Chai's Blog

I don't know about you folks. But the utter insensitivity I experienced this afternoon takes the biscuit. Let me give you the facts.

At 4 this afternoon, I was sitting on the dash of the motor home when a plethora (I believe that means a large number, according to the boss) of mutts began to circle in front of our home. There's this nice little grass open space - usually used by dogs that walk by and pee on, I might mention – and there were suddenly nine or ten dogs parked out there, no more than 12 feet from my nose. They got in a circle when a large lady with an elastic stocking on one leg began coaching the owners of these vermin.

Lord, it was hilarious to watch these pathetic creatures as they circled their owners and seemed to actually pay attention. Can you imagine. They paid attention when they were told to “sit” and to “come”. They always were rewarded by treats when they performed like trained seals, by the way. Tssscchhhh! They can be bought off so easily.

I sat there on the dash and watched these goings-on while I licked my genitals. This is the equivalent of a Muslim throwing shoes at a president. It is my way of saying: “You are nothing but a dog!”

The lesson went on for an hour. There was a moronic bulldog. You know the type: Teeth that don't really fit correctly. They pretend to look ferocious but they're really kind of sad creatures. There was a tiny Yorkie – no more than a pound in weight. I could have taken him down so easily. There were two huge puppies that seemed to be a cross between a bloodhound and a German Shepherd. Now these were a little scary – mostly because I would have had some difficulty bringing them to heel. Maybe I could have done it one at a time. But I doubt I could have managed both simultaneously.

There was a German dachshund with her belly scraping the ground. She needed to be put on the barbecue and then put on a bun with some mustard. A poodle rounded out the top bunch (the rest are not worthy even of mention). There's something really dippy about a poodle. Why do they permit themselves to be carved up with these silly-looking pom-poms?

The boss took me outside and put me on my leash. Oh-oh, that got their attention. The instructor with the elastic bandage on her leg became a wrangler and had a hard time getting these pathetic mutts to pay attention to her. They all were intrigued by your's truly. I just sat on the picnic table and kept an eye peeled for any rogue pooch that might go off the reservation and think he might try his hand are being a hero by threatening me. Fat chance!

In other adventures, the parental units loaded me in our snazzy new car and drove me across the state of Florida this past weekend. They were off to visit an old friend. Turns out the old friend now has a West Highland Terrier. I recognize the boss has a thimbleful of Scottish blood left inside him. And he really seemed to like this Scottish dog. He told a story about a terrier like the one we were visiting who is honored by a statue in Edinburgh, Scotland. The dog was named Greyfriar's Bobby. The dog apparently was so loyal to his owner that when the owner died, he lay on the grave of said owner every day for a number of years until he himself died.

I was VERY nervous about having to share a house with a pooch. But, I must admit, the dog actually was kinda of interesting. First of all, she's a "she" and that seemed to make us mates at a certain level. She had a nasty tendency to sniff my butt as I walked through the house – my God, how I hate that.

But we actually did get along. She kept trying to be buddies by presenting me with her pull toy. I think she believed she and I could co-mingle and be friends. It just isn't in my DNA that I would ever be a friend to a dog. But, if the time ever came when I had to choose a dog with whom I might share a house, I definitely could be lured into living alongside Schotzy, the West Highland Terrier. She doesn't bark and she definitely didn't try to dominate me.

So that's my first attempt at blogging. It is hard to get the paws on the correct keys. Hope you like it.

Things Looking Up

There is nothing in this world - nothing - I enjoy more than bargaining for a new car. It's what gets the juices pumping. Every synapse is firing, the give-and-take sparks energy. All-in-all I'm a pretty happy camper when it come time to negotiating. And I honed these skills with the Vietnamese and Cambodians and, yes, even the Namibians. But the Vietnamese are best when it comes to tough bargaining.

First, we had to dispose of the old Honda Accord. We gave that to the towing people, along with the title. They said they would crush the car because it was no use to man or beast. They simply didn't believe me when I told them this car would be rebuilt in Cambodia. I've seen it done, I told them.

So now we had a find a replacement car. This is not so easy when you have a requirement to tow that vehicle. Most Toyotas, Hyundais, Hondas and many domestic cars don't let you tow with all wheels on the ground.

We looked at a Chevy Cobalt and a Chevy HHR which met the requirement. It was pretty easy to squeeze down the price on these because General Motors is an eyelash away from going bankrupt. And that was a consideration, since warranty issues might come into play.

The salesman didn't want to let these fish off the hook since it was 100 per cent certain that we would be buying a car. But I said I needed to review the repair records and to read the reviews of both cars. When I did that on the Internet, it was impossible to proceed with the purchase. Both get a "mediocre" for reliability score from multiple sites. We transferred our affections back to Honda and the Fit seemed to meet our needs. We made contact on the Internet with various dealers and located new 2008 cars that were discounted. Then we drove to Sarasota, 25 miles south of us, to learn the only 2008 was sold an hour earlier. But the salesman had a fallback position: a 2007 Fit that had - wait for it - 1,494 miles. Those miles were driven by a little old lady. She died and her son brought the car back to the dealership. This was the perfect car from our point of view. So the haggling began. And then it ended in five minutes. The salesman had zero interest in negotiating. "This is the price, take it or leave it." he said. I said I was looking to make an offer of $2,000 less because it is a used vehicle but he was insulted. He didn't care. I suggested he put me with his sales manager and he refused. We left.

The sales manager phoned as we drove back north and we had a pretty good conversation about sales techniques in a crashing economy. He reduced the price some, but not enough. I told him we would think about it but there was an issue of trust that we'd have to struggle with.

Fortified with lunch, but sagging a bit from struggling in and out of our rental car with the massive back brace, we rolled into the Bradenton Honda dealership. We lucked out with an excellent salesman who had a sense of humor. But he still seemed to have a difficulty understanding the concept of serious negotiation. The Fit is a "hot" car right now because it is so fuel efficient. We danced around for a while on a 2007 Honda Fit. I asked to look at the car's manual to confirm that the older Fit could be flat towed and it instantly became clear this was not possible. Honda specifically prohibited the car from being towed for more than 20 miles at 30 miles an hour.

That moved us back to the brand, spanking new, 2009 Fit. There is no prohibition for towing it. Now we were 'way too expensive, of course. But he came down more than $2,000. In addition, he threw in the add-ons that came with the car and it started to look fairly attractive. He asked if there was anything to keep me from going ahead with the purchase.

"Here's my problem," I explained. "I have massive quantities of Scottish DNA, with transfusions of Vietnamese DNA and possible side strains of Chinese and Cambodian DNA. All these require that I perceive that I am getting an actual bargain. And I don't feel that way yet. So we need to see a little movement downward in the price." I told him I needed to see $300 off the bottom line. I told him I'm just an aging cripple, with a broken back, and I'm trying to do best by my bride.

He rolled his eyes and went off for a Coke or to the bathroom, or to check with some grand pooba of sales. I whispered to Jo that $200 off would be fine. He came back in and said the final stretch allowed him to come down $150. It's a deal, I said.

A couple of hours later, we drove home in our spanking new Fit.

All these financial seismic conditions have put a crimp in our plans to head for Alaska. We had budgeted $12-14,000 for that trip. The car ate all of that up (and more) so we think we will park and enjoy Florida's west coast for this winter. This will allow my back to heal...and for Jo's arm to be taken care of. It seems to be healing well. But we are not 100 per cent certain that all of the glass came out.

So the best laid plans of mice and men go down the drain. But we'll rise again.

