Friends & Family – The Destinators

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!*

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.

San Diego, CA

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!

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.

Malibu, CA: VT-ID connection

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?

Rancho Palos Verdes – reunion

We all met on the same day – June 23, 1984. Judy, Doug and I (along with 9 other excited bicyclists) arrived in Portland, OR for the start of TransAm Eastbound 0624, a bike tour organized by Bikecentennial (now Adventure Cycling). Self-supported, we’d pedal our bikes across the country from Portland to Virginia Beach, carrying all our own gear on the bikes, for the next 90 days. You do get to know people pretty well by being together on the road, through super highs and lows, in that much time!

BGU/DEN: Parker, CO

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.

Parker, CO

As mentioned in Doug’s post, the uncertainty of how long we’d be waiting for RV repair was unnerving. Sitting day after day in a dimly lit hotel room with only a bed and 2 chairs at the Quality Inn behind the Mercedes repair center would get old fast. And although we were surrounded by shopping malls with a huge choice of chain restaurants, the prospect of visiting those twice a day for more than a couple of days had limited appeal. We needed a change of attitude, a plan B. After all, people fly into Denver for vacation all the time without RVs. What do they do? What could we do without our RV?

St Louis and Columbia

Photo of the 150-year old Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River (Missouri History Museum)

A favorite part about being in the midwest is catching up with members of my family that we don’t get to see very often. With the A/C saga behind us, we aimed for Missouri where temps were forecasted to hover around 100. Does the outdoor thermometer on the RV get to 3-digit numbers?