Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

February 2024: “To boldly go where no man has gone before…”

As mentioned in the previous post, throughout our tour of Kennedy Space Center, two themes recurred. Our trips to the moon (in 1969 and the one coming up), our trip to Mars, and whatever lies beyond that, all are born of two foundational imperatives: a zeal for exploration, and a commitment to scientific and technological advancements necessary to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Although I’m not sure NASA actually ever said as much, it was apparent that NASA believes, for the good of the space program, both of these imperatives need to be amped up. And in my view, devotions of these sorts are not only good for the space program, they’re good for the country. In fact, both of these derive from a sense of national optimism, something our country sorely needs.

At one point in one of our tours, the guide said something like, “yes, yes, yes … there are lots of benefits to our space program: advances in engineering, medicine, material science, computing, and so on. But the exploration of space is essential even without these benefits. It’s in our nature. It’s inherent in some early caveman thinking, ‘I wonder what’s over that hill?’ To stop exploring is to deny our humanity.” During the early days of the space program, that sentiment was part of our national consciousness. It wasn’t just James T. Kirk; we all thought of space as the “final frontier.” But what NASA senses is that our national sense of common wonder, our sense of destiny, our willingness to take risks and bear costs together, our unifying national purpose, all have been dissipated in a sea of competing interests. No doubt there are lots of reasons for all this: fracturing political ideologies, the distractions of trivial technologies, other national and international priorities, lack of national leadership, and so on. Even as our space program is privatized, though, a robust space program cannot survive without national (and international) excitement and fervor. Rekindling those fires is part of what constitutes the Kennedy Space Center experience. As I wrote after our visit in 2017, KSC is all about “the glory of exploration, the human need to go new places and learn new things, and the indomitable human spirit that allows us to achieve the impossible.”

The second focus at KSC is on STEM education, and in particular vitalizing STEM studies in secondary education. Over and over again, STEM, STEM, STEM. It came up in tours, in displays, in interactive games, and even entire buildings directed at young people. Everywhere. Constantly. After a while, I began to wonder whether the emphasis was truly necessary. When I was young, we didn’t need an emphasis on STEM. We were going to the moon and everything in our country was tied to moon-driven STEM-stuff. But one of our guides made an insightful observation … the more common technology becomes, the more our technological achievements seem easy and mundane, the less focus science, technology, and engineering get in our daily lives. And that’s especially true for young people, most of whom have only seen a world where technology is commonplace and easy. Why worry about STEM education when for a couple hundred bucks, you can take the entire computing power of the country and put it in your pocket? Spend years studying thermodynamics and differential equations? Meh. I’ll just google it. But without both competence in such things, and even more importantly, enough education to appreciate competence in such things, a space program yields to the challenges that seem too daunting.

Anyway, those two essentials are part of what makes the KSC experience so memorable. These two seemingly incongruous, yet fundamentally linked, emphases. The philosophical, abstract, near-spiritual essence of humanity’s need to explore, grow, and achieve, combined with the practical, prosaic, even terrestrial details of what it takes to travel, live, and even thrive in the most hostile environment imaginable. KSC puts these together in a way that is new and exciting every time we go there. What a combination. And what a place. We’ll be back.

February 2024 : Disney? – Yup … Again …

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 …

August 2023: Acadia National Park

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!

A hike to Glen Ellis Falls on our way to Mt. Washington.

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.

Atop Cadillac Mountain, this is pretty much how the weather was all week!

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

For photography, clear blue skies are basically boring. But there was one (but only one) morning with enough clouds to make for an interesting sunrise.

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.

August 2023: Antietam National Battlefield Park

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.

August 2022: Roosevelt, the Park and the Man

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.

The “Little White House” is really nothing more than a small, two-bedroom cottage, the kind of place one would not now associate with a “presidential retreat.”

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.

April and May 2022: Here and There

I wasn’t going to post anything about two trips made in ACE this year, since they were mostly about things other than RV’ing, but since I’m about to do a post about our recent trip to F.D. Roosevelt State Park in August 2022, here’s something quick that explains the gap.

April 2022: Georgia Nature Photographers Association. Every year, GNPA has an “Expo,” which is the club’s gathering at some photogenic location for several days of classes, field trips, displays, contests, and general photography goofing around. This year it was at Jekyll Island, but since I was derelict in making reservations, the hotel was full and I had to resort to taking ACE down to Blythe Island county campground.