Oh, He Broke His Back...That's Not Good

Jo and I escaped with our lives last night when I lost control of our car as we returned from an afternoon trip. I had just left the Interstate and was on a little road on our way back to our motor home when a low divider appeared in the road. I swerved but couldn't avoid bouncing the front of the car over the divider (a six-inch high hump in the road). That action seemed to cut off our brakes and we hurtled into the Florida underbrush.
It felt as though we were accelerating instead of slowing down as we flashed past sawgrass and a big melaleuca tree. We sheared off the tree and that seemed to bring us to a halt. The whole windshield was smashed in and Jo'd side of the car was pretty well demolished.
I was gasping for breath and Jo said she was cut on her right arm. Blood streamed from her wounds. I tried to reach for my cellphone but that was pretty painful. I swung open the door and got my feet on the scrub grass. I called 911 and was amazed when I was connected to the emergency services of the county we were in. I was amazed because our cell's number is out of Connecticut, 1,000 miles to the northeast. I told the operator about our situation and she asked me to give my location. I did the best I could but she wanted a cross street so she could triangulate on me. I told her I knew of no cross street and asked if she could not locate me via the GPS in my cell. She managed to do that (ain't technology grand!)
She said EMTs (emergency medical technicians) would be with us in three minutes.
Jo and I saw in the car, surrounded now by mosquitoes as large as seagulls. They seemed interested in Jo's blood and generally in just getting under my skin.
A passing driver spotted our lights and stopped to ask if we needed assistance. I thanked him and asked if he could stay by the road with his flashing lights so he could guide in the EMTs.
They arrived as I was pulled Jo from the car through the driver's side. Her door wouldn't open. The EMTs supported me as I came up to the road, then they secured me on a back board while they took our blood pressure. Mine, amazingly, was close to normal. Jo's was 200+ over something equally outrageous.
We drove off just as the Florida Highway Patrol officer arrived and he said he'd catch up with us at the emergency room of Manatee Memorial Hospital, about 10 miles away.
They moved me into Orthopaedic Trauma and they put Jo in Emergency Triage. A doctor ordered a CT scan on my neck because he feared it might be broken even though I said all the pain was in my lower back. After a couple of hours, the Highway Patrol officer stopped by to give me the report number which he said I'd need for insurance purposes.
He said we both would have been dead had I been speeding but said it was pretty clear to him we were not exceeding the speed limit. He said he thought the car was pretty much a total loss. His report showed an outline of a car with a request that the officer mark an X on any area that was damaged. He had marked an X on every possible place and also noted the windshield had caved in. The two airbags had not deployed, however.
My doctor and a nurse came over with my discharge papers and helped me swing my legs to the floor. When I stood up, however, I let out a scream because of the excruciating pain in my back. It was infinitely worse than four hours earlier. They and another nurse grabbed me and laid me back on the gurney. A nurse shot some magic juice into my thigh and I felt my pain ease while the doctor who now seemed to understand that my pain was not in my upper neck set up another CT scan on my lower back. This showed a compression fracture of my T-12 vertebra. This led to a series of X-rays of my spine which confirmed the fracture.
Now I was going nowhere. They brought Jo to me so I could hand over our cellphone. money and other stuff. Her arm was bandaged. She had bitten her tongue and she also had cuts on her neck. Otherwise she was in pretty good shape. The hospital arranged for a taxi to take her home while I was rolled upstairs.
I spent a restless night - mostly because the guy in the next bed seemed to be in worse shape than me and kept calling out or grunting through the wee, small hours.
Jo returned in the morning and we contacted our auto insurance company where it was confirmed that we are not protected for the damages. But we are covered for the first $10,000 of medical bills before our health insurance kicks in.
We arranged for Jo to rent a car for a week so we can assess our situation and look for a new vehicle.
Jo has to get with an orthopaedic surgeon on Monday to have the chunk of tree removed from deep inside her arm. The emergency room people didn't want to dig too deeply.
The nurse came in to see me this morning and gave me a shot of morphine. This was followed by my usual doctor who told me I would be fitted with a clamshell cast to immobilize my spine. Then a neurologist came back and he confirmed that approach and said I would be able to leave as soon as it was built. Might be a problem to accomplish this on a Saturday, he said. So we'll see what transpires.
We'll keep you apprised of developments.

A Blast from the Past

There may be no greater pleasure than reconnecting with a friend and colleague from 28 years ago and filling in the gaps in our respective lives.
That's what happened today when one of the finest writers I've ever worked with stepped back into my world.
Michael stopped writing in 1980 when he left The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I was his editor. I'd hired him after working with him for years at The St. Petersburg Times in Florida where he helped reshape that newspaper with original, inspirational and inventive writing that cut a swath through our feature department.
He was a big man, physically, back then. And he's substantially bigger now. When he hauled his Falstaffian body aboard our motor home, it sank about three inches as he climbed the steps.
During the past 28 years he moved his creative energies from writing to the stage. He gained a national reputation as a Renaissance Festival king. His basso profundo voice fairly vibrates your inner core when you listen to him. When he sings, his operatic bass is riveting and mesmerizing.
We connected because Jo and I drove our motor home over to Orlando for a "free" weekend at a membership park where their top salesman was put in charge of convincing us of the value of buying a $16,995 membership package. When that didn't work, the price dropped to a mere $6,995. And still we didn't buy in. Then the salesman seemed to take the rejection as a personal rejection of him and he became curt and snippy.
Eventually, after two hours of hard selling, soft selling, arm twisting and ultimately personal abuse, he threw in the towel. He handed over our promised $100 in Walmart gift cards and the 30-day free membership in the parks around the U.S. They had offered these incentives to get us to agree to listen to the sales pitch.
And then we were free to enjoy the rest of our weekend at this quite pleasant park.
Michael's arrival made the day special. He's a bear of a man. He may weigh more than 350 pounds and he has just been hired by Disney World in Orlando to play a British version of Father Christmas this holiday season.
We patched the memory quilt of where we'd both gone and what we'd done since last we'd worked together.
My last recollection of Michael as a feature writer was to watch him struggle to put words on paper while sitting in front of a manual typewriter in the newsroom in Allentown. I remember the sweat - yes, real beads of actual sweat - on his brow as he struggled to find his muse. Singing is easy for Michael. Acting is easy for Michael. Writing is hard. Even though he has few peers, he told me today that he always felt like a fraud, that he was not as good as everyone thought he was when it came to writing.
To this day, he said, he wakes up from a recurring nightmare in which he is poised in front of a typewriter and he cannot write the first sentence of his story.
So he walked away from that work, loaded his wife in a VW bus and drove around the U.S. visiting national parks. Eventually they hooked up with the Renaissance Fair circuit in which he played the role of Henry VIII, and his wife played one of Hank's wives.
They did that for eight years before he moved into the Disney complex as an actor. Now, he is between gigs (that's actor talk for being out of work). But things look up after Thanksgiving when he takes on the role of Father Christmas.
He is 62 now; his health is not so good - heart stents, gall bladder removed, the toe next to the big toe on his left foot was recently surgically removed to stop an infection down there.
But the voice is still there. Ah, the voice: sonorous, creamy rich, musical. He's like a bottle of port that has been brought up from the cellar. What a joy to find him again and to connect for even a few hours.

Living on the Wild Side

You might think that living the retired life in Florida would be a tame thing, something that could not compare well with seeing lion attacking a wildebeest in Africa, or counting the bullet holes from the Khmer Rouge on the walls of Angkor Wat, the ancient temple in Cambodia. Yes, it is slightly more tame.

But there are moments when the wildlife comes back into focus. This morning was one.

I drove into our RV park after dropping off Jo at her silk painting class. A flick of movement, off to my right, caught my eye. And there was a four and a half foot long iguana hanging upside down on the trunk of a Spanish-moss-covered oak tree. He barely moved. His mane of bristling spikes caught the sun. His bulbous neck throbbed ever so slightly. I drove back to the RV and grabbed my camera before returning to the tree. But he has disappeared when I got back. I stood in the sand-spur-filled grass, looking around. And there he was down on the ground.

I knelt down beside him and he looked at me with his ball-bearing eyes. He allowed me to photograph him at will and only showed a little nervousness when I would stand up to move my position.

The Rat Came Back

This is a story about a rat that has been living in our Honda Accord for at least two years. Maybe I've got this wrong. He started living in our Honda Accord in 2006. Sometime between then and today he died.

I discovered this when I had the car serviced and told the mechanic there was an overflow of water from the air conditioner's evaporator box. It poured into the passenger compartment and onto Jo's feet.

This morning, the mechanic took the evaporator box off the car and pried it apart. Oops. There's the rat... or what was left of him. Mostly tufts of furry stuff and large quantities of leaves and other nest-building material. Presumably he used the cold fresh water from the evaporator for thirst quenching. Nice.

The mechanic called everyone over to view his handiwork. I was called from the waiting room to view the remains. Nasty smell!

$238.23 later, we have a fresh-smelling car that seems to pump much greater quantities of cold air into the interior space.

Jo and I remember seeing rat turds in the back seat of the car in 2006. We set a large trap with cheese but the smart little bugger stole the cheese without springing the trap. So we moved over to the tried and true peanut butter. We dumped a dollop on the spring of the trap. But this rat had gone to trap school and he avoided the peanut butter. We left it in the back seat until it had hardened on the trap. The rat continued to leave his calling card of turds as we hauled him around New England, Provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and then back to the U.S. via Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

Somewhere along the journey the rat gave up the ghost. We no longer saw the turds and assumed he had left the premises. Wrong. He'd simply crawled into his evaporator and evaporated from our sight.

Ah...Florida!

We stepped out of the motor home this morning and there it was: the humidity of Florida...and the wall of heat. Ah! We're home.

