Category: Deep Thoughts

A few years ago, while enroute to Grand Teton National Park, we made an impromptu overnight stop in Dubois (pronounced “dew-boys”), Wyoming. The place was so appealing, we decided to return for a longer stay.

The appeal of Dubois, though, actually starts in Iraq. In 2004, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel, Michael Strobl, found himself stuck in a desk job in Quantico. Feeling like he needed to connect somehow to the ongoing war in Iraq, Strobl volunteered to escort the remains of a 19-year-old Marine, PFC Chance Phelps, back to his home in Dubois. From his first encounter with Phelps at Dover Air Force base, through the transfer to an aircraft in Philadelphia, then by hearse from Billings to Dubois, Strobl found himself surrounded by decent, patriotic, respectful Americans, all of whom showed their appreciation and sympathy for a young man who died simply because his country called him to a dangerous place. When he finally arrived in Dubois, Strobl found himself met with kind words, appreciation, and touching, small-town stories about a young man from the heart of America.

Strobl wrote of his experience in an essay (which I read when it was published and sent along to my sons, both in the Army and one actually in Iraq) and that essay was later made into an award-winning HBO movie, Taking Chance. Strobl’s essay wasn’t about the war in Iraq, it didn’t even hint at whether American should have been there or not, whether the cause was just, or whether the strategy was sound. It was just about the lives that Chance touches as he journeys back home, and the journey of self-discovery that Strobl makes as he escorts Chance back to his family. As Strobl wrote in the essay, “When I first met Chance at Dover, I didn’t know him at all; by the time I got him home, I missed him.”

So, for us, Dubois is not only a place, it’s a reminder of a heartwarming story about the best traits of America.

Anyway, back to Dubois itself. What is the appeal of Dubois? First, the campground itself is lovely and sits right on the banks of the Wind River. So, for a place to take a breather and relax, this place is perfect.

Mostly, though, the appeal of this little town is the area. Dubois itself is a charming little western town (year-round population is only about 600), with nice little restaurants and a weekly rodeo. It is only about 60 miles southeast of Grand Teton National Park, and sits right in the heart of the Shoshone National Forest, an area of stunning beauty. Gannett Peak, Wyoming’s highest mountain, sits just south of the City. East of the city is the Wind River canyon, a 2500-foot deep cut in the terrain exposing strata dating back to Precambrian times (more than 2 billion years old)!

But once again, western wildfires starting bearing down on. As we were heading towards Dubois from Grand Teton, signs along the highway warned: “Active Fire Area — Use Headlights — Drive With Caution.” Over the course of the next couple days, the Fish Creek fire grew from 600 acres to over 6000, closing US-26 entirely for a brief period. As I write this (September 5), the fire is still not entirely contained and is up to 17,000 acres.

Fires or not, though, Dubois remains one of our favorite places. So, next trip to Grand Teton (and there definitely will be a next trip) we’ll be stopping here again.

The tragedy that unfolded at Jasper National Park gave us an additional three days in Glacier, one of our favorite places from our 2016 trip out west.

This version, though, was slightly different. We were staying on the east side of the park, which is not as commonly visited as the west side, and indeed we didn’t explore the east side at all on our first trip. So, first day here found us off to the Two Medicine area in the southeast corner of the park.

Two Medicine Lake is scenic, although frankly not as dramatic as what one sees on the Going to the Sun Road.

Speaking of the Going to the Sun Road, we revisited that drive and yes, it’s just as good no matter how many times one does it:

The highlight of the eastern side of the park, though, came when an impulse hit Wendy to drive back into Canada to visit Waterton National Park, the other half of what is Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park. And the highlight of that highlight was Cameron Lake:

The thing about Glacier National Park, though, is glaciers. Specifically, the vanishing glaciers. The National Park Service is completely exercised about the state of glaciers in the park and, by implication, the issue of climate change. “Losing the park’s glaciers could be a lesson about the significance of global warming.” On one display, NPS says Glacier’s glaciers will be gone by 2030.

The issue of global warming is so mixed up with politics and dubious science that it’s hard to know what to make of the current hysteria, especially for those of us for whom this is number 12 (by actual count) of the end-of-life-as-we-know-it scenarios we’ve already lived through (starting with nuclear annihilation in the 1960s, the population bomb in the 1970s, the depletion of oil in the 1980s, a “China syndrome” nuclear winter, etc. etc. etc.). Furthermore, many of the dire projections about global warming, including even disappearing glaciers, have been strikingly inaccurate. Recall, in 2006, Al Gore presented us with an “inconvenient truth”: “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.” Wrong. Turns out that wasn’t an inconvenient truth so much as a convenient falsehood.

