Vivian's RV Vignettes

Summer of ’24 is underway!

I launched my travels with a drive to eastern Tennessee. The start was a little rough as I found I had lost one of the safety clips for my flat tow hitch pin to pull my truck, and the bolt I tried to substitute didn’t do the job and got sheared off by my first gas stop. But I found a sturdier substitute and made it safely to Johnson University in Knoxville, where I’m in the dissertation phase of my PhD program. We have a Leadership Summit every summer where we meet for three days for instruction and inspiration for the PhD marathon. It’s not required for the program, but I’ve gone every year except the first one and always found it very helpful.

We go through the program in cohorts with other students. Laura and Brad are in Cohort 19 with me (along with a few other students), and we’ve started a tradition of taking a picture at this gazebo every year.

We do a “Lightning Round” of practice presentations of our research (2 minute summary) followed by answering questions from fellow students and profs. It’s good practice for presenting at a formal conference, and can help clarify ideas. I gave it a shot.

We believe in “work hard, play hard” so we also went bowling together. 🙂 Some of those Doctors and Doctors-to-be are pretty good alley rats, too.

The conference ended on Wednesday (at least for the students) and our family vacation in Townsend (half an hour away) didn’t start until Sunday, so I got permission to hang out on the Johnson campus for a couple of extra days. (They have full hookups for my RV and graciously let me do my laundry in the dorm, too!) The campus is absolutely lovely, right on the French Broad River.

I took a walk at sunset one evening and just soaked it in. There was this moment when I came down the hill to the river bank into a little clearing… there was a tree stump where a male cardinal alighted, and his mate followed a second later, framed by a rising cloud of fireflies. And then I looked and there was a deer perfectly framed by the thick green undergrowth. We all looked at one another for a magical moment, like a fairy tale. Then the deer took off into the woods and the birds flew away. There was no time to take a picture, and no picture would have captured the quality of that scene anyway; it was enough to have lived it.

On Friday I moved on to Townsend, my happy place on the Little River where it flows out of Great Smokey Mountain National Park, and my parents and Margaret joined me on Sunday.

Nancy Elizabeth brought her tribe down Tuesday and Wednesday from their home in Johnson City two hours away, and we went up and visited them on Friday.

Over the course of the week we did most of our favorite things in Townsend and GSMNP, including tubing the river, taking a family picture at Newfound Gap, touring Cade’s Cove (this year, both on foot and by car), and visiting the Wood-N-Strings Dulcimer Shop.

We got some great looks at elk, bears, and deer. On Friday, we finished up with a picnic at Lake Watauga.

On Saturday/ Sunday, I drove up to northern Illinois just west of Chicago. My niece Madelaine came with me because she’s attending a two-week camp/ art class at Wheaton College, so we made a road trip of it. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take any pictures together, but we had a fun trip (including a quick stop at Asbury in Kentucky so I could show her the media communications building… I so wish we’d had that when I was a student there!). Thanks for your stint as my copilot, Madelaine!

(Picture of Madelaine, or part of her anyway, stolen from her mom’s Facebook. Confession: some of the other photos in this post are also stolen from family/ friends’ social media because I was lazy about taking pictures so far on this trip.)

My plan is to stay here until Saturday and then head up to Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota, the place I was heading for just before my old RV began to shed its skin on the interstate last year. I built in this week in Illinois because I can stay here free (it’s a Thousand Trails park) and I figured I needed a week without a lot of sightseeing to catch up on work and school. However, I do plan to work in a side quest tomorrow to Dyersville, Iowa, to see the Baseball Field of Dreams and Hall of Dreams Museum. (Plus that checks the “do something meaningful in Iowa” box for me… on my only previous visit, I just drove straight through and walked around a rest stop for a couple of minutes in freezing wind.) So tonight I’m watching the movie “Field of Dreams,” which I actually never saw before despite my love of baseball. It’s trippy for sure.

I’ll try to post again somewhere further down the road. 🙂