Category: Uncategorized

This week, we visited a modern laundromat for obvious reasons. My experience in a laundromat was limited to college days when you sort of washed stuff in one load, dried it and left wondering why all your clothing was changing to the same color, usually pink or gray. On the road, my regimen is to drop Sharon off and head to a coffee shop to grab a couple of brews for us. Not this week as my planning and logistics manager insisted I stay the course and learn the intricacies of washing clothes in a commercial establishment. Uh……

To be successful in the RV business, you must have skills or training in sanitation management, electrical systems, water management, mechanics, carpentry, chemistry and mechanical engineering. You also need at least two rolls of Gorilla Tape, useful in most of the above noted regimens. In addition to my cartography skills (paper maps in Vietnam and artillery) I also agreed to sitting through basic laundry 101. My hat is off to whomever handles that responsibility in your compound. You need to master fabrics, soaps, bleaches, dryer sheets, fabric softeners, computers and financial planning. I will never take this responsibility lightly again!

Today’s commercial washers (costing between 5K and 16K EACH) will wash the hell out of your clothes. You pay for each load with an app on your phone. Each load costs between 6 and 15 dollars and is spun out in around 30 minutes. Dryer cycles run around a buck for 20 minutes. Extra time on a dryer can be bought by the minute for 1.25 but you’ll quickly see you are ahead buying another full cycle which requires moving to another dryer. Temperature control in all respects is a skill that requires lots of experience.

My concept of folding clothes did not meet Sharon’s standards. She thought I would do better just tossing stuff in a bag randomly. Believe me, I have it down now.

A thousand pardons to skilled laundry practitioners. I grossly underestimated the nuances of doing it correctly. The preservation of colors and the continued fit of clothing is far more complicated than what I remember on the back porch with my grandmother. We had a wringer washer, a tub for rinsing and a tub with some magic stuff called blueing. Our dryer was a wire between two posts and a gentle South Carolina breeze. Please take a moment to thank the scientist in your home who does the laundry. Times have changed…..

Have a great week!

SR

We are spending the holidays still ensconced in beautiful Page Arizona. As I write, a motorized para-glider is gingerly flying over the RV park, enjoying a rare respite from the seemingly incessant wind. We are easterners in the minds of the populace here, very much in tune with the beauty of the midwest. That beauty comes with near constant ambient light and noise.

It gets dark here. I am talking about cave tour, turn off your flashlight kind of dark. There is no ambient light where we are and you can see the heavens much more clearly. The quiet is disconcerting. Step outside and hear nothing…..no traffic, folks puttering about, lawn mowers. In Edgar Allen Poe terms, it must be similar to the day they close the lid and cover you with dirt…..

We walked the docks this week and were thunderstruck by the size and opulence of the houseboats in their berths. The docks are wide enough and long enough to accommodate small service trucks, pedestrians and the endless stream of UTV’s loading the houseboats with a convenience store sized inventory of stuff necessary to enjoy a week or two anchored in a niche on this puddle called lake Powell. We can pick up our cellphone, dial a few numbers and presto, bingo, a courtesy cart will be at your site and transport you to your boat, the restaurant or any of the other amenities found here. When you do back your mammoth barge out, you provide the marina with the coordinates where you will be and they will send an “anchoring crew” to anchor your boat! Apparently there is a trick to doing that when shore is a sheer rock wall. That and many of the folks we see maneuvering the armada around here have not a clue how to drive the damned things. Out of curiosity, we inquired about the rental of a houseboat. Not a problem if you have 2 grand a day for the nicer ones. Another observation….there are several ramps to shuck your ski boat into the creek, one for do it yourselfers and one where a professional launch artist puts her in for you. The carnage around the do it yourself ramp reminds me of Gaza……you get my point.

I did notice a bass boat, equipped with power poles, slip into a tie down for a sandwich, I am guessing. I laughed, as the depth of this lake would require power poles about 100’ long. As long as I am mentioning things, there is a proliferation of young beauties whose bathing suits would not make a kids slingshot, leading me to the conclusion that a dermatologist would do quite well here. Money that you weigh instead of count, big boats and gold chains seem to attract these little girls. Bass boats do not.

So the day is started, a fuel truck is on site and the games begin. Have a wonderful holiday and join the masses that love America. May a police baton leave an indelible impression on those who hate. America is on the mend and all is well.