Even still, it is apparent that earth began warming in the 1850s, and that warming continues to this day, and that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have contributed to that warming. And it is true that global warming has consequences, including some that may be only aesthetically important, but are significant anyway. Like vanishing glaciers. There has been a visible, measurable decrease in the size and extent of glaciers in Glacier National Park. The real questions, though, like what fraction of current warming is due to human causes, how consequential is that warming, what we can and should do about it, the costs versus the benefits of response options, are not only beyond what can intelligently discussed here, they seem to be beyond what can be intelligently discussed anywhere.

So, in the meantime, Glacier National Park was well worth the visit. And I’m sure we’ll be back, glaciers or not.

Having arrived in Moab, we followed our usual course and went to the visitor center at Arches National Park, asking the ranger for his suggestions on the best ways to spend our 3-1/2 days here. After discussing a few of the options, he said, “If you can spare a day, you really ought to visit The Needles District of Canyonlands. It’s worth it.” That possibility was on our list anyway, so on Friday, July 26, off we went.

To get to The Needles, one has to drive 40 miles south of Moab, and then 35 miles west on State Route 211. Far from being just a long drive, however, State Route 211 presents its own, fascinating story.

Route 211 passes through the what is now the Bear Ears National Monument. National monuments, because they are created by Presidential fiat, are often controversial, but this one is a doozy.

After decades of maneuvering by Native American groups and self-appointed conservationists, on December 28, 2016, even though it was after Donald Trump had won the 2016 election and Obama had only days left in his term, President Obama designated 1,351,849 acres of land in Utah as the “Bear Ears National Monument,” making it the third largest national monument in the continental United States. (For what it’s worth, the largest national monument is also in Utah: the Grand Staircase / Escalante National Monument at a whopping 1,870,000 acres. One way or another, the federal government owns 63.1% of the state of Utah. Things could be worse, though; it’s 80.1% in Nevada.)

In any event, almost immediately after Obama made the designation, opponents (including Utah’s governor and legislature) started working on ways to undo Obama’s parting decree. President Trump got the message and promptly commissioned an evaluation of the designation and then, barely one year later, reduced the size of the monument by 85% to 201,000 acres.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, the original proponents starting working on ways to undo Trump’s undoing of the original designation, so in October 2021, President Biden restored the designation to its original boundaries.

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, one can confidently look forward to the undoing of the redoing of the undoing of the doing. And for those of you who wonder what kind of land use policy is reflected in this back and forth, all I can say is, “welcome to America.”

Back to the trip …

The first thing one encounters on the path to The Needles is “Newspaper Rock.” Indeed, we were told that Newspaper Rock is a must-see en route to The Needles.

Newspaper Rock didn’t do much for us. I asked the ranger why such things are considered important and he said that the carvings were 2000 years old and told passers-by where to find game, water, encampments, and so on. Meh. Compared to other cultural compilations of knowledge from 2000 years ago (like the Library of Alexandria, for example) a few stick people doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but I guess if it’s your grandma, it’s a different story.

Where Bear Ears National Monument does start to get interesting, though, is in the geological formations that line the roadway.

And after the drive through Bear Ears, the real treat was The Needles, an array of sandstone spires that were formed when a giant salt dome pushed up the crust of the earth, split it into a series of parallel cracks, and then erosion erased everything down from the cracks.

We did a few hikes (Cave Spring and Pothole Point) and drove down to the Big Spring Canyon overlook. I toyed with the idea of driving to the Colorado River overlook, a 7-mile dirt road that leaves from the Visitor Center, with long stretches of soft sand, and is described as “technical.” Well, I’m a pretty technical guy, and I have a 4-wheel drive truck (admittedly with street tires), so I asked the ranger if he thought I could negotiate the route. “Are you very experienced?” he asked. “No.” “Don’t.” So much for that idea.

As usual, the advice from ranger we got when we first arrived was exactly right. With a day to spare, The Needles is a must-do destination.

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.

One of the oft-touted advantages of an RV is that, as something of a mobile condo, it permits one to live near the relations for a while, allowing for extended visits, without the hassles and expense of hotels, restaurants, and rental cars (and now, COVID-loaded public places). In our case, that effect is multiplied because we’ve got three RVs scattered among the families, which means the congregating location can be essentially anywhere.

