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.
Continue reading “Rig Updates for 2026”
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.
Continue reading “Lewiston, ME”
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!*
Continue reading “Return to The Compound, Los Lunas, NM”
I’ve “known” Dennard from the Blues Guitar Unleashed forums since he first lit up the stage at the BGU Live jam at Lake Arrowhead, CA in 2018. I wasn’t at that event, but his original songs and charismatic stage presence brought him immediate fame within our online community. This man is a player!
Sue and I first crossed paths with Dennard in person at the 2023 BGU regional jam in Grand Rapids, and again in 2024 in Albuquerque. We were looking forward to jamming a few tunes with Dennard again earlier this month in Parker, but, alas, at the last minute he could not attend due to a family visit. We’d also been looking forward to meeting up with Dennard here in SoCal around this time one year ago, and that was one of the visits confounded by our sudden change of plans. Not this time!
Continue reading “San Diego, CA”
We’ve been friends with Harry and Karen since early in our CT days, when they lived in NY. Our shared history is well explained in this post from 2017, when we visited Harry and Karen at their current home in Boise, but here is a summary: Along with friends Pat and Geoff, we all used to do a fair amount of mountain biking and off-road tandem riding around the northeast, and for a number of years (right up until Sue and I started transitioning to Vermonters) we enjoyed a series of ski trips out west together. Visits slowed down once priorities changed (careers for us, and add raising families for the them). Now, well into retirement (us) or recently retired (them) and all the kids now grown, who knows what might happen next?
Continue reading “Malibu, CA: VT-ID connection”
Blues Guitar Unleashed regional jams have been a regular enough feature in this blog that I’m not going to open this post with another explanation of what they are (although if you need that, see my posts from last year or the year before that). Beginning last December my friend and fellow musician Bob (aka BobbyUT) has been making and tweaking all the necessary arrangements for our gang of blues brothers and sisters to get together this fall in his hometown of Parker, Colorado, just south of Denver, for 4-1/2 days of music and mayhem. That event took place last week, and history was made. Again.
Continue reading “BGU/DEN: Parker, CO”
Well, it was bound to happen at some point. And that point was on I-70, near Grinnell, KS, just after 2:00 on a Friday afternoon, when our engine suddenly quit, every light on the dashboard came on, and we coasted to a stop on the shoulder. Trying to restart the engine failed. Jump-starting failed. We had fuel, the fuel filter wasn’t clogged, there were no ominous fluids leaking from underneath, not overheating, plenty of oil, no smoke, nothing obviously broken or burnt – no failure or problem that I could figure out with my limited skills and automotive knowledge. So we made our first-ever call to the roadside service provider we’ve had on retainer ever since we got the motorhome (Good Sam). They found us a diesel repair shop in Colby, Kansas, about 40 miles up the road from where we were stalled, and dispatched a tow truck to take us up there.
Continue reading “Ohh, Nooo…”
On our last trip through Kansas (nine years ago!), we wrote that Kansas had no national parks for us to see. That changed in 2022 – and that change has (so far) withstood our government’s renewed scrutiny of National Park Service facilities.
Continue reading “Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Park – Topeka, KS”
Sue recently pointed out that our approach to route-finding often places a much higher priority on visiting different places to do interesting things with great people than it does on efficiency or saving time or following a direct route. These priorities brought us not only to Cincinnati, but also to the two Ohio towns in the title of this post.
I want to point out that I am writing perhaps three posts in one right now. The two visits in this post sandwiched the visit in the previous post and the A/C saga spans all three of those, as well as the one before that. In the past, we’ve tried to remain chronologically consistent in our posts, but this shouldn’t be too hard to follow. Still, please pay attention!
Continue reading “Ashtabula and Ostrander, OH, thoughts on route-finding, and the Great Air Conditioner Saga of 2025”
About 5 years ago, we found ourselves in a situation where we each had to travel separately for a while. At that time, I wrote a couple of posts about life on the road, how stuff happens, and you deal with it. Well – as you may have already guessed – deja vu all over again.
Continue reading “An unanticipated repositioning”