sue – The Destinators

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.

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.

Death Valley National Park

We’d really wanted to see Death Valley National Park on this trip – that was right up at the top of our list of reasons for undertaking this repeat visit across the country. Once again, due to the government shutdown we didn’t quite know what to expect, and up-to-date information was hard to find. However, given our recent experience at Joshua Tree, and considering that from Bakersfield we were less than 3 hours from the park, we headed over to check it out. And once again, we were pleasantly surprised! The Death Valley Natural History Association is a non-profit that supports all of the goals of DVNP. They are funding park staff salaries during the shutdown, and the park was nearly fully open! And most of the closures were due to planned improvements or repairs to flood-damaged roads, unrelated to the current budget issues. Our heartfelt thanks to the DVNHA and all of the staff we met in the visitor center and campground for enabling us to have an amazing visit in Death Valley

Bakersfield, CA

Mutual friends introduced us. “You should meet this couple we met! They both play music and travel in an RV with an insane amount of music gear. You’d love them!” So we first got together with Rod and Tanya at their home in Egan SD in 2016, and love them we did! That was our first year out on the road and we learned so much from them about RVing, traveling with music gear, and making music. Mentors! We were humbled that these pro musicians, traveling as RVDreamTour, invited us to jam with them. We were fortunate to cross paths again later that year, in one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever played music in, and once again in 2019.

When we first met, Rod and Tanya were able to work remotely while traveling for months at a time. Although they still do that, their latest work situation requires them to occasionally be on site at several places in the west. They still spend summers in Egan, but winters now in St David, AZ which is nearer to the work sites. We checked in from Palm Springs, when we were about to be heading towards St David and – surprise! – they were in Bakersfield, CA. Well, that’s not very far from Palm Springs, is it? Set a course!

Palm Springs, CA

We became friends with Nancy and David within minutes of meeting them for the first time in 2017. Our friends Mark and Linda had encouraged us all to cross paths in our respective RVs at Lake Powell while we were all out on our own respective adventure trips. We got along so well with Nancy and David (Mark’s cousin and her husband) that we joked about perhaps having been friends in a former life. Despite living on opposite coasts, we’ve connected again several times and enjoyed every minute.

Joshua Tree National Park

We really wanted to visit Joshua Tree National Park as we head east. We didn’t know what to expect with the government shut down, and in this case we were pleasantly surprised. With the help of many volunteers and paid staff from the Joshua Tree National Park Association, a non-profit partner that provides support to JTNP to meet all of its goals, and a skeleton crew of National Park Service staff, the entire park was open and almost fully operational. We made sure to thank all of the volunteers and staff for their time and effort so that we could visit this wonderful place. Several thanked us back for having come despite the shutdown.

So Long, SoCal

We’ve wanted to visit the Pacific Coast in southern California for a long time. It took us a couple of tries, and we finally did it. Yay!

Menifee, CA

My aunt Marcelle, one of my dad’s 15 siblings, was a party girl. Despite having 5 kids, she and my uncle Jerry held at least one major family reunion each summer. My cousin Rachel was about my age, and her brother Brian was close to my brother’s age. The youngest of the brothers, Gary, was 10 years younger than me so when I was about 10, we older girls thought it was fun to hang around with the new baby, forming a bond that lasted over the next few years so we got to know each other pretty well. (Youngest daughter Sharon was born when I was in college and has lived in New England her whole life, so I only got to know Sharon when we were both a good bit older.) And in between, in kind of a no-man’s land, there was Keith.