We arrived at our resort this morning after getting three free nights in two campgrounds on the way south from Georgia. We did experience some scary bits for two or three days when we had to search for gasoline in North Carolina, South Carolina and most of Georgia. Happily, we stumbled off the expressway in Macon, Georgia, and found a station that was able to let us fill up. Before that, we had to call friends in the tiny settlement of Big Canoe, Georgia, to come and pick us up as our car was on empty.

Florida seems to have gas. But the price is steep.

We spent our first day here getting set up for eye exams, getting the car an appointment for service. On our two free nights and three days at the world's largest RV facility in the center of Florida, we took advantage of end-of-the-month specials to have maintenance done on our motor home. We also attended a free seminar on generators and listened to the speaker tell tales of woe about how his colleagues at the RV Center have been laid off because of the plummeting sales.

We visited Manatee County's Art Center to sign up for classes. Jo will return to her silk painting. I have signed up to work on metal and hope to make some bracelets, earrings, pendants as a change of pace. It was heartening to check in the Art Center's store and find that all but one of my raku pieces (shown at the top of this blog) have sold. Jo still has a couple of silk scarves on display. So there is a market for this.

Where Land Meets Water

When you look at The Outer Banks on a map, there seems to be little more than a thin line of land kissing the sea. And so it is when you come here. There is so much water to the west and to the east that the land seems insignificant.
But the land is what makes the place so special.

We came to Hatteras Lighthouse and listened to a park ranger told us about the graveyard of the Atlantic, just off the Outer Banks. There are around 1,000 ships buried in the sands of Diamond Shoals. But this ranger very smartly focused on just one - a German U-boat. The submarine, numbered 701, cruised off the shoals and did some substantial damage to U.S. ships during 1942. She even headed up to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and, under the cloak of night, she laid out a field of mines that resulted in the sinking of three ships.

She cruised just under the waters of the Outer Banks and took out one of the largest fuel tankers of the time. But she sustained damage to her air scrubbing system that caused her crew of 50 to get sick from carbon dioxide poisoning. She had to make frequent trips to the surface to open her hatches and take in fresh air. And that was her undoing. A little trawler, outfitted poorly by the Navy, tried to take her out by throwing depth charges at her while she was on the surface.

Before she could dive, however, the trawler radioed to the mainland and a bomber was dispatched. It dropped two depth charges which blew her stern off and she sank in 100 feet of water. The skipper sent his men to the surface in a huge embolism of air from the submarine and 40 of the 50 men made it up. The bomber dropped them a raft before heading back to base. The Gulf Stream current took the men north, far from the site of the attack and all but seven men died while awaiting rescue. A seaplane landed in the Atlantic and saved the seven men, including the skipper.

We wandered the grounds of the lighthouse and learned the entire structure had been moved more than a half mile in 1999 when its original position was threatened by the encroaching Atlantic. Moving this huge lighthouse - which weighed twice what a Space Shuttle weighs - was accomplished with jacks and tractors.

We headed on down the ribbon of land to a free ferry that took us and our car to Ocracoke Island. Free! Now this is an interesting change of attitude, compared to the Maine ferry system which is designed to discourage visitors from visiting the beautiful islands off the Maine coast by more than doubling the fare charged if you buy a round-trip ticket on the mainland compared to the local residents' cost if they buy their tickets on the islands. Mmmmm. It says much about welcoming people.

Ocracoke is a distinctive little place about 14 miles long with hour-glass-fine sand. The wind howled and blew the sand into every orifice and crevice on us. And we were astonished to see people driving their trucks on the beaches of the main part of the Outer Banks where the land seemed to be invisible because it was so low. That's what our picture at the top of this blog shows.

On our way out, the wind had picked up even more. The road was covered with drifting sand and even salt water that had blown over the dunes from the nearby Atlantic. Great fluff balls of foam filled the road, the spindrift of the seas. Highway workers pushed back the sand and we crept through the one road out with salt water up to our tires.

Flying Away South

We awoke on Saturday morning and could see our breath.
This is not a good thing. It indicates we are in VERY cold weather. So it was time to head south. And so we did.
We moved along smartly through Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We parked in an empty lot alongside Jo's particular friend, Sue, in the city of Harrisburg. We caught up with her and and then rolled south, around Baltimore, Washington, and finally, to Richmond, Virginia. We found a little campground among the pine woods, 200 miles away from the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
On Tuesday morning we came to that very special place, Kill Devil Hills. This is an historic place. This is where man first managed to fly. Orville and Wilbur Wright, a pair of high school dropouts who made a living by making bicycles at the end of the 1890s, wanted to fly. They read all the literature available at the time. And they were secretive. They didn't really want to explore the possibilities of flying machines in the bright lights of publicity. This was 'way before CNN, of course. So they set out to find the windiest areas in which to experiment.
They found out from the Weather service that Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina was a little village of 200 souls on the edge of the Atlantic. So they set out to figure out the physics of flying in this windy neighborhood.
First they created a kite, a big kite, and they put up a local boy, weighing 60 pounds, in the kite. He survived. They tried it with one of the Wright brothers but he was too heavy.
But these young men - they were 32 and 36 at the time - figured out that all the current literature about control of kites was incorrect. These smart guys created a wind tunnel in Dayton, Ohio, and experimented with dozens of wing shapes. They discovered the keys to control and they carted their broken-down kites by train and boat to Kill Devil Hills. They were successful with their kite and returned two years later with their first powered machine.
Interestingly, they had asked automobile manufacturers for a light engine (weighing less than 200 pounds) that could generate eight horsepower. They were laughed at. Impossible, they were told. So they built their own 12 horsepower engine that weighed only 160 pounds. It is the embodiment of American ingenuity.
That first flight, as many of you know, was only 120 feet. Think about that for a moment. Many of our homes today are 120 feet wide.
Today, we walked the field and saw the markers showing where their plane lifted off and where it landed a few second later. And the second flight was just a little farther along the field. And then they flew again and achieved an additional 50-or-so feet. And then Wilbur took the plane and flew it for a fourth time that day for 850 feet.
(The picture at the top of the post shows the point of liftoff, with the markers for each of the landings).
You can see the granite marker out there and the significance hammers itself home.
The plane, built of ash, with a cotton muslin material covering the wings, weighed 650 pounds (with its engine).
Their achievement is monumental. But it is astonishing to realize that, 66 years later, Americans stepped onto the surface of the moon.
We headed on south down the Outer Banks. Wind swept the sand in spirals across the road. it reminded us of driving into Luderitz, through the Namib Desert.
We came to Avon, a tiny community on the Banks. And here is where we linger for a couple of nights before continuing on our journey back to Florida.

Fixing the rig

I introduced you to Chip from Rallys-R-Us when we were at the motor home rally in Vermont 'way back in August. Chip lives in his rig, a big Kenworth diesel beast that gives him a workroom, as well as a living area. He also pulls a heavy trailer in which he has heavy-duty equipment, as well as a motorbike.
We'd negotiated a price for Chip to install a new sway bar on the front of our motor home, along with new bushings on the rear axle. But he didn't have our size at the rally. No problem, said Chip. He said he'd meet us in Danbury, Connecticut, on his way to another rally. Date was set for Sept. 13 and I had to call him and give him the location of a suitable parking lot near the interstate highway.
We met at 9:30 when he rolled in with his rig and parked alongside our quite small RV.
His wife hopped out and headed for the big stores in the shopping mall. Chip set about laying out his piece of carpet and a wide array of tools to do the job. He was meticulous about getting everything organized before disappearing under our RV. No wasted motion.
Without putting the heavy RV on any jacks, he removed and replaced the three front shocks (one is linked to the steering column and is called a "shimmy shock," he told me.
Then he used his air compressor to undo the old sway bar and yanked it from the front end. He hauled his bright orange - 50 per cent heavier - sway bar into position and attached it to new bushings which he bolted onto the chassis.
Then he undid the wheel covers on the dual rear wheels of our rig and installed stainless steel mesh tubes which link both back wheels on each side. These are linked to a nifty device which continuously measures the air pressure in each tire to provide us with protection, we hope, when we roll down the highways of life.
All this was done in 2 1/2 hours. Then he hooked up his computer in his workshop to his credit card reader so he could get paid for his work. Off he went, with his wife in tow, to another appointment about 100 miles away.
Very impressive, very efficient. Another American finding a different way to make a living on the road.
Did all this make a difference. Incredibly, the sway bar keeps our heavy vehicle much more stable. When we make tight turns, we no longer have the sensation that the rig is about to topple over because it feels top heavy.
We'll just have to see with the wheel checking and balancing system.