SR

We have made it to the shores of Lake Powell in scenic Arizona, very near the Arizona-Utah line. The lake is magnificent, dwarfing our Lake of the Ozarks, offering 186 miles of shoreline, 25 miles wide at its widest point and an average depth of 132’. We are in Navajo Indian country and for the first time in my life, I understand why the Indians were so mean. It is the heat, described as “dry heat”, whatever in hell that means. Our tour is the elimination tour and we chose to experience Arizona in the hottest time of the year. We have eliminated Arizona, at least in the arid lowlands. If you get to 7,000’, say in Flagstaff, the weather moderates considerably, apparently the Indians didn’t figure this out. As a point of reference, most folks around here have no idea what “humidity” even is. The climate accounts for the orneriness of the abundant rattlesnakes and scorpions….there are signs everywhere to not pet the snakes. One last point, a 20 MPH wind is described locally as a breeze.

In a strange sort of way, the place is beautiful, well except for the proliferation of old trailer houses where your wealth is showcased by how many tires are on the roof. I suspect the affluent folks choose radials as opposed to bias ply truck tires, which are likely too heavy to hoist onto your roof anyhow. We have scored wonderful parks to set up the Taz M-Haul, especially the one we are in now named Antelope Point. It is paved, with Astro-turf to set your chairs and grill on, level and filled with RV’s ranging from our modified hillbilly rig to 500,000+ coaches. The park is adjacent to a huge marina, run by the Navajo Nation. Half of the population of rural Arizona is here for the weekend, with houseboats and top tier ski boats everywhere. My logistics officer, Sharon, is a meticulous planner, landing us in places like a secluded but a very nice place named Homolovi, which the Mormons chose to build a settlement on but got the hell out of there after a summer or two. The sign there suggested they had great difficulty raising crops (it is on the banks of the little Colorado river…..a ditch to a Missourian). No kidding!

We are here for an extended stay as it is close to the Grand Canyon and a dozen other national treasures, which you can drive to or boat around. We probably won’t see much on a boat tour, as I am insisting we go at night or dawn, lest you become mummified in the heat. I am including several photos to illustrate our journey so far. As a final point, I found myself in the wrong lane entering the park, as the sign telling you which lane to be in was about the size of a paper plate and placed well beyond the point you could make an adjustment. A native lady manned the booth and was not in a good mood, probably because her restroom facility was a porti-potty that smelled like death from 100’ away. She chastised us and I responded by suggesting that whoever placed the sign was somewhat mentally challenged. She was irritated and I can become irritated right back at ‘ya. I cut her some slack though, as I have a First Calvary decal on the RV and I am sure she has relatives who took umbrage at anything related to Calvary!

have a great week!

SR

We knew it would be hot but failed to anticipate the winds today as we visited the museum and memorial dedicated to the Murrah Federal Building bombing in 1995. The museum is the best curated museum I have ever visited, and I have been to many. The simplicity of the memorial is both beautiful and moving. The museum is an emotion racking experience with vivid descriptions of the tremendous response by the various emergency services who turned absolute chaos into an organized and tremendously effective exercise in handling a mass casualty event. Should you attend, allow at least two hours to see and feel the events of the day at this National Park.

After the museum we walked the 4 or so blocks to the famous Devon building, said to be the tallest building in Oklahoma at 50 stories. We made reservations for the lunch buffet on the top floor, offering an incredible panorama of Oklahoma City and the surrounding countryside. The restaurant goes by the name Vast and was allegedly a wonderful place to enjoy an upscale luncheon buffet, replete with what is described as a terrific dessert offering. The building is an architectural masterpiece in steel and glass with the fastest elevator in the midwest.

Our anticipation did not meet the realities of the buffet. The food was very average, the selection limited to two mediocre meat offerings, a few vegetables and a soup that was mysterious and underwhelming. Sharon is a veteran of 27 tours in the classroom and elementary education and her summary of the dining experience was succinct and accurate. She described the main courses as bad elementary cafeteria food. My brutal assessment is augmented by the cost of the meal for us, in the 70.00 range. Sorry Vast……

Oklahoma City, downtown, is a super clean city that is very pedestrian friendly. We were surprised at the relatively few folks moving around during the lunch hour, being used to KC and STL downtown foot traffic. The lack of enthusiasm today may be the result of the Pacers thorough thrashing of the Thunder from Indy. We can attest…they take basketball as seriously here as we do the Chiefs and NFL.