The above photo was entitled “Life Among the Ruins,” which I thought was a clever play on Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins.” That poem, if I recall correctly from high school or college or whatever it was (which I probably don’t), was about how everything man builds will crumble and fall, but love will survive. So my photo might by analogy say that everything man builds will crumble and fall, but life will survive. Get it? Pretty clever, eh? Apparently, it was too clever. For the second time at a GNPA Convention, this photo was put on display in front of the entire membership during the contest awards ceremony as an example of what is wrong with the photograph. I give up.

May 2022: FMCA Amateur Radio Club Spring Rally. Yes, another geeky ham radio excursion, but this one turns out to have been relevant for the post that is to follow about F.D. Roosevelt State Park. The rally was hold in Crossville, Tennessee, and besides doing our usual ham radio stuff (which, as noted, most normal people find insufferably dull), we did a little field trip to the Cumberland Homesteads Historic District. The Cumberland Homesteads was the largest of the Roosevelt’s New Deal subsistence homesteads built to aid “needy yet worthy families” with jobs, training, and the purchase of homes. Two hundred fifty-one families lived in homes they built, all within a community of farms and businesses. Families paid for the homes through the wages they earned building the community and farming the land.

What makes the homestead especially interesting, and relevant to the post that will follow on our trip to F.D. Roosevelt State Park, is that Roosevelt faced an interesting problem during the Depression: At the time, it was considered morally wrong for an able-bodied man to accept money that he didn’t work for. Even if people could be persuaded to take charity, giving someone charity without giving him a chance to work was considered degrading. Hence Roosevelt had to come up with all of the make-work agencies, like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation. Roosevelt knew that to lift people out of poverty in a way that didn’t humiliate them in the process, he had to give them an opportunity to “earn” they money they received, even if it was nothing more than building a trail through the mountains or a community center in the middle of the Cumberland Plateau. The Cumberland Homesteads was a marvelous example of what people can accomplish if we “help” them without degrading them in the process.

It makes one wonder what America would be like if such an ethic were still the prevailing norm?

Next trip … Roosevelt State Park and Roosevelt’s “Little White House.”

December 2021 – Christmas and the Keys

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.

The obligatory stop at the southernmost point in the U.S. Except that it’s not. The actual southernmost point is on the Truman Annex to NAS Key West, but those people shoot you if you try to jump the fence for a photo op.
Robert carded us onto NAS Key West so we could have lunch at the marina restaurant. Typical MWR facility: great ambience, good food, a marina with retiree’s yachts as a backdrop, and a beach with swimming and kayaking.

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.

April 2021 – Wither Callaway Gardens?

Part of the reason we’ve always had a fondness from FDR State Park is that it is located adjacent to Callaway Gardens, which has also been one of our favorite places: thousands of acres of stunningly beautiful gardens, miles of bike paths, two golf courses, a wonderful butterfly house, (until recently) a world-class greenhouse, countless natural and hybrid azaleas, all geared towards what has always been the mission of Callaway Gardens: to provide opportunities for recreation and spiritual renewal in an area of natural beauty.

But this trip, we saw something we were not expecting … Callaway Gardens looked like it was struggling, both financially and philosophically.

Attendance had been slipping for years, down from one million visitors per year at its peak in the 1990s to about 400,000 in the past few years. There were several management missteps, including adding an upscale hotel, spa, and housing developments, all of which led to the Gardens bleeding cash, eventually having to sell off about 7000 acres (of its 13,000) to cover its debt. In fact, the upscale hotel, which was designed to complement the Mountain Creek Inn, actually ended up diverting guests, even after the Mountain Creek Inn underwent a $3 million expansion. A new CEO was brought onboard in 2015 (he came with a background in resorts and theme parks — including Dollywood and Silver Dollar City) who made some substantial changes, including closing the Sibley Horticulture Center, a greenhouse that was always one of our favorite stops and that was renowned as one of the most advanced greenhouse complexes in the world. That CEO left a couple years ago, and management is now in the hands of HFE Corporation, a company that operates and manages family-oriented theme parks and attractions and is a unit of Herschend Enterprises, the nation’s largest family owned themed attractions and entertainment company.