Meanwhile, in Namibia

I like to visit the Internet version of The Namibian, the newspaper where I spent 10 months over three separate visits. I keep in touch with the country's struggles and find a story that makes my blood boil every once in a while. Such happened earlier this week when I read about a cabinet minister's rantings about a new political party causing what he described as anti-democratic reactions in the country. He, of course, is a member of the dominant ruling party, SWAPO.
I stewed for a while about this minister's racist whinings because they were an extension of what I'd seen in my months in-country.
So I awoke this morning determined to speak back to power. It's always difficult to deal with the subject of tribalism in that country. It is rife. But it also is against the law to mention tribalism.
The picture, by the way, is of the man to whom I refer in the letter as "my blood brother". He is my dear friend Oswald Shivute, a reporter in the North of the country. He represents, to me, the hope of Namibia.
Here's my letter:

To the Editor:
Petrus Iilonga’s recent attack on the divisiveness of the Rally for Democracy and Progress demands a response.
Why is it not crystal clear to this man and his compatriots at SWAPO that he and they are on the wrong side of this issue? Mr. Iilonga, stop for a moment and review: Your SWAPO brothers – the huge majority of them – have created an underclass in Namibia by their insistence on putting their Oshiwambo-speaking brothers in the positions of highest power in the country. Why is it difficult to understand this action forces the other Namibians to be placed in a subservient position.
It just isn’t good enough to argue that the SWAPO brotherhood fought for the freedom of Namibia and, thus, is entitled to the spoils of war by placing themselves in virtually every important position – whether that be the top leadership of the country’s police, the ministries, the judiciary, local government. You cannot do this and expect the Namas, the Herero, the Damara, as well as every other group to grow in their resentment.
And so it has come to this: your fellow Namibians are at last rising up and saying “Enough is enough.”
I have never been so moved as when I stood in a football stadium in Otjiwarongo and listened as 15,000 Namibians stood to attention and raised their voices in unison to sing your national anthem. Tears came to my eyes as I envisioned the promise of a unified nation, a nation where each person saw himself or herself as a Namibian instead of a member of a tribal group. I have spent many months in your country as a visitor and, as an experiment, I would make the point of asking strangers what they were. Only the white farmers’ families identified themselves as “Namibians”. Everyone else described themselves in tribal terms. This told me the government has done a terrible disservice to Namibia by not building this primary sense of country among its people.
My sense is that this is because the government – SWAPO – fails to understand this fundamental building block of democracy: You cannot have people think of themselves in other than tribal terms if you are unwilling to share the power.
This harsh criticism must be leavened by mentioning that I was singularly impressed by many, many Oshiwambo-speaking people in and out of government. If I were permitted to have a blood brother in your country, he would be an Oshiwambo with whom I spent many weeks in the North. But I also met Damara, Nama, and Herero, Himba and other men and women who desperately love their land and look to the day when they are not perceived as an underclass.
I am fully cognizant of the fact that free Namibia is a young, young country. But I fear for you as you struggle to deal with those who are not believers in the ruling party’s vision for a country that bends to their will. Why is it so difficult for the hard-line SWAPO members to see that democracy actually demands the right to dissent, to question authority, to encourage new, different ideas? When that day arrives, SWAPO will have matured and should be considered worthy of representing Namibia. Until that time, I see nothing but brutish bullying and inconsiderate short-sightedness that demeans your fellow Namibians and makes me think you have learned little from the horrors of the apartheid era.
Robert S. Mellis
Palmetto, Florida, USA

Meet Walter

We’re back in Connecticut and enjoying life. I accompanied son-in-law John up to the top of the mountain at the back of Kent where granddaughter Cassie was riding. She’s becoming an accomplished horsewoman and it has been our pleasure to watch her become an interesting young woman.
While Cassy moved her horse down the hill to the paddock for the night, I met up with the land owner.
Walter is O.M. That means Old Money. Generally speaking, O.M. people never flaunt their wealth. He (and they) wears the oldest clothes. Yesterday, his flannel shirt pocket was ripped and hanging down. His trousers were worn so thin you could count the threads in the knees. The zippered part was threadbare. Walter is a man of indeterminate age – except I would guess he is in his early to mid 80s.
He’s probably the most interesting man I know – and I’ve known some great men.
Walter is/was a nuclear scientist. He’s now a farmer, sitting on the top of his mountain with his old farmhouse looking a bit the worse for wear, much like his shirt and pants. His corgi dogs nuzzle and nip at his feet. His hands are badly wrinkled and the blood doesn’t circulate too well in his extremities by the looks of the dark color of his skin. But he has a mind. Oh, what a mind he has.
Every time I’ve spent time with this fine old man I come away in awe. He speaks Russian fluently, and he has taught himself to speak the Gaelic.
We spoke yesterday about Putin and he is quite clear in his thinking about the thinking of this angry Russian. “It all stems from what we did in Kosovo,” Walter said. “We took that away from the Serbs and gave it to the Albanians.” Walter explained that the Serbs, being Slavic, are much more akin to the Russians. And Putin, being an old KGB man, found that unforgivable. Now, with Russia’s new-found oil wealth, he’s game to flex his muscle by pushing into Georgia.
Walter told me about being on a U.S. team that went into Russia back in 1994 in an attempt to help the Russians with creating a safety system with all of their loose nukes. After a week of working alongside the nuclear scientists and military people, Walter attended a party at which the vodka flowed with its usual Russian gusto. He rose and gave the only toast from the western scientists in Russian. He said he spoke about how Russian naval ships and personnel had come to the aid of San Francisco during the fires of the 1890s when San Francisco was in danger of being destroyed. The navy men came ashore and helped put out the fires. He tied this mutual aid pact to their current trip.
“After the toast a short man with white, white hair came up and hugged me,” Walter said. “He had worked alongside Sakharov on Russia’s nuclear development. He said to me in Russian, ‘I love you’,” Walter said.
Our conversation floated along to Henry Kissinger, who lives in Kent. Walter knew him when he first came over from Germany in 1936. He related how Henry had an affair with a Nazi offer’s widow at the end of the war. That Henry. He’s quite a guy.
Walter has strong opinions about nuclear power for energy generation. He says the world has a much harder time tracking the pollution caused by carbon and suggests we really are quite competent to track nuclear waste and by-products. And, he says, if you coat Uranium 238 with another element which he named, it reduces the half-life of the waste to 50 years, instead of thousands of years.
If I were Barack Obama, I know I’d want Walter’s mind to play a role in my upcoming administration.

The ant and the cheese

We're at this wonderful campsite in Northwood, New Hampshire, sitting beside a little pond with loads of frogs and tadpoles in the lily-pad-covered water.

But I have just spent a wonderful half-hour watching an ant work with mighty strength to move a piece of cheese that is larger than he across the stony ground. It has been a truly super-ant struggle.

I had dropped the shredded cheese last night under the picnic table. He spotted it and decided it was worth the effort to move this half-inch-long shred of cheese out and up the hill.

This is a great lesson for all of us. He moved that shred about eight feet. This, it seems to me, is the equivalent of a human adult dragging another human for about four or five miles. It's not an easy trek. The pine needles on the ground must seem like enormous tree trunks to him. He drops the cheese when he hits these obstacles. He scouts ways around the obstacle and returns to the cheese. Over the needles he goes.

Then, when he thinks all is well, another ant meets up with him and tries to take the cheese away. So he now has to fight for what is his. He has dissuaded three other ants from stealing his cheese.

He is up on the side of the hill now, pushing and shoving his cheese to the entrance to the anthill. It's a super-ant struggle against the odds.

And it's a lesson for all of us. Never, ever, ever surrender. When you are knocked down, get back up and fight on.

Good ant. I suppose this falls under the category of stopping and smelling the roses. Another joy of retirement.

Sold and Sailing Away

Quiet Passage, that lovely boat that has carried us into retirement, has been sold.

They say the happiest days in a sailor's life is the day he buys the boat and the day he sells her. That's true for myriad reasons. We both have loved the adventures we experienced aboard Quiet Passage. She was a great little boat and she carried us comfortably for eight years. We traveled more than 15,000 miles aboard her sturdy hull. But it became more and more physically difficult to twist and turn in her tiny space to do the endless maintenance. When I had my back problems two years ago, I knew the writing was on the wall.

So the decision to sell her was one of necessity and little regret. Her new owner is from Alabama and plans to sail her down the Connecticut River in early September. Although we were not there for the sale, I have agreed to visit with the new owner and give him in-depth guidance about her systems for a day. The entire sale was handled via the Internet, although we did have to scurry around to find a notary public when it came time to sign the bills of sale.