Tomorrow we move on to Amarillo, Texas to take the pulse of this north Texas town steeped in cowboy lore. Yesterday we visited the Will Rogers museum in Claremore, another very nice place honoring this ordinary man with an extraordinary wit and ability to communicate. He is one of my favorite Americans, although we discovered he was a lifelong Democrat, a fact I failed to note over the years.

I promise not to turn my blogs into a rendition of “my vacation” but will continue to report on the neat things we see as we motor on.

Have a good week and watch the heat…..gonna be a scorcher in Missouri!

SR

It takes a lot of courage to sell your home and move into a 30’ RV. Another way to look at it is that you must have suffered a stroke somewhere along the way (I have, actually) and are willing to throw caution to the wind. Motivations aside, we did it. There is a degree of romanticism involved and, to be certain, uncertainty.

Our brief career as real estate agents is behind us, and we turned the keys to the Johnson compound over to its new caretakers this past Tuesday. I have a good number of friends in the real estate sales industry and mean absolutely no disrespect to them, but selling a home is not a difficult proposition. Times have changed as have the rules today. I owe our success here to Sharon’s tenacity. A lecture or two recounting our success at selling various vehicles, boats and the jetsom and flotsam of life convinced Sharon that we could sell ourselves and save a pile of money. I was not convinced, but am now.

We have stored our earthly possessions, our cars and clothes in Springfield, as one day, perhaps sooner than later, we fully intend to return to normalcy with a new compound somewhere, likely still in western Missouri. Sharon has enjoyed stability most of her life, raised on a farm, but embraces travel with gusto. My life has been anything but stable, the result of being an Army brat and the penchant of the Highway Patrol for relocation as you advance. We love people and are excited about the prospect of meeting new folks. Our years of RV travel have eliminated many of the surprises attendant to a nomadic lifestyle.

Health concerns prompted me to fight my absolute love of food with a little belly shot once a week. GLP-1 has managed to consume 23 pounds of excess in 5 weeks. No more pre-diabetes, no more high blood pressure and no more runaway appetite. Long term success remains to be seen, but I sleep better than I have in 30 years. By the end of the year I will be at my fighting weight, last seen in the Academy. For those who see us as long in the tooth for this adventure, fear not, age is just a thing. We refuse to let the old man (woman) in.

We will develop a good number of relationships with interesting folks who have a story to tell, and write about them and the places we find. We are “off the road” travelers who revel in hidden eateries and places. Our parameters are clearly defined with little travel in blue states and a reluctance to spend even a single dime in them. We are done with mealy mouthed Democrats and their abandonment of sanity these days.

God willing, we will return to our roots wiser, and with a deeper appreciation for the geography and culture of folks different than us…..but not too different as in liberals. We’ll stay in touch and keep the Taz-M-Haul’s awning lights on!

Have a good week!

SR

Since the election of Mr. Trump, and giving the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth his due credit, our military is enjoying tremendous recruiting success. Folks do not join a military organization to be woke and share a fighting position with a sexually confused person. The motivations are many and I applaud this resurgence in the popularity of our Armed Services. Recruiters are well schooled in answering the questions that are posed by folks interested in this early option in life, but I have seen little written about the long term effects of military service. Until now.

You WILL change as a result of your experience. Some changes are in your face, some very subtle. I am an Army brat and served a hitch in the US Army, replete with a tour in Vietnam. The memories are etched into my mind.

We are all proud of some aspects in our life. The military is going to instill pride in your soul. You will learn to function in tandem with another soldier, squad, platoon and company. You learn to feed on the strengths of your fellow men and women and to understand human frailty. I was an artillery Fire Direction Control specialist. It was my computed data that was fed into an artillery piece guiding the deadly munition to an appropriate target. While proud of this experience, I have an unbridled respect for the incredible power of a well led rifle company. The combat arms branches, where steel meets flesh, is but a small part of the massive machine our military represents. There are millions of good soldiers, airmen and sailors who have supported the point of the spear, the combat arms. Your post military pride will know no bounds, nor should it.

You will learn to do as you are told, with no compromise. A combat action requires a carefully choreographed weave of disciplines and duties. Our young people today desperately need this discipline and for once in your life you will know and appreciate it. You will understand the necessity for uniformity in your existence. If subjected to a deployment, you will learn to manage fear and turn this emotion in to strength. The very real possibility of dying sharpens your mental and physical reflex in ways you could not have imagined.

