March 23-24 Packed 3 months worth of backpacking food. Schlepped camping supplies out to van. Tried to stuff everything of mine into one tote - including my backpack, hiking poles, spare tent, and 3 pounds of red licorice. Went crazy. Realized my PocketMail device and my cell phone are missing in action. Cleaned my room again and again, tore the place up looking for it. Still haven't found it.... |
March 22nd When the daytime temperatures are in the low 40's and the nighttime temps get below freezing, the sap starts to run. Early spring in Vermont is the time for Maple Syrup runs and sugar on snow parties! This weekend is open sugarhouse weekend. Sugar houses all across Vermont are open, offering sugar on snow and activities for the public. We took a break from working today and went to the Morse Farm Sugar Shack. |
February 9th We said bye to Alby, and hit the road north. We drove to Osceola National Forest to meet up and hang out with the Escapees RV'ers. Zeke decided he wanted to drive. |
March 8th Mom and Zeke caught up on their snoozing this morning while I worked on updating the web pages. We drove over to Alby's motel room and plugged the modem into his phone to update the website. It felt very illicit. They had a computer set up in the motel lobby and charged people $5 per half hour to use the internet. After uploading the site and downloading our mail, mom and I hit the road towards Kissimmiee. We browsed the isles of Camping World for hours, marveling at all of the cool things we had never known existed. My favorite thing was the electric weenie/marshmallow turner. |
By the time we excaped camping gadget hog heaven, we were starving! We pulled into a resturant called "Iron Chef". If you're a fan of the Food Network, you may have watched a cooking show by the same name. If you haven't, you should! It's a hoot. Well, the resturant was packed! I only saw 2 empty parking spaces. When you go inside, you find out why it's so popular. There are at least 150 buffet items, each more delicious than the last. They had heaping piles of king crab legs, shrimp, mussels, oysters, lobster, and just about every dish made with beef and chicken you could think of. They had numerous varieties of sushi, endless condiments (including some eye watering wasabi!), a huge cooler of ice cream, an entire table of fresh fruit, fried plantains, tons of finger foods, spring rolls, egg rolls, chicken fingers, stuffed mushrooms, and on and on and on .... Mom and I hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch ... so we really pigged out. We weren't the only ones. Almost every table had an extra plate filled with empty crab leg shells. Most tables seemed to go through a pound or more of crab apiece. DROOOOOOLLLLL.........I'm surprised we didn't burst. I think I had 4 heaping plates of food. |
February 9th We said bye to Alby, and hit the road north. We drove to Osceola National Forest to meet up and hang out with the Escapees RV'ers. Zeke decided he wanted to drive. |
I climbed up a fire tower that night to watch the sun set. It was really neat to look down into the landscape I had been hiking in. Being so high up made me realize just how flat Florida is. As you can see from the picture, there is nary a bump or a mountain in the horizon! |
March 10th Ever since I was born, mom has had a dream that she and I would be thousands of miles apart when a war would break out...making it extremely tough for her to find me again. The past few nights she has been having nightmares, which are very unusual for her. They've involved dead, broken bodies, world war, and intense separation anxiety, with us being far apart and unable to find each other again. The week preceding these dreams has been filled with little mishaps and strange happenings... For starters, her oxygen concentrator quit working a few days ago. The only place we can get it repaired is back in Vermont, as it's a loaner piece of medical equipment. Mom's neurology doctor refused to write a refill for her drug Mestinon until Mom came back and saw her personally. Mestinon is the wonder drug that Mom started taking recently, that allows her to walk without needing an electric wheelchair, breathe without too much difficulty, speak without slurring her words, etc. etc. She needs to take it every 2 hours, or her body ceases to function very well. Needless to say, going without Mestinon was not an option! There were a bunch of other little things that made it necessary to come back to Vermont. Mom's other doctors wanted appointments with her, the car needed to be inspected, we both needed to do our taxes, and Peter may be going to California to work for a few months, making it impossible to see him for who knows how long... I had been planning to have mom drop me off at the start of the Appalachian Trail so I could hike, while she went home to do important things. Last night we stayed up late talking, and I decided to go up north with her. She fell asleep and slept better than she had the entire week - no bad dreams. So, this morning we packed up and hit the road. We drove and drove and drove and drove some more. We passed our favorite tacky place, South of The Border. |