In the meantime, we have found a gem of a campground, hidden in the Maine woods. We are eight miles from downtown Freeport, Maine, one of the busiest commercial centers in the state. This is the home of L.L. Bean, an enormous clothing and sports equipment enterprise.

We found Recompense Shore Camp Ground by chance. It is part of a farm that raises organic beef and vegetables and lies on the shores of Casco Bay. The place is quiet, with thick trees, many birds and a certain peacefulness. We can hear sheep and cattle calling out in the background.

We have parked here for four nights and used it as a base from which we can wander the coast of Maine and down to Portland.

Dancing with Eagles

The bald eagle hung in the sky over Sebasticook Lake in the heart of Maine. He peered down and could see the mother duck and her four ducklings. Yes. The ducklings were the perfect breakfast. He swooped and glided, his enormous wingspan leaving a shadow on the smooth water of the lake. The mother duck sensed the immediate danger. In some mystical way, she communicated to her brood. "Dive, Dive, Dive." That was her simple message. They did just as the eagle touched the water. Mom ducked under at the same moment. Her brood was safe.
The eagle flapped, lifted and pulled into the sky for another attack. He did this four more times as I sat by the window of our friend's home on the side of the lake. Four more times the duckling and mom dived under the water and the eagle had to lift off the water and soar again. He tired of these wily birds and climbed to 500 feet to reconnoiter before seeking another possible breakfast. It goes down, for me, as one of those lifetime moments. Delicious to see the much less powerful duck and her family figuring out by instinct or smarts just what needs to be done to stay alive.
Jo and I now are on the coast of Maine. This is home for us. We feel at peace surrounded by the craggy rocks, the seaweed, the wheeling seabirds, the fog, the people who are without sophistication but who endlessly exhibit honesty and straight forward commonsense.
We spent time with friends Bob and Rita Norling in Concord, New Hampshire, before climbing over the hills into Maine.
We stopped in Yarmouth, the home of the DeLorme map company. We use DeLorme on our computer to find our way through the various states. We have been experiencing some strange behavior in the computer with the software and I wanted to stop in and talk with a technical support person since I had not been able to resolve the issues via the Internet.
We spent an hour with a young man who was as perplexed as we are. We decided the problem centers on the new computer we have bought. It is the latest, greatest, and uses 64-bit technology. In trolling the Internet for others who have had problems we kept seeing that the 64-bit system seems to be the hangup. They assured me they are working on a patch for this. So we asked if we could stay in the parking lot for the night. No problem, the receptionist told me. "Just park at the back of the lot." We did and had a delightful night. As the darkness fell, I wandered over to the three-story front of the DeLorme building. The glass wall allows you to view Eartha, the world's largest free-standing globe. It is the building's centerpiece.
We parked the next couple of nights on the side of Sebasticook Lake, at friends Rick and Gayle's fabulous home. This is where we saw the eagle. And this is where we gain weight because Rick loves to cook. Every meal was a treat.
We moved Downeast, which is what the coast is called. We drove over to Southwest Harbor where we had spent many memorable weeks while sailing earlier. Now we parked our rig in the back parking lot of Wilbur Yachts, when former sailing friend Dave Larson works. We stayed with him and his wife Bena for a couple of nights and Bena outdid herself - again - by performing culinary delights, including roasted chicken that was slathered in yogurt and herbs. We had a spectacular honey and yogurt parfait laced with fresh strawberries on Saturday morning. Along with that there were muffins laced with salmon with cream cheese and capers. Mmmmm. Fabulous.
Now we have come down the coast and look across the water to Islesboro, one of our favorite places, standing out in Penobscot Bay. This is perhaps our favorite place to sail. Every yard is a new vista and is more breathtaking that the one before.
We feel so fortunate to be able to enjoy this beautiful place.

It's a different world

We are attending a rally of motorhome owners in Vermont. There are nearly 2,000 people milling around and living in their coaches in the evenings. It's a veritable town here, with wi-fi, some coaches have paid for water and electric. Others, like us, are living as though we are anchored on a boat away from the shore. We start our generator in the evening so we can watch TV or charge our cellphone or work the laptop to connect to the Internet.
The participants mostly have their bricks and mortar homes, unlike us. When they hear we are living aboard there is still that sense of surprise that we are so adventurous.
Coaches range from $20,000 to $2.1 million (only a few here are that expensive). The expensive ones have marble (real marble) floors, fans in the ceiling, bathtubs, king-size bed. It is VERY heavy and probably costs a fortune to drive. But, if you can afford the price of the coach, it's unlikely you are bothered by $4.50-a-gallon diesel fuel.
Jo and I sometime participate in seminars together and sometimes we split up and go our separate ways. I took in the electrical seminar in my endless search for understanding the mysteries of amps and current and voltage this morning while she was off creating stained-glass. Two nights back, we took a dinner cruise on Lake Champlain. We sat with a young couple and had a wonderful time swapping stories. We endlessly hear how envious people are that we are living aboard full-time. They always claim that's their goal but they have to work another five or 10 years. And we always tell them not to wait too long. This lifestyle is not for the feeble and infirm. It's for folks who believe in living out on the edge while they can.
I found a mechanic who specializes in stabilization issues on these coaches. The more we drive, the more we are aware of being rocked pretty badly when massive trucks pass us on the interstates. They push an invisible wall of air in front of their trucks and when that wall hits the coach we are pushed to the side and do some nerve-wracking roll-n-roll. The mechanic says he has the answer to our problems: a much-strengthened anti-swaybar and bushing system. So we asked is he could add it while we attended the rally. He said he didn't have one with him that would fit our coach. However, we have arranged to meet him in a parking lot in Danbury, Connecticut, in five weeks when he heads south after another rally. He said he'll bring the swaybar and bushings and will fix us in the parking lot. I had a hard time believing this but he assures me he hauls along a complete workshop and can do everything on the run. So we'll see how this adventure plays out.
Jo and I attended a line dancing class and had a great time until my bad knee gave out. But she kept on dancing. Afterwards, we joined daughter Stephanie and the family at a Vietnamese restaurant for a wonderful meal. We took the whole gang for a drive through the rally grounds so they could get an idea of the astonishing variety of motor coaches that currently are attending.
When we leave here on Sunday morning, our plan is to head southeast and visit with old friends in Concord, New Hampshire. Then we'll head for the coast of Maine.

Eating with the Sikhs

Jo and I had traveled south to our boat in Connecticut because a potential buyer was flying in to make a bid on her. We got there a day ahead of him so we could check that the batteries were fully charged and there was no mildew from sitting closed up.

After getting her in presentable condition, we drove to an Indian restaurant in the town of Middletown, CT. We were the only customers because it was a bit early. In the background there was a drone of a holy man on TV, chanting over what looked to be a corpse. The owner of the restaurant explained that it was evening prayers and it was being beamed in via satellite from the Punjab in India. I thought it was a little strange to engulf us in prayers while we ate but I asked how they could be doing evening prayers when it was getting to be dawn in India. He patiently explained that the satellite people had recorded the ceremony so it could be transmitted for evening prayers on the east coast of the U.S.

I commented on the fact that the holy man was wearing a turban which, in my limited understanding, meant he was a Sikh. "Oh, yes. Yes. We are all Sikhs in this place," said the owner.

He said when he first came to the U.S. he had a beard and had never cut his hair, like all Sikhs. "But that is not good here," he said with a laugh. "I was not permitted to cook food in the restaurant because I had a beard. So I cut off my beard and I cut my hair and I took off my turban." As he said this, he stroked his glossy black hair. "When I get older, I will grow it all back. But not now," he said.

All the other young men working in the restaurant had gathered around by now, wanting to share in his story. All of them were like him. Our waiter had a bit of a beard, but he was quite young.

The next morning, we drove back to the boat to await the potential buyer, an Englishman named Napoleon Mannering. I had Googled him the night before. There is only one Napoleon Mannering in our world, apparently, for he showed up in Argentina and in Toyko where he had been teaching English and running a soccer (football) club. He'd been interviewed by a Tokyo radio station and they had provided the transcript.

He arrived with the yacht broker. His surveyor had already been on the job for a couple of hours before they arrived. When you think you wish to purchase a boat, it is important to pay a surveyor to provide you a nuts-and-bolts analysis of what you are buying. It is the surveyor's job to protect the potential buyer. And so he did.

He informed him that there was water in the deck, causing some delamination. He did a pretty good job of scaring Napoleon away because he decided to walk away from the transaction without proceeding to the sea trials. He explained to me that he needs a boat to be perfect because he has no fix-up skills. Good luck, Napoleon. There is no boat that I'm aware on that doesn't need fixing up and regular maintenance.

