The Destinators – Page 10

Stump Sprouts v. 35

Since 1987, with a scant handful of exceptions, a wonderful group of friends have gathered on Memorial Day weekend for a same-time-next-year event at Stump Sprouts in the Berkshires. Though we’re charter members of this group, due to our summer travels (up to 2019) and COVID (2020-2021), we’ve missed this annual rendezvous for the past few years. Since we’re in New England for this spring and summer, we were filled with joy when we learned the MemDay SS Weekend was on this year, and there was room for us to rejoin!

Variations on adventure

Early May is when we usually leave for our summer adventures. After missing 2 adventure years due to covid, we took a deep breath, put our least emotional and most rational hats on, and decided to sit out one more year. Covid uncertainty abounds in New England right now and projections about if, when and where new waves may occur over the summer are up in the air. I also had another shoulder surgery in late March, for which a solid few months of physical therapy will improve the outcomes significantly – and that’s much easier to accomplish at home than on the road.

So instead, we have a different kind of adventure this summer. We are planning to do some short trips to explore New England and hang with local friends and family. We’ll be responsible adults and take care of some much-needed, deferred maintenance on our home. And of course, music will continue. Stay tuned…

A classic Vermont fall

Fall in New England is a delight. The weather turns cool and crisp, all outdoor chores get done to prepare for winter, and the leaves turn into a colorful palette of bright reds, oranges, and yellows mixed in with a bit of peach and burgundy. Since we’ve been traveling in September and October for the last 6 years, we were looking forward to the fall foliage display as we’re in Vermont this year. It did not disappoint!

The Rendezvous

Our loyal readers will recognize The Truck, first spotted at the Ermine Hill trailhead parking lot in Denali State Park in Alaska in 2019. It was spotted again several times in Alaska (it’s a very huge state but there are very few roads, so that’s not a very big surprise…) before we actually got together with Dean and Dawn in Seward, Alaska. That rendezvous was so much fun that we knew we’d make others happen. We later missed each other by a day at Tombstone Provincial Park near Dawson City, Yukon – kind of a bummer, though we knew there’d be other opportunities.

Because we’re not traveling this summer, we were doubly elated when we found out that Dean and Dawn were traveling through Vermont. Another rendezvous, literally in our back yard (and our front porch, back porch and kitchen)!

Home

Home again! After a delightful visit with my mom, great meet-ups with friends along the way, and exploring a few new-to-us sections of the Atlantic coast, we’re back in Vermont.

We made a decision not to plan an epic adventure trip for this summer – we felt there was still too much uncertainty about the virus – and this short trip confirmed that decision. Although the threat from the virus is waning, it’s not over and collateral effects continue. The border with Canada is still closed. Several museums, visitor centers and other attractions we’d hoped to visit were also closed – many because they did not have enough staff to operate.

We’re happy to spend another summer in Vermont, which is nearly back to normal. We really appreciate the beauty, pace of life and outdoor activities here, and we love spending more time with our friends.

Simsbury, CT

It’s funny how when we’re leaving for or returning from a trip, we’re a bit excited and tend to have long first and last days on the road. As a result, we don’t often stop to visit friends inside about a 4-hour driving radius from our home. That means a visit to Mark and Linda in Simsbury had become long overdue (though it’s not like we haven’t seen them at all – two of our meet-ups in the past 5 years have been on intersecting RV trips: one in Memphis, TN and another in Page, AZ).

The Outer Banks

We’d never been to the Outer Banks. What are these things? What’s out there? They are a chain of long, thin islands shielding the coast of North Carolina, although they’re not normal islands. They’re more like sand dunes, evolving by the minute from the wind, tides and waves, and slowly shifting the Outer Banks south and west over time. They’re long, over 100 miles (the inlets between the islands close up and form anew in different places with time and the storms), and quite narrow, from a few hundred feet to 3 miles wide, and they are low, with an average elevation of 12 feet above sea level.

Beaufort, NC

There is in this blog another post with a very similar opening photo to this one. In that post, we introduced our readers to Walker, who lives with our friends Hope and Carlos in Beaufort, NC. But the photo above is recent, and Walker is almost five years older here than in the previous photo, and don’t we all wish we could have aged as well as he!

Murrells Inlet, SC

My cousin, Sam (aka Cecile), is 17 years older than I am. She got married and moved away about the time I was learning to walk. Like her sister Jeanette, we didn’t really get to know each other back then. (I did get to know their older sister, Helen, who stayed nearby.) Sam moved back to our home town just months before I headed off to college and I met her once. Since then, we’ve met each other mostly at funerals. We vowed that we would connect sometime simply for fun. That time finally happened.

Myrtle Beach, SC

Dorothea Taylor is one of my favorite instructors at Drumeo, my favorite online drum education program and drumming community. She’s relatively new to Drumeo, having joined the instructor team about 2 years ago. However, she’s not new to drumming, nor music education – she’s been playing for 56 years and working with students for almost as long! Dorothea preaches the benefits of using rudiments (think marching bands – yup, she started out in a drumline) on the drum kit – and rudiments are what I most need to learn to take my drumming to the next level. Her no-nonsense, disciplined teaching style resonates with my learning style.