You will develop a lifetime and deep appreciation for the concept of leadership. The military quickly separates bullshit artists from leaders. This ability will follow you in life. You will develop an appreciation for your limits in life, whether they be physical or mental. Your ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment will be sharpened and you will rely on this ability for the rest of your life.

Finally, you will have earned the standing to raise hell about the political climate in our country. The proliferation of the aforementioned bullshit artists that permeate government will cause you to wince and smile simultaneously, another skill you will have developed.

If your son, daughter, or grandchild is headed in this direction, smile. Rest assured they will be better for it!

Have a great week!

SR

We both were raised in modest environments, Sharon in neat farm homes and me in a military officer’s abode where excesses simply did not exist. Notwithstanding her father who kept every nut and bolt and other pieces of stuff that you tend to accumulate in a machinery shed, if we didn’t need and use it, we didn’t own it.

We have scheduled the fabled three men and a truck to load out our furniture, my tool chests and outdoor cooking appliances. We need young muscle for those tasks although the move to a storage facility is a short one. We decided to move our “household goods” ourselves, the other stuff you collect over time. It is important to note that we lived at Truman Lake for ten years, collected quite an array of stuff and chose a reputable auction service to assist us when we left. In short we left with the clothes on our back and enough tools to fill a widow’s tool box. That my readers is the way to do it….start fresh with new stuff and roll on.

I asked Sharon as we lifted another carefully packed and labeled box into our storage facility if she believed we are hoarders. We agree that we must be. When we finally settle someplace, it will be after another glorious sale of the jetsom and flotsam we have collected in ten short years. We have stuff we have never used and lots of stuff we used once. The retail world loves us especially the outlets that sell clothes. Hundreds of pounds of clothes, some the result of a waistline that is anything but static, some impulse buys, some from our professional existence and a precious couple of items we wear regularly. It is no small wonder third world countries despise us.

I could provide detail to support our realization that we have crossed some line in the acquisition of stuff but it is embarrassing. One simple example of our full throttled consumer lifestyle is a huge box filled with bird feeders. Birds could care less what they eat out of as long as they eat. I am sure some of my feeders would attract a flock of Pterodactyls if they were still flying around. I am equally sure this concern is addressed in the hundreds of pounds of books from our library.

Suffice to say, this new realization has jolted us into reality. We are getting ready to live in a modest travel trailer which will be refreshing as the favorite shirt I always reach for is likely to be one of a precious few items in the wardrobe. We are about to find out what a modest living environment is all about. We are going to shake this self described hoarder lifestyle and learn to exist without the trappings of a runaway consumer. Wish us luck….and do not judge us harshly. Look around your own abode before you ridicule us, uh huh, just what I thought.

Have a great week!

SR

Sharon is consumer savvy. She buys an occasional treasure on an auction website that markets Amazon and Costco returns and other assorted items. She can put a jar of Piney River gravel on one of the many websites that folks peruse……and sell it. I accompany her to her retail outlet, the parking lot at a box store near us, for her MM in deliveries of stuff she decides we no longer need. Put a plaid sport coat and checkered tie on her and she would make a wonderful salesman at Big Al’s Quality car-mart.

As an example of her marketing savvy, I was involved in watching the Chiefs on a bright fall day, sitting on a leather couch we did not particularly like. My game was interrupted by a knock on the door. I hopped up to see what fertilizer service was working the neighborhood on a football Sunday and was met by a well dressed gentleman who announced he was here for a couch that Sharon had sold him an hour or so before his arrival. She had sold the couch out from under me leaving a gap in our living room furnishing and relegating me to a chair I moved into the vacant space.

There is no doubt Sharon has “saved” us a fortune by pedaling stuff that we bought in a moment of weakness or the need for retail gratification. We all do it. When you flip the television on you are bombarded by clever advertising for products ranging from feminine hygiene to shrinking garden hoses. Madison Avenue has devised innumerable, often subtle, colorful, and enticing ads to hawk stuff that Amazon can put on your doorstep tomorrow. I marvel at big pharma’s ability to direct market a plethora of fabulous new drugs that will cause your hair to fall out, teeth to loosen, lose control of your bowels and possibly give you cancer…..but your headache will go away.

