I thought I was done thinking about Shawnee here in southern Ohio, but I’ve got one last entry about the weekend in this campground. Things Tracy and I have said just in the last 24 hours: I never thought I’d want to call the police twice in one week. I hope that entire family […]
AM Hikes, PM Lounge
This place, Ohio’s Shawnee State Park, is really growing on me. On the advice of a couple of friends (hi, Melissa M!), I’m reading Blue Highways by a fellow named Least Heat-Moon. He reminds me how travelers set themselves up for failure by assuming what a place will be like before they get there. Perhaps […]
Living Between Two Worlds
I feel like I’m in a Star Trek episode where the transporter has malfunctioned (in the future no one says, “broken”), and I’m stuck between two planets. It’s not as bad as the time in The Next Generation when Geordie and Ro got stuck walking around the Enterprise like ghosts and had to figure out […]
Calm and Quiet
I’m still here at Savage River State Forest, sitting in a camp chair overlooking the rushing creek at the back of our site. I’m watching a water thrush hop from one moss-covered rock to another. He has a long, fluffy, white insect in his beak. I feel too lazy to pick up the binoculars to […]
Five Days in the Hollow
We’re in Savage River State Forest, which isn’t really a hollow (“holler” for you non-Southerners). It’s a deeply wooded, steep valley that feels like a hollow, but it’s actually up in the Allegheny Mountains of Maryland, near Sleepy Creek. I started calling it a hollow as soon as we got here, when I broke out […]
Goodbye Quarantine Campground
Well, that’s not a fully accurate headline, since we’ll be even more isolated where we’re going, but I will always think of this first campground we came to and got “stuck” at as our quarantine campground. We meant to come for a weekend and we stayed for two months. I can’t say often enough how […]
Campground or Crazy Spring Break?
Long-anticipated Memorial Day weekend—and only the second weekend that Virginia has opened campgrounds to vacationers—began here on Thursday, as RVs pulled up the long drive in and slowly filed all the spots in this ~200-spot campground. Seriously, 200 spots, and this place is now filled. All despite the fact that local hospitals are at their […]
Grateful for Friends and Family during the Lockdown
We leave this campground in less than a week and have lots to take care of before then, but before we leave I want to thank local friends and family who’ve helped us out. They all think they’ve played small parts, but really they’ve made our new life possible. Laundry Sanctuary 1) Thanks to Mary […]
Fluid Travel Plans
We haven’t moved yet and already we’ve changed travel plans several times. I hear from folks on the road that you have to find your own comfortable balance between set reservations and winging it, so we’re busy working on that from a stationary point. 🙂 Destination: Ohio Seriously, what’s got us flipping around our most-recent […]
Trip down the Super Highway
A big thank you to my cousins Lisa and Robin for inviting us out to a family farm nearby for a much-needed day in the woods. I know, we’re already in the woods—but here in the campground we’re surrounded by strangers, whereas out in the middle of several hundred acres of farmland and wilderness, the […]
