” is considerably higher.) But the area is still as beautiful, and Mt. Washington still has the worst weather on earth.

After a couple days, we arrived at Acadia National Park. We had been tracking the weather on coastal Maine for weeks, and it had been what one would expect at coastal Maine: cold, rainy, and generally dismal. Except that when we got there, it remained sunny and warm for the entire week. I’m sure that’s a blessing bestowed upon us as a result of my conspicuous clean living. Actually, maybe that’s not it.

Traveling around the country, we’ve gotten used to dramatic vistas, but Maine presented us with a different kind of beauty.

We spent days hiking and touring around and never grew tired of the scenery. Acadia gets more than 4 million visitors per year, making it one of the busiest national parks in the U.S. But, as usual, nearly all of those people never go more than a couple hundred yards from the nearest paved surface, so hiking along the coast soon leaves one pretty much alone.

And one highlight of the trip was the culinary indulgence of having an excess of lobster at least once, and sometimes twice, per day.

Since we were eating the little critters, we decided to take a tour on an actual lobster boat, guided by a guy whose family has been lobstermen in Maine for five generations.

[Digression /on] There’s a theory in environmental philosophy known as the “tragedy of the commons.” The idea is that where there’s a common resource, each user has no incentive to preserve the resource for the benefit of others, which leads to each person over-consuming his “share,” which leads to depletion of the resource, and so on. When the theory was developed by Garrett Hardin back in the 1970s, many economists noted that the theory makes sense in a simplistic kind of way, but for its validity it requires that the users fail to appreciate the problem and cooperate to maintain the resource. So, the question was, which is true in real life? Cooperation or depletion?

As it turns out, the Maine lobster fishery offers at least one answer. Starting all the way back in the early 20th century, Maine lobstermen voluntarily began to cooperate to preserve and enhance the lobster fishery. Each lobsterman agreed to voluntarily limit his take, and they agreed on certain practices to manage the lobster population. For example, they instituted strict size limits on harvestable lobsters, returning lobster that were either too small or too big. If a female egg-bearing lobster is caught, the lobsterman clips a notch in the tail of the lobster, indicating that this lobster cannot be harvested and, if caught again, must be returned to replenish the population. And so on. Eventually the practices were codified and expanded, but the program remains largely self-regulated.

In fact, in 2009 the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, for her study of private cooperation of common resources, using the Maine lobster fishery as an example. Her conclusion:

[Ostrom] challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.

And the result of such self-regulated, voluntary cooperation in Maine? Eighty-five percent of all the lobster eaten in the U.S. come from Maine. And annual lobster harvests, that were roughly 20 million pounds per year in the 1980s are now 95 million pounds per year! Wow. [digression /off]

Anyway, Maine was a great stop, we (finally) crossed off an important gap in our RV-travel bucket list, and now it’s off to upstate New York to see son #2 and his family.

Well, first, an announcement: All good things must come to an end, and it was time for ACE, our long-lived Class A motor home, to find a new home. There was actually nothing seriously wrong with it, but it was 11 years old, had 70,000 miles on it, and, while motor homes require a lot of TLC, this one was requiring more TLC with each passing year and there comes a point where the effort required is greater than the benefit received.

But there’s a coda to that story. Two, actually.

The first is that the guy who purchased ACE, in an amazing act of generosity, agreed to delay delivery for two months so we could use ACE to take a 6-week, 3000-mile trip to the northeast to visit family and see Acadia National Park. More on that below.

The second is that shortly after we transferred ACE to its new owner, we bought a small’ish travel trailer, a Grand Design Imagine XLS 23LDE. Seeing as how it’s an Imagine brand, we thought Imogene would be a suitable name, “Genie” for short. That will be the subject of a future post.

Our farewell trip

There’s lots to say about the trip, which was wonderful on all counts, but here are a few of the highlights…

Antietam National Battlefield Park

In September 1862, the Confederate Army, under Robert E. Lee, invaded Maryland in an attempt to shift the focus of the war away from the south and into Federal territory. The Confederates were met near Sharpsburg by Union forces under Major General George B. McClellan. The engagement occurred in a small area, roughly 5 miles long and no more that a couple miles wide, but what occurred there was the bloodiest day in American history: 22,000 casualties in 12 hours. The area of the fighting is preserved now as the Antietam National Battlefield Park.

And, as usual, the National Park Service has done an unbelievable job of bringing to life the history, the battle, the personalities, and the significance of that day. Most of all, NPS has set up a driving tour of the battlefield area with stops at each of the significant locations, with each stop presenting the operational ebb and flow of the engagement in a way that mimics what is known in military terms as a “staff ride.”