So our trip to Connecticut was a bit depressing. But it caused us to drop the price of the boat by more than half. So we expect lots of people now will want to grab our beloved Quiet Passage since that price makes it the bargain of the year.

The $5 Haircut

We've both gone for three months without cutting a hair on our heads. So the ad in the free paper from the Vermont Academy of Hair Styling that offered haircuts for $10 so that students would have an opportunity to learn their new skill on our heads seemed like a fairly good deal. The ad noted that the students worked under the guidance of professional instructors which gave me a sense of comfort.
So we made the appointments. And then we showed up. We were greeted by a rail-thin woman who wore the brightest red hair and the whitest face makeup. Mmmmm. Maybe a portent of things to come. But Tiffany came out and shook my hand. Jo landed with Andrea. Both of them seemed pretty normal. The student in the next booth had day-glo blue/purple hair and two nasty-looking studs through her bottom lip. Another girl had so many tattooes in interesting places that it was better than reading a magazine. All of the tattooes seemed to have a Gothic overtone to them. Not a good way to put geezers at ease.
Tiffany gave me an outstanding shampoo and skull massage. Almost as good as I remember getting in Phnom Penh from the hairstylist who always finished up by whispering in my ear "You very handsome man." This, of course, always guaranteed an extra dollar in her tip.
I asked Tiffany how many students were in the academy and she told me 80. But half of them are housed in the basement where they spend the first 500 hours of their training learning about the hair and the chemistry involved in the changing of color. She told me the 11-month course was coming to an end for her since she graduates in October. That, too, gave me some heart since she had some experience on the cutting room floor.
The instructor came by and asked her what she was planning. "He wants me to take an inch off," Tiffany told her. The instructor fluffed up my hair and told her to get to it.
The first cut was two and a half inches long. Mmmm. Should I stop her now? I didn't but I watched with some interest as 80 per cent of my hair dropped onto the floor in front of me. And still she kept clipping.
Ever single hair on my head met her scissors at least four times. She snipped and snipped. She stood back to see if it was even...and then she snipped again. I mentioned that I do like to part my hair on the left and she nodded and said she could see where the part fell. But there would be no part in my future. I now was moving quickly toward looking like some Roman emperor. It was beginning to look like I was a natural to join the Army.
Jo, sitting beside me was telling her hairstylist to clip a little more off. The instructor came by and told Andrea that she had left "a corner" and suggested how to improve that. So Jo was done and waited out at the front desk. But Tiffany still clipped away.
The instructor came over to see how she was doing. She asked what I thought and I said it was a pretty good haircut but I doubted I would need another until well into 2009. That's not a bad thing, of course. But I surely am glad I don't have to stay up in the North through the winter months for I would have a chill on the brain.
Tiffany finished me off, then she handed me her card with a "$5 off the first haircut" discount. So my $5 haircut, if amortised over the next eight months when I shall be growing my hair back, will be the cheapest haircut I've ever had.
She gave me extra cards to pass out to family and friends. But I can find no takers. Are they trying to tell me something?

Up, Up and Away

The mist hung in tendrils in the valleys of Vermont at 5 a.m. as Jo and I drove south to beautiful Stowe, a favorite of skiers in this part of the world. There's no skiing now, of course, but it was chilly in the early dawn.
We'd come to Stowe for a balloon fest and watched as 25 balloonists rigged their baskets to filmy nylon and polyester. They use a large fan to partially inflate their enormous balloons and at just the right moment they fire up their propane burners which pumps hot air into the cavernous interior of the balloon
The tipping point arrives and the balloon pops upright with the captain inside the basket. People load up (up to five passengers, depending on the size of the balloon and the propane burner). Then they ignite the propane in short bursts and the balloon finds that instant when the weight of the basket and people is overcome by the lift. Then they are off, oh-so-gently. There always is a look of euphoria on the faces of the guests aboard (at a price of $250 per person for the ride!)
They drifted upward. over the treetops. The cold still air forced many of the balloons down into the trees and the passengers leaned out of their baskets and picked the leaves as they drifted by.
It was two delightful hours in the early morning. We drove north and had breakfast and then back to our motor home.
If you click on the picture on this page, it will take you to our photo album of this event.

Dr. Pane

One of the issues we gypsies must deal with is the handling of health issues as we roll along. Our Medicare does pretty well since urgent and emergency care can be handled from anyplace in the world. But dental issues: now that is a different kettle of fish.
Jo ran into a mouth problem in Connecticut and she visited daughter Lynn's dentist who diagnosed she needed a major root canal. In addition, he said, she had an abscess and that would require 10 days of antibiotics before any endodontist would drill into her teeth. Ten days took us out of Connecticut, however, so we then phoned daughter Stephanie in Vermont to see if she could find an endodontist (a person who specializes in root canals). She talked with her dentist and received a recommendation. Jo called and lucked out by getting a cancellation the day after we arrived in town.
But the best laid plans didn't work out. The endodontist suffered a heart attack just as Jo settled into the drilling chair. Not good. That took him off to the hospital where, happily, he survived. But Jo now had to find a new specialist since he would be out of commission for a number of weeks. Who should she find but Dr. Pane, truly, who was able to take her in because of a cancellation on an hour's notice.
He got down to work on the root canal and managed to carve out one of three roots on the first visit. Now she awaits a call about another cancellation so she can have the job finished. We can't get the new crown installed because of the time lag. But Dr. Pane says he'll plug up his work with a temporary filling and when we return to Florida in September we can have that final work done.
In the meantime, Jo and I are enjoying life in Vermont. This is a beautiful state: endless horizons of green mountains, laid back people, and a general dislike among the natives for the faster pace of the urban states.
Stephanie and Alex have taken us sailing on Lake Champlain a couple of times - always a great thing. We stay here for another month then we plan to roll through the White Mountains of New Hampshire and on into our beloved Maine.

Sailors Ahoy

There may not be anything better from our point of view that hearing from fellow sailors (boaters) as they travel along.

Imagine our delight this weekend, to hear from old Bradenton, Florida, boaters Jerry and Marsha who had brought their boat up the Chester River on the Chesapeake to the lovely town of Chestertown. We had visited this great place sometime ago as we were meandering through the Chesapeake.

We drove two hours up to meet with them to hear of their adventures aboard their boat. I might have written about Jerry a couple of years back when he ran his Hatteras powerboat onto a rock in the Okeechobee Waterway across Florida. The rock ripped the stabilizer fine off the boat and then push it into the hull, creating a Titanic-like slash on the back of the hull. The boat sank in the waterway, with its bow up on the bank. Jerry and Marsha escaped and their boat was a complete write off because the water got into their engines and ruined them.

Now, I thought that would be the end of their adventures in the water world. But Jerry and Marsha are tough stock. After licking their wounds, they found another Hatteras powerboat and began the adventure all over again.

And here they were, making their way to Long Island Sound for the summer.
We drove through the lush Delaware and Maryland countryside, with the hundreds of chicken houses that house millions of cluckers then eventually end up in American ovens or frying pans. The houses these guys are penned in are long and low. They generally have two huge (4-6 foot diameter) fans that suck in fresh air. Delaware is the home of Perdue Chicken, as well as a host of other markets. There are many processing plants scattered around the state. Quite surprisingly, you rarely smell the chickens as you drive by.

We sat on the banks of the Chester River with Jerry and Marsha and had a delightful lunch. A waterman came in with his crab boat and we watched as he untied Jerry's dinghy so he could tie up.
Jerry sent Marsha out to the dinghy (he has a weak leg and has some difficulty walking). When Marsha and Jo got there, a marine cop pulled in behind the waterman and cited him for something. He wrote out a ticket then turned his attention to the dinghy. He asked Marsha if she was the owner because the dinghy had an out-of-date registration sticker. Marsha said her husband was in the restaurant and the cop waited for us to come out.

He radioed in the registration information and the radio squawked after a few minutes that the registration had lapsed in 1901. I laughed when I heard that. But the cop didn't seem that amused.

He checked to see that Jerry had four life jackets aboard (he did) and then followed us out into the river and to the boat to check the registration. It was, in fact, expired and he wrote a ticket for $65 for the incident.

Then he stood on the back deck and chatted in a friendly kind of way about how he had arrested the waterman who had moved the dinghy last year for placing several illegal nets in the river. He had caught 25,000 lbs of some kind of fish. He said his fine amounted to $130,000 because the nets were a $30,000 fine and the fish were assessed at $4 a pound.

