I’ve been thinking a lot about Spring lately. It used to be my favorite season. When I lived in New Jersey, It was the best days ever after the cold dreariness of winter to see a sunny sky, feel that new warmth in the air, delight in the blooms – azaleas and rhododendrons, tulips, daffodils and crocuses, mountain laurel….
Then we spent 18 years in Tucson, Arizona. It took a while to learn the subtle seasonal changes. You feel that spring feeling often in February when the temperatures get warmer. But, except for an occasional penstemon, you must wait until May to see any color. Palo Verde and Mesquite trees are covered in yellow buds; barrel cacti sprout their yellow fruit and prickly pear explode with yellow and light peachy flowers. May is Yellow Month, but it’s not that dramatic a season change as in the northeast.
Now I see Spring much differently. Living in an RV and traveling during the spring months, I’ve learned to be suspicious of this seasonal change. As I look forward to warmer temperatures, I fear the spring storms that have dangerous winds, giant hail, scary lightning, flooded waterways and the inevitable and terrifying tornado watches and warnings. No matter how hard Doug tries to avoid this scary weather, we find ourselves listening for the screechy obnoxious warnings on our weather radio and our phones. We learn what county we are in. We sit glued to a local TV station watching the yellow-red-purple blobs of radar-tracked fronts moving through enormous areas of the country as we try to become familiar with surrounding town names. We can’t drive fast enough to get out of the whole swatch of the possible problem area, so we hunker down and wait it out.
We keep a “go bag” ready – water, granola bars, meds, flashlights, phone chargers, important documents. We check out the nearest sturdy-looking structure in every campground and we know the quickest way to get there. I don’t sleep well (or at all) on bad nights, but I make sure I go to bed in pants and a t-shirt, not a nightgown I don’t want to run through a campground in. My new mantra on these nights is to keep my bladder empty. Yes, I don’t want to have that kind of accident! I’ve gotten better (than I was) about controlling my panic. I now only worry about Doug and me. The RV and car are insured and nothing in them is worth worrying about. Everything can be replaced. When you’ve gotten rid of as much as we have, things and stuff lose importance. So, I limit my worry time to making sure Doug and I will be okay. The universe has been good to us and we’ve stayed out of any real trouble, even though it’s scary to watch those storms swirl nearby us.
So, with all our recent spring weather issues, it has been a nice experience to find something to celebrate in this season of change: redbuds! All along the North Carolina highways we saw some wisteria and this pretty, purple tree I learned was a redbud. Now, driving through Virginia, both sides and the median of the highway is an exciting splash of purply wonder. My new favorite spring bloom – the prolific, pretty, purple present of the redbud.
We got to add another state to our map – North Carolina. Now we have been in 37 states in our RV since we started living full time on the road in January of 2016. It now is easier to name the states we haven’t been in: Alaska and Hawaii, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Louisiana, Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, Idaho and Utah. On our way to our month-long stay in Pennsylvania this May, we will add West Virginia. Then we have two exciting weeks reserved on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. As we pass through the northern states to see our kids and family in Portland, Oregon, we will add North Dakota. And then as we head to our winter in Southeast Arizona, we will stay in Idaho and Utah. So, after that wide swing through the states we will have only eight more to hit. We haven’t figured out when to visit Alaska but will probably do that one year. We will not be RVing in Hawaii – the RV won’t do well crossing the ocean. That will leave Louisiana, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware and Kansas. We figure at some point we can cross the country through Kansas. There must be some season when we feel safe enough from tornadoes to visit that state. We definitely want to spend more time in Texas so that will make a trip to Louisiana easy. And since we plan to visit family in the Philadelphia area often, we’ll catch up on those missing little East Coast states on one of those trips. Maine and the Atlantic Provinces of Canada are always a draw for us so that’s when we can plan to spend time in Vermont and New Hampshire. So someday, not too far away, our state map will be almost full!
We arrived in Fayetteville, North Carolina on Wednesday, March 27th. We stayed at the Fayetteville RV Resort – a really great campground in the town of Wade. I liked the laundry so much I visited it three times. We are traveling slowly so our seven nights in this campground were relaxing. I had started a big sewing project – making Easter patchwork place mats for our grandchildren and an Easter patchwork table runner for the RV. It was a nice long stay to take out the sewing machine and have fun with this project. Doug worked on a project to cleanup the added wiring on our Honda so the lights and brake can be controlled from the motorhome while it is being towed..