All of this led to what was a palpable change in the way the Gardens now present themselves. Indeed, even before knowing about the Gardens’ financial woes, we all remarked that it looked like the Gardens was cutting costs and struggling to make ends meet. Besides the closed hulk of the Sibley greenhouse, the grounds themselves were visibly less up-kept, the Mountain Creek Inn is shuttered, and the crowds were noticeably diminished. Plus, there was something incongruous about Callaway Gardens, of all places, closing the greenhouse and garden, while keeping the zip line. To be sure, I like theme parks as much as the next guy, but one would think that a place billing itself as “gardens” would have room for a bench among the flowers.

I’m sure that part of the Gardens’ woes can be attributed to a series of unfortunate external events. Troubles started after 9/11 with the decline in the travel industry, its real estate ventures got walloped by the 2008-2010 real estate crash, it made some bad financial decisions, and it’s certainly suffering right now from the COVID slump.

But I wonder if something else isn’t driving the decline in attendance. Callaway Gardens always sold itself as a place of quiet, introspective beauty. A place of spiritual renewal as much as anything. Obviously, a place to to renew one’s soul is only attractive to people who think they have a soul, which is an increasingly rare belief in America nowadays. And quiet solitude in a place of natural beauty has a hard time competing with the frenetic pace and fractured attention spans of a technology-crazed populace.

All of which may explain why Callaway thinks, probably correctly, that the secret to the Gardens’ future lies not so much in spiritual nourishment as in theme park exhilaration. Whether it can actually build itself up into the kind of would-be theme park that can successfully draw visitors seeking that kind of experience remains to be seen.

But an even bigger question in my mind is whether, succeeding or not, we may lose something of what made Callaway Gardens worth going to, namely that it was precisely not a theme park experience. I don’t know. Maybe the Callaway Foundation, which owns and oversees Callaway Gardens and which is committed to the original Callaway legacy, can strike a balance of attracting enough of the sort of theme-park clientele to keep the gardens going, while preserving enough of the quiet, subtle, natural beauty of the area to provide spiritual nourishment for the rest of us. Or maybe that’s an impossible balance. Or maybe there’s no market for spiritual goods in a world where people find all the affirmation they need in a theme park. We shall see…

April 2021 – No Rules Camping

Over the years, Roosevelt State Park near Pine Mountain has always been one of our favorites. Miles of hiking trails, a lake for fishing, nearby attractions, vicious geese that attack small children … what’s not to like? We were here last four years ago (“Preparing for the Next Big Trip“) with Cliff and all the little girls, so, when Jennifer and her girls had a three-day weekend available, it was back to FDR State Park.

The entire picture album for the trip is here: FDR State Park – April 2021.

And because FDR State Park was one of the places we first went camping when we moved to Georgia, it was also the place where we developed our principles of “no rules camping.” Here’s the deal. When we were raising our kids, we had lots of rules: we go to church and Sunday school every week; you eat what’s put in front of you; you do your chores before you play; TV only if you get all A’s and B’s, and then only 30 minutes per day; we pick your friends; bedtime means bed time; no R-rated movies until you’re 18; and dozens of others. Maybe we had too many rules … that’s one of the things one thinks about in hindsight after the kids are grown: what did I do right or wrong as they were growing up? But, right or wrong, we were basically a rule-based family.

Except when we went camping. Then, perhaps sensing that the little darlings needed a respite from the regimentation of our family life, we established no-rules-camping. It worked like this — when we were camping, there were no rules. You were free to do whatever you want. Really, whatever. Well, not exactly “whatever.” We did have two rules: we had to know where you were, at least within a search-party radius, and the kids could not physically harm each other, at least not seriously (mental abuse was OK). But subject to that, the kids really were free. They could jump on their bikes and go where they chose, head off into the woods, walk into the lake fully clothed (that actually happened), eat or not eat whatever they chose, wipe their worm-baity grubby little hands all over their clothes; stay up until all hours; play in the mud; whatever. We figured that, other than the normal, perfectly acceptable risks of being outdoors (cuts, bruises, broken bones; drowning; ticks; snakes; etc.), there was relatively little harm from easing up on the reins, it was fun (and probably healthy) for kids, and frankly it gave us a few days off from having to constantly socialize the little darlings. And it was fun for us too.

I think rules-based parenting is probably passé nowadays. But even still, there seems to be a delight in the freedom that a camping trip provides. Within minutes of our arrival on this trip, for example, the girls literally ran off into the woods, following the azimuth provided by their geocaching app, in search of some trinket. I don’t remember if we knew where they were or not — we certainly knew that they were on foot so they couldn’t have gotten too far — but it brought to mind memories of countless trips over the years, and the pure joy of watching kids doing what they do best, which is being kids.