We waved goodbye to this fellow and then sat aboard as the wind blew at 20 knots, creating a bit of tempest in the river.

Marsha and Jerry returned us to shore when the breeze quietened down and we drove back to the campground, meeting thousands of cars heading the other way on their way home from the weekend on the shore.

Tuesday morning, we received a phone call from old friends and sailing buddies Corky and Sue. They had just sailed into Ocean City, Maryland, aboard their 47-foot catamaran. This is 32 miles south of us. Now we head down to have dinner with them on Wednesday before we head out of Leisure Point Resort on Thursday morning.

We found them lugging laundry back to their dinghy and we settled into a waterside restaurant for a four-hour dinner to hear their tales of cruising Bahamian crystaline waters... as well as stories of life aboard, weather horrors and future plans for their 47-foot carbon-fiber catamaran named Surprise. We'll meet up with them once we get to Connecticut since they still own a spectacular home that's been on the market far too long.

We had toyed with the idea of immediately heading for Alaska this year but have abandoned the idea because we really need to be on the west coast of the U.S. right now to make it possible to spend enough time in the remote northwest of Yukon Territory and Alaska in June, July and August. So we are now planning to head out from Delaware on today (May 29) and drive north to Connecticut to visit with our daughter and family. We'll spend a few weeks there and attend the graduation of our oldest granddaughter who moves up to high school in the fall. Then we'll move north to visit our younger daughter and family in Vermont for a month before setting out across the Maine woods and down to the shore during August.

Free at Last....

Yes. They put us out of our misery today. We knew our chances for continuing at Leisure Point Resort were shrinking day by day. We were terminally bored with our duties. Working the marina store ended up being a joke. I would sit outside the store for eight hours and would help a boater tie up when he wanted gas for his boat. I handed him the nozzle and chatted with him while he filled the tank and then spilled the gasoline into the bay - every time. I told the owners they were liable for a $10,000 pollution fine from the U.S. Coast Guard if someone reported the ongoing pollution. I suggested they provide oil-absorbing pads (retail cost 77 cents each) to prevent these spills. But they laughed at that idea.
Jo's job inside the store was to see that the coffee pots were filled regularly - not exactly brain-expanding.
We kept looking for ways to make the hours less boring. I would endlessly sweep perfectly clean decks, Jo walked around the store with a duster, flicking an invisible dust.
So we were just relieved this morning when Stu, the essentially useless and bumbling manager, called us up to the office and said the resort would pay us for the gas we'd used to drive from Florida. And they would allow us to stay rent-free on the site for two weeks while we got our ducks in a row.
Thank you, very much.

Now we are free to reconsider our options for the summer. So we'll let you know how the adventure changes.

On Staying in Touch

We've been Workamping now for one month...and we're surviving well enough. Work is not all it's cracked up to be, of course. But that, as they say, is why they call it work. We have done everything from weeding (ugh!) to cleaning bathrooms (hate it!) to vacuuming, painting, planting, sweeping up goose poop. Now we have started work at the marina store (the reason we were hired), things are looking up. We open the store tomorrow and folks will be able to come in by car or boat to get food, groceries, fishing gear and even gasoline. We're pretty excited about the possibilities.
We don't have to cook because the owners have hired a cook and he and we will make it happen after the first few days.
Now while all this is on-going, there have been lots of other interesting diversions. We've made the 320-mile trip north and east to get the boat uncovered and readied for sale. Now it's in the hands of a broker so we wait.
I also have been editing online the work of a wonderfully bright reporter in Namibia. Luqman Cloete has a good story he's working on about a handicrafts center in his town being told they will lose their funding and will have to make the crafts, market them and sustain themselves without outside help. I love the concept that Luqman can simply email me the story with a request that I edit it and come up with suggestions for improvements. All of this happens as though he is in the next office. Time and distance simply has no meaning because of the Internet.
And equally exciting, as I was reading the New York Times on Tuesday, I discovered that Hla Hla Htay, a brilliant, bright young woman who passed through the Southeast Asia Media Center training school while I was there in Phnom Penh, popped up with two pictures in The New York Times from Myanmar.
Hla Hla got her job as a reporter for Agence France-Presse when the Bangkok bureau chief called us in Cambodia one day back in 2004. She asked if we had trained any good Burmese journalists who might be candidates for the bureau position in Yangon (Rangoon). Hla Hla was in training with us at that time. She is a tiny woman but I felt she had the heart of a lion. She is smart, thoughtful, inquisitive. She was honest but she was oh-so-shy and self-effacing.
After I recommended her and the bureau chief in Bangkok said she would meet with her for an interview in Thailand on Hla Hla's journey back home, I sat down with her and coached her on the art of the job interview. She got the job and we kept in touch for a year. But then her emails bounced back as the junta in Burma cracked down on Internet use. I kept trying to reach her but without success.
So you might imagine my delight at finding her credit line on two pictures played across half a page in The Times on Tuesday. She clearly has established herself. I remember that Hla Hla made $50 a month as a reporter before coming to our media center. When she returned to Yangon, she was employed at $1,000 a month - an astonishing increase in pay.

Meet Charlie, our racist

Jo and I wandered around the camping area Sunday (as opposed to the permanent area) of the resort. We wanted to meet the folks who visit for a 10-day period.
We chatted with a couple who were talking with an overweight fellow who was missing most of his front teeth.

Charlie seemed to be the complainer of the park. He had complaints about Dick, the owner, about the neighbors who spy on him. About just about everything and everyone. You could feel the negative energy encircling him.

He told us he retired as an electrician and asked what I did. I told him I had been the publisher of a group of weekly papers. He immediately decided to pigeonhole me. "Oh. So you're an educated man?" he asked/stated.

I told him I had left school at 15 and he just couldn't buy that a high school dropout could scale the lofty intellectual heights of being a newspaper publisher. We danced around on that for a while and then the conversation rested on the five young people that Dick brings in from the Czech Republic each summer.

"Course, they don't pay them much," Charlie announced. "But the government pays them." He pronounced it "govmint".
I couldn't figure out what he was talking about and told him that. "The govmint pays all these people to come in. Just like they pay the niggers."

Mmmmm. And Barack Obama has to win over the Charlies of our country.
We left Charlie sucking on his toothless mouth and continued on around the campground.

At the end of our first two weeks of work here we were sucking air on Friday afternoon. Jo and I had been assigned to strip the flaking paint off more than 110 chairs and almost as many tables. Then we spray painted them. After we finished that (four non-stop days), we were assigned to rake the loose leaves on some of the lots owned by the park. We have discovered muscles that had long since atrophied.
Oooooh. the weekend rest seemed even more welcome.

On Wednesday of this coming week, we drive north to Connecticut to remove the winter cover from our boat. We'll spent a couple of days with her, getting her cleaned up for the broker we're contracting to act as our agent to sell her.

Wild Horses

The wild horses of Assateague, 50 miles south of where we live, are rough-coated, small and keep their distance. However, the group apparently voted to send one of their number over to the road so we could see him close up.
He stood quietly chipping away at the desireable new grass while humans got out of their cars and petted him - against the rules of the national park. The pony-sized horse seemed docile enough even though there were signs posted that these horses are unpredictale and should not be fed or petted.
The horses are thought to be the descendants of horses left on Assateague Island by mainland farmers in the 17th century who were trying to avoid mainland taxes on their possessions. They seem quite content with their lot as they stand at the edge of the land and water.
Farther south, on Chincoteague Island, there are even more wild horses. These are rounded up in July and herded across the water to the mainland where they are auctioned off. We might return for that event.
We had come south, stopping at Ocean City inlet to watch the surfers dancing with the waves. Ocean City seems to live mostly for tourism. There might be 40 miniature gold courses along the main road. Lots of seedy motels and condominiums rise into the sky.
As we sat on the rocks of the inlet jetty, photographing the wet-suit-wearing surfers, a rogue wave smashed over the rocks and soaked both of us. We retreated to the warm car.
Just a short distance from where we live, on the way home, we came to the Indian River inlet. The current was racing in at about three knots. Chinese families crouched by the inlet, casting their fishing lines into the water to capture dinner.

