Year's jaunt broken up into three parts

(Continued from previous week)

Our year off work didn’t mean that we were on the road each week for 52 weeks.

We sort of broke it down into three separate trips.

The first was a nine-week jaunt as described earlier that took us from home up to Illinois, over to Maine, through Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and into West Virginia and down the Blue Ridge Parkway, to where else, but the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a day or two.

It was then to home from just before Thanksgiving until the latter part of January.

The second leg was a three-month haul that gave us a taste of the Southwest and a good taste of California, especially Yosemite National Park, before heading back home in early May.

The third jaunt was just at three weeks. 

It was the beginning of summer and we made it as far as Rapid City, SD. Some say it was the hottest summer in 30 or more years for the Plains states.

We felt their pain, especially since our vehicle didn’t have an air conditioner and we weren’t budgeted to stay each night in a motel.

But we did succumb. On the way back home there was a good motel stop and a bad one. The first was somewhere in either Nebraska or Kansas or thereabouts.

It was hot and the people running the motel knew how to please anticipated guests. When we went into our room, the air conditioner was running and the room was at a very cool temperature.

Our next motel stop was in Little Rock, AR. It’s funny how we forget where the good spot was and know exactly where the unpleasant point was.

We went into our room, and the air conditioner was not running. The room was hot. The curtains on the window on the front of the room had been pulled back allowing the evening sun to blast in and heat up the brick interior wall.

There was no way those bricks were going to cool down. There’s always the good, the bad and the ugly.

Well, that room was  the bad and the ugly compared to our previous motel stop.

Anyway, we made it home on the evening of the next day.

The journey was over, but the remembrances remain these many years later.

Other experiences will be shared later.

Next post: Oct. 11, 2016 

(Note: We are going on vacation, that is, camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where there will be no wifi for posting during that time.)