What a great trip. We’re already talking about fitting in another three-day excursion this Fall, and I can hardly wait.

March-April 2021: Ft. Wilderness

Oh no! Not another Walt Disney World / Fort Wilderness post?!? Yup. Well, sort of. It was indeed back to the Disney Fort Wilderness campground (for the seventh time in the past nine years, plus a boatload of times before that), but this trip was different. First, it was a full-blown family reunion, and second, it was done during the COVID clamp down.

Family Reunion. With the family spread out over 1000-plus miles of the eastern side of the U.S., getting everyone together takes effort. A lot of effort. Specifically, it required our driving ACE down 400 miles from Atlanta, Cliff hauling his RV 1000 miles down from New Jersey, Summer and the girls flying down from Philadelphia, getting Robert’s RV 100 miles up from Tampa, putting Jennifer and the girls on a plane from Atlanta, and somehow timing arrivals and airport runs to get everyone and all of the RVs in the same place at roughly the same time. Actually, now that I write that, I have no idea how that happened. But, thanks to extraordinary effort by everyone, it did. Amazing.

And it was worth it.

Friday night dinner, before Jennifer and the girls arrived. The bottle of wine on the table is for the adults, except in case of a widespread kid-meltdown, in which case any form of subduing the children is permissible, including forced inebriation.
The Cousins” (as they refer to themselves) at the Ft. Wilderness pool on Saturday. The “campground” is so full of things to do that all we did was to hang around there all day.

Jennifer and the girls, and Robert, Laura, and the boys, all left on Sunday, so the rest of the week was Cliff, Summer, and the girls, along with the two of us. That meant two days of the Magic Kingdom and EPCOT, plus a couple more days of pool time, fishing, horseback riding, some really incredible dinners, and continued lizard catching.

Anyway, I won’t go on and on. The last time the whole family got together was back in the summer of 2019, so this gathering was long overdue. It was great for the grownups to spend time together, but it was even better for The Cousins.

The full family album is available here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/NdkzXPbqS4Zdg2zh8.

COVID. Obviously, a crowded theme park, with tens of thousands of people crammed within inches of each other, is a recipe for a super-spreader event of Biblical proportions. (Think of the angel of death hovering over Fantasyland, with the first-born son of each family dropping dead in the boats on It’s a Small World.) (As opposed to the parents keeling over after they’ve heard the refrain for the 95th time.) To prevent such a thing, Disney implemented a large number of restrictions designed to limit the carnage: only a limited number of people were admitted to the park (although you couldn’t prove it by me) and advance reservations were necessary to enter; masks were required everywhere, and there were warning posted that patrons failing to “properly wear” a “suitable mask” “would be asked to leave”; the lines were rerouted to prevent people from passing within inches of each other, along with signs posted reminding people to maintain a six-foot distance; crowd-producing activities (like the fireworks show) were cancelled; and several attractions were closed. And, for the most part, the guests seemed to abide by the restrictions and everyone seemed to take things in good spirits. As is evident from our pictures, we were fully masked up all the time and no one seemed to much mind.

I must say, though, that some of the restrictions seemed a bit much, more like they were drafted by lawyers, or bureaucrats suffering from the nail clipper syndrome, or by corporate PR types intent on corporate virtue signaling, than by sensible health professionals. Or maybe designed to limit the online complaining by the mask-Nazis who incite social media mobs whenever their sensibilities are offended. In any event, some measures seemed more than necessary. For example, we traveled to and from the Magic Kingdom in open-air boats where everyone, even if the boat was fully loaded, would be masked up, situated several feet apart anyway, in the open air, sitting in a 10-knot breeze as they traveled across the water. Even still, Disney chose to limit capacity on those boats to about one-third. Seriously? People were waiting in line under much riskier conditions, just to limit a situation that hard to imagine posing any realistic risk. Other examples abound: spraying down the seats and tables with disinfectant, plexiglass barriers everywhere, restaurant seating restricted to every-other-table, and so on. In a sense, I suppose, Disney should be commended for taking health measures seriously and trying to make everyone as safe as possible. Nevertheless, the experience could have been better under more sensible management.

After everyone had left, Wendy and I stayed one extra day to decompress and have a relaxing dinner at Narcoosie’s, the waterfront restaurant at the Grand Floridian Resort. As we sat there, running through the events of the past ten days, we agreed it was one of the best RV trips we’re ever had. We’ll savor the memories forever …