Vivian's RV Vignettes

Once again, I find myself several states/ provinces/ parks behind in blogging. This time I can plead technology failure. My primary cell phone (my most reliable internet access) suddenly and irrevocably died while I was trying get a photo in New River Gorge National Park, and two attempts to replace it have failed. (Long story.) I hope to get a good replacement in another week, but in the meantime I’m depending on my old Pixel 3 that only does 4G internet, overheats easily, and has poor battery life. The expensive Peplink wireless router setup I purchased in Florida was performing so poorly that I just sent it back for a refund. I have a Starlink dish, but it needs a clear view of the northern sky, which can be hard to get in heavily wooded east-coast campgrounds. (I really got it for my trip out west later this summer, where there’s big sky and not much cell service). If you want more technical details of my technology travails, see my Facebook (or feel free to message me if you’re trying to figure out something similar yourself!).

At any rate, this will have to be a “quick highlights” update on my travels since Lynchburg, Virginia.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I put my RV in storage for a few days over Memorial Day weekend and went to see my sister, Nancy Elizabeth, in Johnson City, TN. On Saturday May 27, we all went to New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia.

On the way, we stopped for lunch at the Southeast’s favorite restaurant phenomenon, Cookout. This was the last successful picture from my old phone. RIP Pixel 5A.

Unfortunately, as I said, it died when we were trying to get a picture of all of us together at the Gorge, so I don’t have any pictures of my own from there. The only pics I have of the park are what NEB and Nate took and shared with me.

We went and saw the iconic bridge over the gorge, too, but I don’t have anyone’s photos of that, so here is a stock photo courtesy of Google.

(https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1639)

It’s a beautiful park and I think I’d like to go see it again sometime when I’m not stressing out about being incommunicado with the world three hours away from my home on wheels and my backup cell phone. But I’m glad I got to see it with NEB and family. 🙂 And I’m very thankful they were ok in their own misadventure after we parted… they hit a deer on the way home and totaled their van, just after they had sold their other car. 😦 Fortunately they’ve got a nice new van now.

I headed back to Lynchburg, picked up my RV, and drove on to Thousand Trails Virginia Landing near the southern end of the DelMarVa peninsula. That was my first time crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel, and it was quite the experience in an RV. The campground was pretty, right on the water, but didn’t have much cell signal, so my Starlink came in handy for the first time. I stopped there specifically so I could revisit Chincoteague and Assateauge Islands, from my childhood love of horses and the Misty of Chincoteague books. We went there on a family vacation on my ninth birthday and it was magical. We visited the Beebe Ranch and saw Misty’s descendants, including her daughter Stormy (who was already a pretty old horse by then in the late 1980s), and saw a band of wild horses up close on Assateague.

I had been following the story of the Beebe Ranch on social media lately. The elderly members of the family who still own it had put it up for sale so they can afford to retire in comfort, and the Museum of Chincoteague has been raising the funds to buy it to preserve it as a tourist place and home for Misty’s descendants. Unfortunately, when I stopped by to look, there’s not much left of it. I remember from the 80s, when they had a big stable yard with Misty’s descendants in individually labelled stalls. Sadly, I think the barn burned down a few years ago, and it looks like they already sold off some of the land to developers (with new houses built on it now). The remaining place is so small that at first I drove by without seeing it. I could see some ponies in round pens out back of the tiny house, but they are only open to the public by appointment on certain days so I couldn’t really stop and look. I really hope the museum can take over and preserve what’s left of that unique bit of Chincoteague history for future generations to enjoy.

I went over to Assateague and did get to see some of the ponies.

On the Virginia end of the island, they’ve put up fences to keep them off the roads. I think the Maryland end has more free-roaming herds… I’d like to go up there sometime and see them, but I didn’t have time on this trip.

Next I went up to Massachusetts, Thousand Trails Gateway to Cape Cod. (I miscalculated my driving time due to hitting rush hour in New York City, and had to stop over one night in Connecticut.) There’s not a national park there, but I wanted a chance to see a little more of nearby Rhode Island, which I had driven through before but not really seen much of. So I picked a beautiful warm day and went to the beach there.

In typical New England fashion, it was nice beach weather one day and cold rain the next. That was the day I drove up to Maine to see Acadia, and can I say again, it was COLD. I spent a few days more or less huddled in my RV trying to keep warm, but then my sister Margaret flew up to Bangor to join me, the weather improved, and we went and saw the park. I took a ridiculous number of pictures and I’ve already put a ton of them on Facebook, so I’ll just share a few of the best here.

Margaret flew home early Saturday morning, and I continued on my way to Fundy National Park at the head of Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada. I didn’t love the border crossing experience. The border guards live up to Canadians’ legendary politeness, but they are paid to be suspicious and ask a lot of questions, especially to anyone traveling in a vehicle big enough for a serious smuggling operation. I had to pull over and wait in the lobby for about 15-20 minutes while one of them went through my RV very thoroughly (not necessarily leaving everything exactly as he found it). I hope they don’t do that every single time… I’ve got three more border crossings in the next few weeks (once more into Canada and twice back into the US).

But I’m glad I came here to Fundy National Park. It’s similar in some ways to Acadia, but I think the forest inclines a little more to fir trees here (though both parks are a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees). Fundy’s main claim to fame is that the bay has the most extreme high tides of any place on earth, rising as much as 16 meters from low tide (the height of a four-story building). There are complicated scientific reasons for this, related to the shape of the bay and its natural resonance frequency compared to tidal frequency… I about half understand it, but you can read all about it here: https://www.bayoffundy.com/about/highest-tides/

At any rate, from last night’s high tide and this afternoon’s low tide, I got some fun before-and-after pictures to compare.

Last night, I stuck a stick in the sand at the very highest edge of the waves’ lap just before high tide. Five minutes later, the water had washed up six inches beyond it. Today, the stick was still there, but the water was probably a good hundred yards (meters? this is Canada) away.

I had fun walking around on the ocean bed where water would have been several feet over my head just six hours earlier (and will be again in another six hours). But I learned quickly to step on the pebbly shingle and avoid the exposed red clay base that’s as sticky as glue.

The seaweed in the tidal zone has to be incredibly tough and adaptable, to be exposed to air for so many hours and then inundated with cold sea water.

Also, the first porcupine I’ve ever seen in the wild crossed the road right in front of me.

Pretty sure I saw groundhogs yesterday, too, but I didn’t get a picture.

The park was once the site of settlers’ homesteads, and the fruit trees they left behind are in bloom now, along with wildflowers.

That pretty much brings me up to date. Anne Shirley fans should stay tuned for my next stop, Prince Edward Island.