All day we passed platoons of Army vehicles heading both directions on I-95. There were tanker trucks filled with diesel, open air personnel carriers, Dessert Storm style Humvees, and van load after van load of sleepy Army men, leaning on their duffle bags as they stared at the passing landscape. |
In addition to the hundreds of official Army vehicles, there were dozens of private semi trailers hauling additional Army equipment. It was very creepy. That night Mom and I slept at a truck stop somewhere in Virginia. The familiar, steady purr of diesel engines put me to sleep quickly ... I was out like a light. |
March 11th We got up and on the road sometime around 6:30 AM. As we neared Baltimore, Maryland, mom veered off of I-95 and headed for Glen Burnie, where we knew a Krispy Kreme store to reside. We had been to the Krispy Kreme store before, but had no idea how to get there. Relying on a hunch, we drove 15 miles in an east northeast direction, and bumped into it. Even more miraculous was the fact the the "Hot Donuts Now" sign was on!!!!! |
When the sign is on, they're churning out fresh glazed donuts, straight from the conveyor belt to your mouth. You can watch the donuts travel up and down their little donut elevators, the donuts starting as little rings of dough at the beginning, and transformed into poofy rings of perfection at the end of their travels. They exit the |
donut elevator straight into a river of hot oil, where they are cooked the perfect golden color ... whereupon they are mechanically flipped over, and golden browned on the opposite side. The donuts ride along the conveyor belt to drip dry, and run straight into a glorious, cascading waterfall of glaze. |
The donuts slide out of the other side, positively glistening with glaze. Then they are taken off the conveyor belt by employees gently picking them up via a chopstick slid into the donut hole, so as not to damage the glaze. We ate half a dozen straight off of the line. I have quite seriously entertained the idea of opening a Krispy Kreme franchise up here in Vermont. The closest store I know of is located 500+ miles to the south of us. Well, we drove and drove some more, and reached the Vermont border right around 8:30 PM. We yakked to the guys at the welcome center for a long time. |
Originally we were planning on staying at a truck stop somewhere for the night, but getting to the border energized mom. I crawled into the bed and conked out, while Mom drove on. I woke up again at 11:30 when Mom turned off the key - we were home, in our driveway! We all piled into the ATV and rode into the house. My teeth were chattering a mile a minute. Looking at the thermometer, it read 20 degrees. That was about 60 degrees less than we had experienced less then 48 hours ago. Can you say temperature shock? BRRRRRRR!!! |
I stayed up until 2 AM tending the fire, to make sure it would stay toasty warm all night. |
March 14th Unpacked the van, made a complete mess of the house, and are in the process of making everything neat again. Went to the first of 6 doctor's appointments today. Made arrangements to finally take my road test, and hopefully get a driver's license. Vaccumed my house, chased the dog around, took out the old van mattress and put in a futon, and read lots of magazines. We'll be back on the road and headed down south in a week or so. Then back to hiking! |
March 15th - 21st The past week has been one big blur. Our to-do lists seemed to stretch on forever. As I write this though, almost everything has been checked off! I have been stripping off paint, sanding the naked wood, applying 3 shiny new coats of red paint, and polyurethaning the insides of drawers, as well as the van instrument panel and drink console. We totally reorganized the van layout and storage. Now we have two dressers and two custom plywood cabinets for storing all of our supplies. I tore up the old stinky rug, and laid down a new one. We also splurged and bought 9 drawer pulls for 89 cents apiece at Home Depot. Now everything matches. |
Zeke has a ton of room to stretch out now. He has his own rug on the top of the big dresser. Now he can lay on it with his nose out the window, and watch the cows as we drive by. Look Zeke ... cows! (Zeke really likes cows) |
We've put in a nifty food and cooking supply box where our computer used to reside. It's a HUGE improvement over the last storage system. Everything about our new van setup is a huge improvement. Now that we've lived in it, we have a better perspective on what we really need. |
I'm ready to hit the road soon. I'm getting cabin fever! The little snow-covered triangle is the front entrance to our underground house. We still have a ton of snow. |