The next stop was another really nice campground – Forest Lake Thousand Trails Resort in Advance, North Carolina. I had a little problem on the drive here – something really upset my stomach and it wasn’t a pretty sight to see me being sick as we drove into this new campground. So, we didn’t get to explore the campground on our first day. Then our second day was raining and cold – I recovered indoors, and Doug stuck around with me. Luckily, we reserved this campground for ten nights, giving us lots of time to enjoy a whole resort full of things to do. We are still dealing with rain and cold days, but we had some hours of sunshine that we took advantage of and sat outside on our site. We have a nice view of the lake and enough room for me to sit with the sun warming me and Doug to sit in the shade. There are lots of community buildings in this place and during the high season, I’m sure they are filled with campers. Right now, the sites are almost full and although the store and pool are not open and there are no activities on the calendar, there are pool tables, ping pong tables, puzzles, arcade games and two free lending libraries. We had an hour or so of sun today, so we took a quick walk around the recreation halls and through the cabin area. We are expecting more rain today and tomorrow but every once in a while, the sun comes through the clouds and I feel like I should run outside and enjoy it. But as soon as I put my shoes on, the sky darkens again. Oh well.
We ventured out to a flea market in Lexington. Not very exciting because it’s too early for produce, but we picked up some odds and ends for a few bucks. We went to Thomasville – what used to be the furniture capital of the world. Now that notoriety is assigned to High Point. But the world’s largest chair is still in Thomasville and although there are many boarded up, empty stores, it still has a nice downtown Main Street, complete with an emporium of second-hand stuff, tulips, and murals.
Greensboro was much better – as small-town historic downtowns go, this one was pretty cool. Greensboro, the Gate City, is also now “Jeansboro” – with larger-than-life painted jeans sculptures all over town. The “Jeansboro” public art project celebrates Greensboro’s denim and textile industry history. It’s a nice to city to walk through with large, pretty green spaces, one of which has a huge netted sculpture flying overhead. The best part of this town is the International Museum of Civil Rights which is located on the exact site of the 1960 F.W. Woolworth lunch counter sit in. On February 1, 1960, four college freshmen sat down at the counter that was for “whites only” and quietly asked for service. It didn’t happen overnight. These four men, and then local citizens, high school students, and sympathizers from other parts of the country, sat – and came back day after day and just sat – and their courageous, non-violent protest helped fuel the fire of other protests against segregation across the country. The street is named February One. The Woolworth lunch counter is still where it was in 1960 (we couldn’t take pictures inside). Our tour guide led us through the displays with stories of the South, including his home town of Durham. For us, it gave us another historic point in our journey through the history of the civil rights movement. We connected this experience to other sites like the Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Little Rock Central High School and John Brown’s abolitionist raid in Harper’s Ferry. We hung out to see a little bit more of Greensboro and had a good slice of pizza at L’Italiano’s.
We left Advance, North Carolina and arrived in Fort Chiswell RV Park in Max Meadows, Virginia. In between the rainy weather, we found a nice day to tour our next little town – Wytheville. It is famous for being Edith Bolling Wilson’s birthplace (First Lady and wife of Woodrow Wilson) and its centerpiece is the Bolling Wilson Hotel. We stopped in a fabric store, Batiks Etcetera and Sewwhat Fabrics, so I could pick up a stabilizer for a quilt I am planning. I am proud of myself for only buying 3 fat quarters of their beautiful batiks, in spite of seeing thousands of amazing colors all over their crowded, but cool store. One of the highlights of Wytheville is the Big Pencil. It’s a 30-foot-long metal sculpture that hangs high over the entrance to Wytheville Office Supply. It’s been there since its construction in the 1950’s. We love seeing these larger-than-life structures that appear all over America.
In this campground, we sheltered from a tornado watch that went around us. The campground was busy – lots of snowbirds traveling through with one- or two-night stays. Outside our window was a great view of a grassy hill sprinkled daily with noisy sheep. So bucolic! I worried about those sheep. Where did they go to shelter from a storm? Well, we only got lots of rain, a little wind, no hail and the rotation (not really a tornado) was a few miles away. Because we didn’t want to drive in the predicted high winds the next day, we stayed here an extra night, leaving us just one night at Walnut Hills Campground in Staunton (pronounced “Stanton”), Virginia. We’ve been in this campground before when it was a KOA. Doug used to remember all the campsites in great detail. This one we have only vague memories of, but it is a nice campground with a small lake, a meandering rivulet, and nice folks in the office. It was great to be able to walk around the lake in the afternoon with a bright sky and brisk but not cold temperatures. Tomorrow we leave Virginia to get to our next state – West Virginia – number 38!
