December 18, 2005 Marietta, GA (suburban Atlanta)

Paul Here: Our computer access has been a little less than we expected and our time for writing and posting hasn’t been quite what we had thought as well. We’re wrapping up a few nights in Marietta with my brother and will shoot this off with his high speed access. (I also have photos to post but it appears the computer I'm using doesn't have the necessary "umph" to get them up to the blog. Hopefully I'll get them up within a few days.)

From Leverett, Mass we headed south and spent a night in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey (NW part of the state) with a cousin and among other things got to see what an amazing party palace a young man can make when given a barn, surplus building materials, and numerous neon beer signs from a remodeled tavern. It was impressive.

We then traveled to central NJ and visited relatives in Princeton Junction and stayed with relatives in Kendall Park. I even got to see a picture of my great, great grandmother (I’d be hard pressed to come up with her name.)

Miles and I got to talk trains and electricity with my 3rd cousin at the dinner table. He works in computer security, or maybe computer supported security systems, and spends a lot of time in subway tunnels in NYC. I know we heard plenty of stuff about electricity, but all I really remember is the hand signal for telling a train to stop rather than telling it to keep on going as if the tracks were clear..


From central NJ we took the incredibly inefficient, but scenic route down to Cape May, NJ and then took the ferry across to Delaware. Big seas on the Delaware Bay and, although we didn’t need them, all the sea sick bags on board got used

We rolled into Cherry Hill Campground in College Park Maryland http://www.cherryhillpark.com/ without event and officially started using our camper. As soon as the kitchen table was set up Miles and Jill spontaneously started doing school work. Ruth and I looked at each other in disbelief and bewilderment.

It was there, in our first “setting up for the night in the camper” that we pulled the ReCycle North down comforter out of the garbage bag for the first time. Ruth had assumed I had at least looked at the comforter once before, but I guess I had put a lot of faith in the nice woman who donated it in a garbage bag. I had always been prepared for a blood stain or two since that was what the donor had told me. Instead, the comforter was blood free but had a big slash in it that instantly spewed feathers throughout our camper. A little “duck” tape kept the rest of the feathers in and only a few loose feathers went up in smoke in our electric heater. This less-than-pristine comforter got mangled further the next day when the 3-day old apple cider fermented and let loose out of Miles’s sport water bottle. It left a big apple cider puddle on the comforter which looked an awful lot like urine to anybody passing by the picnic table that I tried to use as a drying rack.

We had a great first evening in DC with cousins before turning in for our very first night ever as a family in the camper at the campground.

The next day, when most people would be sightseeing in DC, we stuck around the campground and took care of long overdue camper chores including buying shelving at Home Depot and stocking up on provisions. At the Home Depot parking lot, a guy with a 4-door full sized Ford pickup with a diesel engine came over to talk “rigs” with me. He had the truck we dreamt of getting if we had wanted to blow a wad of money, and we had the tiny rig that he dreams of getting for a weekend trips to the beach.

And of course, the 6 degrees of separation rule kicked in at the campground on our chores day when I noticed the trailer next to us had Wheatland, Wyoming license plates on it. (Wheatland is about an hour from where I grew up in Cheyenne.) A nice family with 5 kids was in the camper and they readily invited Miles to play on the playground (Jill was back at the kitchen table doing homework).
The Keck family from Wheatland turned out to be great neighbors and invited us to join them on a tour of the Capitol the next day with a house intern from Wheatland. We also got a little time in at the Botanical Garden and the American Indian Museum before doing a covered dish dinner at the campground. We made the BBQ chicken and mac and cheese and they made the potatoes and veggies, and of course, we had too much food.


The campground had a very nice “conference center” with big screen TV, hot tub, laundry, and of most value to us, toilets and showers since it was (and still is a week later in Atlanta) too cold for us to turn our water on. The conference center got used a lot by people who didn’t just need a flush toilet. One night the square dancers met there in full regalia, another night it was jazzercise, and another night it was a holiday party for the campground staff resulting in leftover corn on the cob and burgers being added to our covered dish effort.

We put on too many miles in a day to get from D.C. to Winston-Salem, North Carolina where we met Ruth’s 5th cousin Bob and his wife Brenda. We had 2 great nights there and saw where Ruth’s father went to medical school at Wake Forest University and where his name is prominently displayed on a wall as a distinguished alumni lecturer from the 1970’s. Brenda and I had made similar journeys in Liberia, Guinea Bissau and other west African countries although they were about a decade apart.

We also spent an afternoon at Reynolda House, the Reynolds family (think tobacco) mansion in Winston-Salem. By now, the huge estate is owned by Wake Forest University and it’s not all that different than Shelburne Farms in Vermont. It was originally built in the early 1900’s as a self-sufficient working farm with amazing grounds and buildings. In the sprawling mansion, I was curious to see how the organ pipes in one part of the room were connected to the organ in another part of the room. As I got peered under the organ on my hands and knees, another visitor looked at my rear end sticking up in the air and said, “That’s an interesting view.”

