The Destinators

The North Coast of Western Nova Scotia

I’ve always had a fascination with travel and for the past 20 or 30 years (give or take a few) whenever Doug or I learned of an interesting place to visit we put a pushpin on an electronic map. (It actually started with a little silver bucket with small pieces of paper and a pen on the bookshelf in our living room – our ‘Bucket List’ bucket – evolving from bookshelf to computer to The Cloud, but the concept still holds.) (We also keep track of the source of each so that friends who made the recommendations receive proper attribution.) Anyhow, as we got close to retiring those e-pushpins were nearly out of control. We’ve now spent a good part of the last 12 years reining things in, tracking and checking off the locations, marking some for a possible revisit, thanking the folks who sent us somewhere, and learning effective strategies to navigate our pushpin map.

So, here we are in Nova Scotia.

Rig Updates for 2026

Our motorhome is 18 years old! Last year‘s travels began with new tires all around, new leaf springs, and some heavy-duty rear shocks, then out on the road we got a new engine control module and starting battery, also a new water pump for the living quarters when the original one failed. This post reviews a couple of significant updates and upgrades we made in preparation for this year’s travels.

Saint John, NB

Saint John, NB (not to be confused with Saint John’s, NL), is the oldest incorporated city in Canada, and the 2nd largest city in New Brunswick. Its location where the Saint John River meets the Bay of Fundy made it the perfect spot for heavy industry and shipping. The city now boasts of reinventing itself as it modernizes and expands into more high-tech industry, tourism (it’s now a major stop for cruises on the east coast) and the arts.

Campobello Island

Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada is just across the short Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge from Lubec, ME. Not quite 1/3 of this island is taken up by the Roosevelt Campobello International Park, jointly administered by Canada and the US, preserving Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s summer home and surrounding land.

Lubec, ME and Superlatives

There are several places we could have chosen to cross into Canada from Maine. As superlatives nerds, we chose Lubec, ME because it’s the easternmost town in the continental US. OK, it’s also a cute little coastal city with shops, restaurants and a great hardware store. Also the easternmost campground, Sunset Point RV Park, which happens to be a great place to spend a couple days of R&R after the reunion festivities. Just outside of town is the West Quoddy Lighthouse, the easternmost point in the continental US.

Lewiston, ME

The very first stop on this year’s journey was at Bates College, where I and my Bates ’76 classmates came together to celebrate our Fiftieth College Reunion.

Garden refresh

We were positively gleeful, back in 2024, when the power company informed us they would take down 4 large trees in front of our house that were interfering with their power lines. We had been thinking about hiring someone to do that since the trees were old, overgrown, misshapen, not healthy looking, hanging over the roof on our 2nd-floor bedroom and rubbing against the siding in our kitchen. They also created a dark, damp corner in our house.

Maybe once they’re gone we could do some landscaping and turn the now open space into a garden bed…

We’re off like a rocket!

We’re at a point in our travels where we want to fill in some blank spots on our map. This year, we’re aiming to capture a bunch of of e-push pins in the Maritimes and Quebec. So, here we are already in Lubec, ME (the subject of a future post) where we can throw a rock into New Brunswick!

Our departure was unusual for this trip. Doug’s 50th college reunion (already in the past, another future post) dictated a fixed departure date. A month before departure day, we had one distraction/interruption after another – hiccups in our planned upgrades to the RV electrical system (future post), delays in a landscaping update for the house/yard (future post), toe surgery and dental extraction for Sue (no future post!), meeting with a new ophthalmologist and a new set of eye drops for Doug (same). That left us barely enough time to pack, and none at all to write up this intro post before leaving…

Fortunately, in our 12th year of doing these trips we know pretty much what we need. We loaded everything into the RV, shut the doors and headed east. We’ll re-sort our way through the packing when we have a chance…

Home

This time we made it! Yes, we finally got to visit the south west! And yes, we really enjoyed it. This, combined with our travel experience from last year’s trip, gave us the confidence to… linger a bit on the way back. After visiting friends and family between LA and San Diego, we took a couple of days off by ourselves in Huntington Beach to just soak up a bit more SoCal vibe and savor some quiet time on the coast before turning around and starting the return trek across the country. It would start to snow at home in less than a month.

Return to The Compound, Los Lunas, NM

In 2014, before this blog began, even before RV travel entered our lives, Sue and I traveled to a blues jam near Augusta, ME. This event was run by a high school teacher and tennis coach with a serious guitar habit who calls himself “Cowboy” in the BGU forum, though his real name is Wilbur. At Wilbur’s jam, we met a whole bunch of cool people from the Blues Guitar Unleashed forum, including one who had chosen “sloslunas” for his forum name, likely because his first name is Steve, which starts with “S,” and he lives in Los Lunas, NM.

But that was my first jam of any kind, my first time playing my guitar in public, the first time I ever plugged into an amp and played at stage volume – a whole bunch of firsts. At one point Steve came to me, acting real serious, and then he told me I was a player (“You’re a player, man!”). I found that to be incredibly encouraging, uplifting and enabling. We became friends. When Sue and I started all our traveling, we stopped in to see Steve and Hy in Los Lunas. That was in April 2017, way too long ago. Though we’ve tried a few times to get there again, each of those efforts was thwarted – until this year!*