So, over the years, we used the RV to host dozens of family gatherings in campgrounds (such as a gathering at Land Between the Lakes, May 2015), meet Cliff on his temporary work assignment in Beaumont (November 2015), meet Cliff at Disney World (April 2016), travel out west for the birth of grandchild #7 (June 2016), meet Cliff in San Antonio (April 2017), visit my sister in California (June 2018), take an extended West Coast vacation with Robert and family (June-July 2018), arrange a linkup with Robert as he PCS’ed from Washington to Florida (May 2019), meet Robert and family at Disney World and break Christopher’s arm (March 2020), attend Robert’s promotion ceremony (March 2021), do a family reunion with all four families at Walt Disney World (March 2021), and meet with Cliff in Shenandoah National Park (June 2021). Plus probably a couple dozen other meetups, gatherings, and trips that don’t come to mind.

For all that, though, this is the first time that we’ve used the RV for a holiday gathering, namely Christmas, or as it will soon be phrased in today’s newspeak, “Popular Religious Leaders Natal Day,” a holiday that likely will be held on the last Monday in December. It’s not beyond imagining. We had to cancel a trip with Cliff over Columbus Day weekend due to travel difficulties, which spared me from having to do a blog post on a day now known in some circles as “Indigenous Peoples Day.” I’m waiting for Presidents’ Day to be renamed “Racist Leaders Shaming Day” and the Fourth of July redesignated as “Oppressive Government Founding Day.” All we need now is a national holiday to celebrate “hate week” and the fulfillment of an Orwellian dystopia will be complete.

Where was I? Oh yeah … Christmas. How did I get off on that rant? No matter. This trip not only gave us family time in Florida at Christmas, that gathering was followed by a trip with Robert and family to the Florida Keys. Robert has done an excellent blog post that summarizes the trip, so I won’t repeat the details here. Suffice it to say that this trip was one of the best family gatherings we’ve ever had.

First, if there’s anything better than Christmas with three little boys, it’s hard to imagine what it might be (save perhaps Cliff’s Christmas with three little girls). Plus wonderful meals, beautiful and warm weather, and Robert’s extraordinary on-post home at MacDill Air Force Base. And then, a week in the Keys, with temperatures in the 80s every day, touring around seeing the sights, fishing, kayaking, and cooking out. What a wonderful week.

One other thought: traveling around Florida over Christmas break gave us an eye-opening view into the “snowbird” phenomenon. Besides millions of tourists who come to Florida for a few days, Florida hosts an estimated 900,000 visitors each winter who stay a month or more, which actually increases Florida’s resident population by 5% in a matter of days. Many of these snowbirds (some estimates say a majority) come from Canada (mainly Quebec), but judging from license plates a large proportion hail from the states you’d expect: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. And they all drive like that’s where they’re from, although that’s a post for another day.

Some of these migrants bring their RVs, making the task of finding an open campground spot almost impossible. (Laura was able to snag us a couple spots in a wonderful campground on Sugarloaf Key only because the campground had been closed while reconstructed after a hurricane, and she called within minutes of its reopening being posted on its website.) Other migrants clog the hotels and resorts. But a surprising number stay in homes they maintain in Florida just for the purpose of having a warm alternative to their frigid home states. There are an estimated 11 million second home in Florida, accounting for nearly 15% of all second homes in the country. And not all of these are little cottages. As we learned when we went to Naples a few years ago, upper-end homes there go for $20 to $75 million, although some bargains can be had across the river, such as at Aqualane, where the homes are in the $10 to $20 million range. And yes, these are mostly “second homes.” About 80% of the owners in these areas spend less than 4 weeks per year in their homes.

And what of the RVs that come to Florida each winter? It’s a weird mix. At some places, such as the RV park in Naples, the RV spots for long-term visitors are filled by one multi-million-dollar RV after another.

But we also encountered the other end of the spectrum at our stop after the Keys: little dinky travel trailers that have been “improved” by the addition of corrugated aluminum siding, plastic lawn furniture, and an eye-popping collection of yard decorations including, no kidding, pink flamingos. We even saw a fair number of Harley-riding “biker snowbirds,” which seems like an irreconciliable combination of nouns. And in a “campground” (which was more like a trailer park) consisting of 300-plus sites, there were well over a hundred of these semi-permanent beauties. Robert actually found himself parked between two of these units, and Laura remarked that she didn’t even feel comfortable going out at night. All of which caused Robert to describe this little gem of a campground as a “dump.”

So, there you have it. A great and wonderful trip, made all the better by the hard work and gracious accommodations of Robert and his family, in the midst of a social phenomenon worth seeing. We’ll be back down in Florida twice in the next few months to babysit the Little Darlings while Robert and Laura absent themselves for various reasons, but I’m sure those trips will be nothing compared to this one. Memorable indeed.