March 22nd When the daytime temperatures are in the low 40's and the nighttime temps get below freezing, the sap starts to run. Early spring in Vermont is the time for Maple Syrup runs and sugar on snow parties! This weekend is open sugarhouse weekend. Sugar houses all across Vermont are open, offering sugar on snow and activities for the public. We took a break from working today and went to the Morse Farm Sugar Shack. |
It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of pure Vermont maple syrup. It requires about 6 trees 35 years or older to produce those 40 gallons of sap. |
Making syrup involves a long, delicate boiling process. When the sap has boiled down to the right consistency, you boil it a tad more for proper sugar on snow. You then drizzle the hot syrup over cold snow. The syrup hardens up and can be picked off the snow with a fork. The proper way to eat sugar on snow is with a donut and some pickles. Mmmmmmm.... |
March 23-24 Packed 3 months worth of backpacking food. Schlepped camping supplies out to van. Tried to stuff everything of mine into one tote - including my backpack, hiking poles, spare tent, and 3 pounds of red licorice. Went crazy. Realized my PocketMail device and my cell phone are missing in action. Cleaned my room again and again, tore the place up looking for it. Still haven't found it.... |
March 25th I woke up at the way too early hour of 6am this morning. I usually get up that early while hiking, but never at home. The reason behind my madness? I had an appointment for a driver's license test at 8am. I tried to get my license the day before I left on this trip in December, but didn't even get out of the DMV parking lot. I was using Peter's car at the time, and |
discovered 5 minutes before my test that it didn't have an operational emergency brake. The first thing the instructor did when coming out to the car was ask me to put on the e-brake. When I told her it didn't work, she snapped her notebook shut and told me that taking a test in the vehicle was impossible without it. I couldn't reschedule either, because they were booked for test taking for the next 2 weeks! Grrrrrrrrrrrr. This time, I planned ahead! I called up my neighbor and arranged to borrow their car for my test. This morning I left an hour early for my test, to get used to driving their car. I practiced hill starts, parallel parking (didn't hit anything!), and various car maneuvers. The emergency brake worked great. When arriving at the DMV this time, I was assigned the third person in line to test. I waited in the car and listened to the radio as the instructor went out with the first person. They came back 15 minutes later. While the instructor was gone with the second person, I checked to make sure the e-brake was still operational. I didn't want to be disqualified again! I moved about a foot ahead in my parking space, then right back. As I was doing so, the instructor came back. He came back 10 minutes earlier than he had with the first person. The guy driving looked very glum. The instructor hopped out of the car, motioned for me to roll down the window, and said "That's it. Your test is over." "Noooo!" I said. "But why?" "You moved the car while nobody was in the car with you. Because you don't have a driver's license yet, you are immediately disqualified. You can't retest today. Godbye." There was nothing I could do, so Peter and I drove back home. I entertained fantasies of running over everybody in the DMV. What a fitting way for them to go. GRRRRR!!! I arrived home in a grouchy mood, to put it mildly. Since the day was already going crummy, I decided to buckle down and do my taxes. Mom and I drove to town, dropped me off at the tax office, and she went to drop off the car to get it inspected. Another $180 repair bill. The van had leaking brake seals. Now it's fixed and inspected. ***** Tax update***** I made $11,000 last year as a self-employed carpenter. Today I went to the IRS for them to figure my taxes. I owe $2000!!!!! Gulp. Not only will it wipe out ALL money saved for this trip, but I will owe a lot more than I have ;-( I'll be home in July looking for a few carpentry jobs so I can continue this hike and finish paying my taxes! |
***** Insert from mother....this has been driving me crazy!!!! I couldn't sleep Tuesday night, said a couple of prayers asking God to give me a clue where to look.....and found them under a pile of junk on Heather's tiny folding chair ;-) ***** |
For kicks, I stopped in at my Dentist's office. When I come back in July, I'm looking at a $222 bill to clean my teeth and seal a sticky spot. Time to go rob a bank .... but you didn't hear me say that. :-) |
There was one bright spot in my day. Wild Roses Gear wrote back and said they'd sponsor me! The guy who wrote the letter was really nice. They're going to give me this really cool pair of rain pants ... they have a zipper from waistband to waistband, so you can pee in the rain without mooning everybody or getting wet. How neat is that? Well, time to get packing. We leave tomorrow. |