Just one example: Crossing the farmland was a small dirt path known to the locals as the “sunken road.” Confederate troops dug in along this road as northern troops approached. While the Confederate troops were outnumbered almost 3:1, their superior position allowed them to wreak havoc on the Union army. After 5 hours of fighting, 5500 men had been killed or wounded, and that road is now known as “Bloody Lane.” The details of what happened are accessible nowadays through an assortment of signs, maps, displays, and even an observational tower.

During one of the talks we attended, the ranger made another point that reveals something important about this battle, and about our history generally. President Lincoln actually visited the battlefield after the battle, and visited not only the Union field hospital there, but the Confederate hospital as well. I asked the ranger that such a visit was surprising to me … why would Lincoln do such a thing? She responded that, yes, Lincoln hated slavery with a passion, and wanted it eradicated from the country, but ending slavery could wait. More than that he wanted to preserve the union. He knew that someday we would all have to live together, and his job was to make sure we could. So, when asked by a reporter why he visited the Confederate hospital, he said, “there are men of valor and virtue in there.”

It reminded me of the account of Appomattox where, after Lee’s surrender, General Grant allowed the Confederate soldiers to keep their arms and horses, knowing that they’d need them to live once they got home. And before everyone headed home, the Union and Confederate soldiers mingled together, renewed old friendships, and shared stories. Perhaps, if the war meant brother against brother, people had a sense that the end of the war meant the family could try to get back together again.

Try to imagine such decency, magnanimity, and fraternity today.

Anyway, unfortunately, we had rearranged our itinerary, leaving only one day to explore Antietam. In hindsight, it requires at least two days for the same reason Gettysburg requires more time … Lincoln was right: these places really are holy ground.

Next stop … Lake George, New York.

As noted previously, one of our favorite state parks is F.D. Roosevelt State Park, located near Callaway Gardens. Since it was time to take ACE out for exercise, and since Roosevelt State Park is only 22 miles away from where ACE lives, off we go. Surprisingly, even though it’s August in middle Georgia, which normally would be a combination of phrases invoking the same appeal as phrases like “hot poker” plus “left eyeball,” the weather was actually cool and clear and the three days we spent there completely refreshing.

This time, though, besides enjoying the park, hiking through the woods, and touring along the ridge of Pine Mountain, we took an afternoon to visit Roosevelt’s “Little White House,” a place that we had not seen in several decades. Roosevelt built the Little White House in 1932 while governor of New York, since it was close to Warm Springs, famous for its 88-degree, mineral-laden spring water, which Roosevelt sought out seeking a cure (or at least relief) for polio. It was at the Little White House in 1945, while posing for a portrait, that FDR suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died a short while later. This modest little cottage has been carefully preserved very much as FDR left it, and a museum on the grounds provides many exhibits, including FDR’s 1938 Ford convertible with hand controls, along with a short film describing Roosevelt’s life and presidency.

In nearby Warm Springs, one can visit the pools where Roosevelt, and other victims of polio, went to find some relief from that terrible affliction. Inside the exhibit there is on old “iron lung,” a mechanical device used to compress and expand someone’s torso, thereby forcing the lungs to pump air in and out of the body. There were often hundreds of people in iron lungs at clinics, and many of them spent years in such devices.

But the FDR museum tells another, fascinating story. It was largely through the long times that Roosevelt spent at the Little White House, and through his association with the farmers and workers of Georgia, that he settled upon most of the philosophy of the New Deal. In a book I recently read, Reagan: The Life, H.W. Brand made the point that in recent history there have only been two presidents that actually matter: Roosevelt, as the author of the welfare state, and Reagan, as the author of the conservative revolution–the two presidents who capture the poles of “government is the solution” versus “government is the problem.” And much of the course of modern America, including the current degree of polarization and animosity, reflects the collision of these two opposing philosophies.

All of which makes it hard for me to find a place in my brain for Roosevelt. On the one hand, he faced the most daunting combination of circumstances one can imagine: a global economic depression, a climate change disaster, and a world war against abject evil. What could anyone do under such circumstances but muster every means and resource available to the government and make everyone and everything, in essence, instruments of the state?

But on the other hand, he is the founding father of the welfare state, the man who put the country on the road to serfdom. As mentioned in the previous post, the prevailing ethic when Roosevelt took office was that it is morally wrong and personally degrading for an able-bodied man to take money he did not earn. That ethic is obviously long-gone now, and one must wonder whether the acceptability of living on the dole, indeed the prevailing norm that there is a right to live off of the hard work of others, can be traced back to Roosevelt himself.

I guess none of this is new. Recall the Jews wandering in the desert saying, “We hate it here. We want to go back to Egypt where we had food, and shelter, and free health care,” to which Moses replied, “What? What are talking about? You were slaves in Egypt. What are you going to do, put yourself in slavery for a bowl of soup?” To which the answer was, “Heck yes!” And so it goes.