From Winston-Salem, NC we headed SW toward Gaffney, SC. We finally got our tire pressure figured out and I got to use Spanish with the mechanic at the truck stop. (I had been warned that “pencil type” pressure gauges are garbage and it turns out mine was 15 pounds lower than the truck mechanic’s.) With our new, higher pressure, our gas mileage is back up around 12 to 14 mpg. Woohoo!

On to Gaffney, South Carolina with a stop at Kings Mountain Battlefield (http://www.nps.gov/kimo/) on the border of NC and SC. A couple of key things we learned at this Revolutionary War battlefield: The British commander, Ferguson, had had a chance to kill George Washington at an earlier battle elsewhere but chose not to because Washington’s back was turned, and that despite Ferguson’s earlier ingenious invention of a breach loading, quick loading rifle, he blew it at Kings Mountain because he had traditional muskets. So when he secured the top of the mountain, and all of the Patriots attacked, the Brits had to aim downhill and their musket balls rolled out of the barrels of their guns.

In Gaffney we stayed with our superb friends Jima and Steve (Steve test drove our camper in Clover, South Carolina this summer and spent over 2 days in his shop getting it ready for the Big Trip). Jima turned us onto good home cooking and cookie and muffin baking with the kids, and Steve and the kids had fun putting up Christmas decorations including an amazing collection of Santa Clauses made from Mississippi clay. Steve also turned us on to the haute culture of “My Name Is Earl” on television that we all enjoyed despite some of it going over the kids’ heads.

Another “new” cultural experiences is seeing the rash of trashy billboards on the side of the road. Gee whiz, from our sheltered existence in billboard free Vermont, we had no idea of the quantity or disgusting content of billboards targeting lonely truck drivers on the interstate.

We also saw the Cowpens Battlefield (http://www.nps.gov/cowp/ ) in Gaffney on a gorgeous, crisp day. It’s a Revolutionary War battlefield where the Brits got trounced, but much of the interpretive material was taken down getting ready for the battlefield’s 250th anniversary on January 17, 2006.

We learned that there wasn’t much Civil War history around Gaffney because the resident’s back then were too poor to have much to fight over. The rich slave owners lived out near the coast. In fact, most of the richest people in the US at the time of the Civil War were rice plantation owners in coastal South Carolina.

Cashing in on Steve’s excellent connections among auto mechanics in Gaffney, I got a bunch of tailpipe replaced at Nick’s Muffler. I only wish I had brought the kids to experience the muffler shop. They had to turn on the propane fired “salamander” to heat up the outdoor hydraulic lift before they could get the camper up in the air, and it was one of the few shops where the kids could have stood nearby while pipes were being cut and bent. It was the kind of place that had a couple of Bibles and 4 Wheeler magazines next to the big woodstove in the middle of the garage. Nice folks who treated me well and accepted my check based on my connection to Steve.

It was an easy drive down to the Atlanta area and into Marietta. Funny thing about traveling, Ruth’s brother Jim from Colorado is in Marietta this week as well and he joined all of us for dinner for two nights. We were also joined by my nephew Ben, from Casper, Wyoming, who I hadn’t seen in 8 years. (He’s an Audi technician in Marietta.)

As in Gaffney, Miles and Jill have helped put up Christmas decorations here and I believe are baking cookies with Aunt Marcy as I type. They’re probably getting a lot more holiday decorating experience on the road than they would have at home. We’ll have to see what we can come up with to decorate our little camper.

Jill and Miles got to go sightseeing without us yesterday when Marcy and cousin Grant took them out for BBQ and to see the Big Chicken that marks a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint. The Big Chicken was even highlighted at the Georgia Visitor Information Center when we crossed over from South Carolina. Lucky kids, I still haven’t seen it.

The biggest surprise around here was to see Marcy’s amazing bead making shop off the kitchen. With propane and oxygen lines coming in through the window, and boatloads of glass rods, the place is decked out. Jill was in la-la land sorting through all the rejects and brother Jim went back to Colorado with a custom necklace and earring set for a lady there.



After a sluggish start Friday morning (becoming a bit of the norm for us) we decided it was too late to battle traffic into downtown Atlanta for the MLK sights and we instead hit two sites out here in the burbs. We hit the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History http://www.southernmuseum.org/ in Kennesaw and the Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield http://www.nps.gov/kemo/index.htm

We spent most of Saturday at the Martin Luther King sites in downtown Atlanta. Very powerful stuff. As part of the impact, we were reminded how much Black Americans gained during Reconstruction including sending numerous Congressmen and 2 Senators to DC, only to lose so much to Jim Crow laws of the 20th century. http://www.nps.gov/malu/

Today, Sunday was a great day spent with Ben Lamberson and others. Ben, a superb auto mechanic, successfully installed our radio/cd player in the dashboard and fixed Grant’s “pocket rocket” that stands about 15 inches tall. We took turns ripping around the subdivision on it before heading out to dinner. Dinner at the Marietta Diner included a whopping portion of broiled scallops that overwhelmed poor Miles and dessert included a trip across the street to Krispy Kreme for “fresh off the belt” donuts.


We head out early Monday morning for a tour of the power plant at Lake Juliette (my idea. I’ll explain later.) And then a turn toward the west to points unknown.