Westward Ho!

We feel like we're finally on track. We had repairs to the car in Nashville, repairs to the rig in Alabama, and then a dead car battery in Missouri. Now we're in Topeka, headed back to Colorado for about 2 weeks, then westward towards the northwest.

We enjoyed Nashville very much. Scenic tours, river boat cruise/lunch, walks in Nashville's downtown Centennial Park, etc. Lots of bbq, sweet tea and pie! I have to admit I've had fun eating southern food. Even Fanta Grape, a soft drink full of questionable chemicals, judging from the taste, but a flavor I haven't had since I was a kid. Boy, that was definitely a trip on the way-back machine! I guess now that we're out of the south, no more Fanta Grape.

Nashville got pretty hot and humid so, while we waited (2 weeks) for the car to be repaired, we went to the mountains near Gatlinburg. Very nice RV park - spacious, pretty, lots of trees. Very refreshing! We went to a show in Pigeon Forge, TN called American Hit Parade - pop songs from the 50s through the 80s. For some reason they didn't include the Beatles or the Stones. :) Quite fun! They even sang "Sweet Caroline"!

I visited several quilt stores in the area. That was delightful, too! More fat quarters, of course.

Then back to Red Bay, Alabama. They called on Saturday before Memorial Day and said they had an opening on Tuesday if we could get there. We made it! Getting up for their 7 a.m. start time was a shock! But they finished some warranty work (our ceiling was sagging) in a day, and we were off again. 

We've missed weeks planned for Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Albuquerque. Now that weather is so bad in some of those areas, we decided to go straight through to Colorado. We had decided early on not to drive more than about 300 miles in a day, so we stopped in southern Missouri for the night and then on to Topeka. We're taking a day off today to get caught up on paperwork and maintenance. This is a fairly large campground with spacious sites. It is surrounded by lush trees but the camping area is completely cleared. And it's right next to a busy highway. So only two pie slices. On the other hand, although it is pretty full, we don't hear people noise. Most parks ask for quiet time from 10 to 7 and people do respect that. Thank goodness!

I'm having trouble figuring out what time it is. Some of our devices automatically change time zones and some don't. Our iPads only change if they get connected to the internet, and we don't always need to connect. Right now most of my clocks say 12:30 and one says 1:30, so I'm guessing it's 12:30. Very confusing! One more time zone change when we get to Colorado, and one for the west coast. Then maybe we can get everything sorted out for a while.

Still having problems with pictures. I take lots of them, but can't seem to get them from my phone to my computer. Any suggestions?

I enjoy all your comments! Please keep it up!

Motherhood

I've been thinking a lot about mothers lately, for some reason. A friend reminded me recently that every child has a different mother than his or her siblings. For example, the first child drops a pacifier and you sterilize it carefully before giving it back. When your second child comes along, you pick up the dropped pacifier, blow off the visible carpet fibers and give it to the child. The first child's baby book is full of pictures and notes (I kept a diary for the first and only time during my daughter's first year). Your second child is lucky to have his/her name in the book, let alone notes on what gifts you received when he/she arrived!

But there are bigger changes that take place for a mother. You have more (or fewer) responsibilities. Your relationship with your partner is different. You are more (or less) tired or depressed or content than you used to be. All of this impacts your children, of course. (I know you moms out there are resonating with these words. Dads - maybe not so much.)

My sisters are 7 and 8 years younger than me. My childhood and that of my older brother had a father at home. My sisters didn't. That made the level of stress on my mother and my sisters quite different while they were young. Just ask them!

But as Marv said recently, the goal is not to be a perfect mother. It's to do the best you can with the situation you are in and the background you came from. I sure hope my kids think that way, too!

My mother is quite a woman. She grew up in a time that women didn't work very often, but her mother did. I'm sure that affected her expectations for herself. And when she grew into adulthood, she had a different view of life from many of her peers, including my dad. She is a very intelligent, well-educated woman who wanted to contribute to the world through a career, and she did so for 50 years or so. I'm sure that impacted my expectations when I grew up!

Mom summarizes her life with three songs. Bridge Over Troubled Waters (Simon & Garfunkel) refers to her life of counseling as a missionary, college professor and dean, and private counselor. The Impossible Dream is how she describes her desire to be an ordained minister, which she achieved at age 60. I asked her one time when she felt called to the ministry, and she told me she was 19 at the time. No wonder it felt like an impossible dream! The third song she talks about (and any of you who know her know how appropriate this is) is I Did It My Way. She has always marched to her own drummer. She never goes to breakfast at the facility where she lives, and they have accepted that she's not a morning person. Just don't ask her to be happy about a 5 a.m. fire drill!

I think given her background and history she probably did the best she could. That makes her a successful mother. We still have some issues, but I can let a lot slide now that I understand her better - and also understand me better. She gets five pie slices.