Work: What a Concept

Jo and I have been assigned this week to the company-owned Rattle & Reel hunting and fishing shop. Our job has been to check in the thousands upon thousands of fishing lures. These all are bar-coded and we laboriously check off each batch. We do muse about the possibilities of catching fish with worms like everyoine else in the world. Apparently that's no longer a reasonable option.
When we get through with a carton, we take a breather and stroll the store to check out this rarely seen world - at least for us!
"C'More Deer turbo-charges your hunt", the jug says. It only costs $59.90 a gallon.
"C More Bucks" is a hunger stimulant.
"Deer Cravin' Sweet Seduction" makes you believe in something that seems highly unlikely. In addition, there are Turkey calls that clip onto your rifle which you can pull while you sight on the turkeys. And there are copper 50-caliber hollow point bullets (20 for $25.99), while the platinum version is a bit more expensive. Boy, this is an expensive hobby.
On top of all these things, you will need to purchase the hunting suits that seem to have a thousand oak leaves sewn onto them ($280 for the top and the bottom) and then there's the moist towels that you use to eliminate human scent.
As we looked at all of these possibilities, the wonder is that there is a single deer or turkey or duck or fish out there. They don't have a chance.
The weather has been nasty: cool, drizzly. We run our propane heater in the motor home until bedtime. Then we huddle under the down comforter with the cat pushing in between us to borrow our body heat.
Looks like we'll be doing inventory control for a week because there is so much inventory that has just shipped in.

If you'd like to view Leisure Point RV Resort on Google Earth, just open Good Earth and type in the following address: 25491 Dogwood Lane, Millsboro, DE.

You'll see a very wooded site with hundreds of boat slips. We're located on the little lagoon at the top of the screen. Nice neighborhood.

On the Ocean

The waves, big ones, roll in from northern Africa and Spain. It's cool, refreshingly cool on the coast of Delaware. We've arrived for our Workamper assignment after driving through Angola into Rehoboth (pronounced re-HO-both) Beach.
We'll have to take time to unravel the linkage between these names and the country that sits above Namibia in Africa (Angola) and Rehoboth, the city in the center of Namibia that's the home of a distinct and proud group of people called Basters. They are a group of coloreds (a mixture of blacks and whites, hence the bastardization of their name). Strange places to be in.

The campground/marina people welcomed us when we pulled in. Dick, the head guy showed us on his layout of the resort where he had located us. It seemed like the best lot in the resort to us: our motor home overlooks the marina, with a view of the Indian River and out into Rehoboth Bay.

Rodney and his son helped us get hooked up. He fixed the picnic table that sits outside our front door and arranged for a sewer hookup collar. I plugged in the cable TV cord and water and electric and we were in business.

We unloaded our bikes and toured the facilities. There's a huge swimming pool, a 300-slip marina, a fitness room, a clubhouse with an 84-inch TV screen and a fireplace. Cozy!

Most of the people who live here use Leisure Point as a second home. The houses are manufactured homes and many of them have "for sale" signs on them. The motor home and trailer guests haven't come into town yet because the resort doesn't come alive until mid-April.

Jo and I drove our car to the beach and walked the sand. The roar of the ocean was therapy for both of us. That endless whoosh as the rolling waves break and smash themselves onto the sandy shoreline. We linger in the breeze, loving the sound, the peace.

Our journey into Delaware (a tiny state) took us across flat and verdant farmland. Enormous irrigation robots spread their legs across the fields. There's no need for irrigation on this day because rain had deluged the area in the night and water stood along the side of the road.

The journey from the hustling, dynamic Washington, D.C., area, through Annapolis, the capitol of Maryland, changed in tone the moment we drove across the enormous Bay Bridge across the Chesapeake Bay. This took us to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. We'd sailed under this bridge many times, usually with a nasty chop on the water.

Now, we rolled along through the wetlands, past Kent Narrows, then the Choptank River. Tension drained away as the bucolic countryside whispered "relax" to us and we passed through tiny towns until we arrived on the Atlantic Coast.

Both of us look forward to the new work adventure that begins Monday morning. We still have no idea what our specific duties, though Rodney mentioned that the owner of the resort usually spends about $6,000 each year on plants and flowers, all of which must be planted. Jo is in her glory (at this moment) because she misses being able to garden. Rodney assured her she will get her fill of digging and planting and won't want to see another flower by the time she's through.

Cherries in Blossom

We arrived in Washington, D.C., on a glorious day. We parked at our favorite campground, a county park in Reston, Virginia, and listened to rain being forecast for the next day. As a result, even though we were tired from the journey north, we got in our car and headed into Washington (about 20 miles away) because the cherry blossoms are in bloom and we wanted to see them in the sun rather than the rain.
Thousands of folks thought exactly the same thing so finding a place to park was tricky. Eventually, however, we parked at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, across from the majority of the 2,000 cherry trees.
The low-lying sun warmed the blossoms with its golden light. We wandered among families and lovers, single joggers, old and young. Muslim families posed for photographs, along with Japanese and Chinese and Mexican. It was the melting pot. And it was a wondrous thing to be among all these different people after being surrounded mostly be white old folks from Michigan and Illinois while at our winter quarters in Palmetto.
We drove out of Washington in the darkness, cruising along the George Washington Parkway, glad of having made the effort.

Why Niko Mattered

Gwen Lister, the editor of The Namibian, sent me this column she'd written for the newspaper's March 28 edition after receiving my letter (below) about the loss of Niko Bessinger.

It hammers home, yet again, just how remarkable this woman is. She is white. But her soul is tied to the black man's struggle. In all of my years in journalism, I found no match for her energy, intelligence, ethics and independence. Here is what she wrote:

I dedicate this column to Namibian hero, freedom fighter and friend, Niko Bessinger (1948-2008)

Farewell Mr B
If you were alive today, you would argue with me as you so liked to do, but I will for once have the last word and affirm that you ARE a Namibian hero, whether the official status is conferred on you or not!

In the 33 years I have known you, in your different capacities of Swapo leader, freedom fighter and friend and self-made man, you've always been honest and forthright – at times my foremost critic, yet a staunch supporter of this newspaper and one of my dearest friends.

I, and other founding staff of this newspaper, will never forgot the moral support you gave us in the mid-Eighties when despondency and disillusion, and yes, even fear, would sometimes set in as our offices were firebombed or the staff harassed and detained, and you urged us as journalists to continue to expose the injustices at the hands of the colonial regime and carry on our advocacy for self-determination and independence for our country, and to make the sacrifices that would be necessary to this end.

On numerous occasions over these decades we've laughed and even cried together; we've discussed and even sometimes believed we had the panacea for the problems of Namibia, Africa, yes, even the world! You often held court, as you loved to do, and endlessly entertained friends and acquaintances with stories of those struggle years. We've often argued, and agreed and disagreed as we debated issues, but always remained close as only good friends can. So often too, you were a voice of reason when emotions ran high; a person who was a peacemaker by nature, and you often used your skills in this regard to good effect.

Those who were not in the country during the struggle years cannot know what an inspiration you were to Namibians living under apartheid or even try to measure your personal sacrifice. Until your death you were one of those who represented the real Swapo, the authentic Swapo, and who never lost your sense of humanity or your commitment to a country that you wanted so badly to succeed.

And yes, you were, like all of us, fallible, and had your weaknesses, but never on matters of principle. Stubborness was certainly one of your traits, and I tried fruitlessly to convince you in the past months and even weeks, not to smoke or drink as you battled cancer. But that was part of who you were, and all your friends knew the futility of trying to budge you when you would not be moved!

And yet you never spoke out of turn. Even in your years as a Government Minister and Party functionary, you would never break the confidence of your office, and I knew better than to try to convince you otherwise! And yet I know too that you defended me even when our association may have been a liability to you politically. But you did not 'sell-out' your friends.

You are truly one of the icons of the liberation years, along with others like the Tlhabanellos, the Maxuililis, the Kambangulas, Tjongareros and Shifidis, all of whom are no longer with us, and many of whom remain unsung heroes of the struggle. You nurtured and encouraged the youthful leadership, including the Lubowskis and others, and you inspired and mentored many.

In one of our last long discussions in the weeks before your death, you commented on how different we are to many other African countries, and you expressed the wish that Namibians would accept one another in their diversity and use it as a strength, rather than a weakness, for our future growth and prosperity.

Your voice is silent now, and I bitterly regret that you are no longer with us to continue forward to the road to make Namibia the success story we both wanted it to be. Yet you will live on in the memories of those you leave behind, serving as an inspiration and a guide. You are at peace now, but the struggle is not yet over for those who continue to advocate for a good society, and it is up to Namibians to follow in the example you set.
You always spoke of the child inside you, your guide and your conscience, and the importance of mothers and how they should be held in high regard. Reluctant though I am to accept your passing, especially since you did not get to tell your life story to the world, I'm consoled by the fact that you may at this time already be reunited with your mother again, a hope you often expressed.

I end this letter to you with the words of Khalil Gibran:

"For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its
restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God
unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you
indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall
begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall
you truly dance".

Rest in peace my friend.
Gwen