We attended "Motherhood - the Musical" this week. It is a locally written play, but should be everywhere. It is hysterical! (For some reason, most of the audience was women. Marv was a little out-numbered, but he's a good sport.) The play concerns one woman who is about to give birth to her first child, and three neighbors who are "experienced" mothers, telling her some of what to expect. It ranges from the excitement of finding a bargain at Costco to the constant demands of children to the joys of being special because you're "Danny's Mom." Four pie slices for sure.

The Athens of the South

The motto for the company that built our motor coach is "roughing it smoothly." I guess when you have a washer/dryer, convection/microwave and TV, it's not exactly camping. But it's as close as I want to get.

We have figured out that we are doing what people on vacation do - seeing the sights, trying to find shows, going to museums - but at a much slower pace. That works for us, especially since we have to stay in Nashville at least two weeks to get the car taken care of.

Yesterday we visited The Hermitage, Pres. Andrew Jackson's home. It has been restored after years of neglect, and most of the furnishings (including some wallpaper) is original (with some reproductions). That they managed to pull together so much of the Jacksons' original furniture and decorations is amazing! The grounds are very large and beautiful. The original garden area has also been restored with many historical roses along with iris, peonies, even columbines! And one stretch of herbs for cooking and medicine: basil, thyme, feverfew, yarrow, etc.

The displays in the museum covered Andrew Jackson's life and accomplishments. He was apparently a very good general, a forward-thinking president, and absolutely brutal to local Native Americans. He's the reason for the Trail of Tears. I feel so sad when I think that certain groups have always been persecuted and denied their rights, and that it continues today. I keep hoping we are making progress. We've a long way to go.

Today we took a "hop on, hop off" tour. We love these because you get to see all kinds of places, and can get on and off all day if you want to spend more time at any of them. We rode most of the way through the tour and got off at Nashville's Centennial Park, created for (guess what?) the State Centennial in 1896. At that time there was a huge exhibition and a replica of the Green Parthenon in Athens. Well, not a replica but an attempt to recreate the way the Parthenon looked at its finest. Huge columns, big honking statue of Athena (gilded yet!), and the pediments with the statues now known as the Elgin Marbles (in England, I believe). Hence Nashville's nickname, the Athens of the South. Lots of people there, like a group playing some simple rhythm instruments while a couple danced / fought. I couldn't decide if they were practicing mixed martial arts or doing athletic dancing. It looked like the musicians had several extra instruments which they handed to passers-by. Why didn't I offer to play my tambourine!?

Are we having fun yet?

Happy May Day! Did your special someone bring you flowers? Mine brought M&M's which won't last even as long as flowers. Oh, well, it's the taste that counts, right?

I stand chastized. I complained about the little town in Alabama, only to have my face rubbed in the fact that the people are what make a town worth more pie slices. We were driving the rig, towing the car, towards somewhere in this small town, and got lost. It's not possible to back up when you're towing a car, so after making a few fruitless turns and finding smaller and smaller roads and no town, we finally reached a place where we just had to turn around, and there was not enough room to pull forward and around. We had to unhook (15 minutes or so) and hook up again (another 15 minutes). A fellow in a truck stopped to see if we needed help. (A Samaritan? Several had "passed us by on the other side.") We said we were fine, and he drove on. 10 minutes later we pulled up behind him. He had stopped to wait for us, and asked if we were lost. We said yes, and he took the time to not just give us directions, but lead us where we wanted to go! Now that's a neighbor.

(Also we discovered Mr. J's, which has very good pizza and delicious pecan pie.)

So, my apologies to Red Bay, Alabama. You ARE worth stopping for!

Most of the damage to our RV is fixed but we have to go back to Alabama in about a month for the sagging roof, not from the hail. Meanwhile, we're now in Nashville. (If you have to kill time, why not have fun, too?) Looking forward to revisiting churches Marv served while in seminary, plus tourist highlights like the Parthenon and Ryman Auditorium as well as the schools we attended, Vanderbilt and Scarritt.

We'll also have the repairs done to our car while we're here. It will take a couple of weeks. I wish you could see the 50 hail dents in the roof of the car but the picture doesn't really show it. You'd need special lighting, I think. Most of the car panels will need to be replaced. I'm glad I'm not paying for it! Marv wants to get a new paint job so the car matches the RV. Whatever.

I mentioned slides the other day. I'm not talking about photo slides. If you've never been in a fairly recent motor home, you may not know what I'm talking about. You see an RV on the road and it is the shape of a bus, about 8' wide. But when you stop at your camping site, you slide out the side walls (above the bottom 4') of part of your RV about 2-3 feet, so your width is now 12 or 14'. We have 2 slides on each side, two in the front of the bathroom (from behind the driver's seat through the kitchen) and 2 in the bedroom. It sure makes things more livable! The bathroom is the only area on our rig that doesn't expand. Think of us as the shape of a squarish wasp and you'll have it.

Every time we open the slide that holds the refrigerator we cross our fingers. It's a lot of weight to hang out over nothing! But so far, so good.

This campsite is hopping! Lots of people here for the weekend and live music at the gazebo starting pretty soon. Let's party!