There is a caveat to our retail experience. Seldom do we profit. We have mastered the art of buying high and selling low. I doubt that any marketing professor at our political meccas, excuse me, I meant to say universities, teaches this unusual retail tactic. The standing joke when we acquire something new, is to estimate our losses on Facebook Marketplace when we decide we have, again, been duped. So it is. You can go online and have anything delivered to your doorstep from infant formula to caskets for the do it yourself funeral experience. America has become a land of excesses, with a thriving retail experience available at every turn. Be alert for folks like us. We may just have what you think you need and will gladly absorb the normal retail mark up to deliver the product in a Menard’s parking lot at a fraction of the cost new.

As I write, I can report that I still own the nice recliner I am sitting on….at least until the dreaded knock on the door!

Have a great week!

The ink is dry on the contracts and we anticipate the transfer of FSB Johnson to its new inhabitants on or about the 11th of next month (FSB stands for Fire Support Base, which was a hole in the Vietnam jungle where you stuck a couple of howitzers). It doesn’t seem possible we have been here 10 years or so which is pretty long for us. The location of our next FSB remains to be seen, to be established after our tour of interesting places in America.

In Florida, a few years back, we visited with a seasoned RV salesman at one of Florida’s mega RV shows. He was an interesting guy who had a deep grasp of the RV industry. We were in our second RV at that point and he assured us we would own 3 more before we settled down. So it is that we have again swapped RV’s letting our 38’ trailer go in favor of a new Grand Design 2500RL, weighing in at about 3,000 lbs. less than our current monster. The new guy is 30’ long, thus protecting us from the worry about knocking over gas pumps and clipping innocent bystanders at fuel stops. It is number 5 and likely the last in our lifetimes.

We are mapping out a travel plan these days and have noted that a number of interesting places are, unfortunately, in blue states. We have both had our shots and should be able to withstand whatever it is that afflicts folks in those places that causes them to self identify as cats, snakes, and hermaphrodites. We are traveling without our Tazzy, but plan to stop at a number of kennels that produce light colored Labs to continue our journey in life, in honor of Mr. Taz. Our new rig, the Taz-Ma-Haul, will be a constant reminder of the wonderful life we gave that boy with an eye to the future. The rig will proudly display his name on the back.

Now, we are high maintenance campers. That means nice RV parks, with electric, water and sewer drops at each site, preferably with a nice pool and no alligators. I am taking a generator this time, because occasionally you miscalculate an arrival and are forced into a Cracker Barrel or Wal-Mart lot in a brutally hot location in places like Arizona or west Texas for a nite. I quit sleeping in the heat when I left Vietnam.

I plan to keep writing as our adventures unfold. It will be an adventure unto itself as we will have no FSB to return to until the wanderlust is abated. This prospect has my distant relatives and friends deeply concerned less cousin Eddy and Miss Sharon drop in unannounced (with the black tank full). Most will know what this means.

We will rely on my gracious daughter to handle mail and such and provide us with an address for the tax collector, and the BMW’s have been assigned to a caretaker to keep them lubricated while they repose in storage. We are excited about being Vagabonds for once in our lives…….

Have a great week!

SR

Thank you for tolerating one more piece about the yellow dog. We will heal, one day, but the loss of Tazzy is still fresh, more as a result of the circumstances as the death itself.

We had arranged for Tazzy to be delivered by our mail lady, a sweet woman who always had a treat for him. In exchange for the treat, she would hand him a piece of junk mail and he would proudly hurry to one of us with the mail, tail wagging and very pleased with himself for doing what Labs do. She alerted the Post Office that if Tazzy showed up, and she was off duty, she was to be called in or Tazzy secured until she could deliver him to us personally. She wanted the yellow dog to ride up front with her as she was captivated by him, referring to him as “her baby”.

Instead of the US Mail, the folks who handled Tazzy decided to send him via UPS. Tazzy was unceremoniously delivered by a UPS guy who left him on the front porch, unbeknownst to us until late in the day. We discovered him yesterday evening and brought him in, unboxed him and apologized for missing his last ride with the mail carrier, as promised.

It is not unusual for medical procedures to fail in delivering the desired result. Tazzy, carefully protected from the hard side of life, spent his last week in a cold medical crate at MU rather than with “his people”. The surgery and anesthesia exacted the ultimate price and he died in our arms suffering from diffused pneumonia that did not respond to treatment.

I have been around death in its many forms from tragic to peaceful. Long ago, an older physician assured me there is no dignity in death, even under carefully controlled circumstances. You would think these experiences would have prepared me for the end of Tazzy’s life. Not so.

Our previous labs are all home with us, and my daughter is to place a bit of their ashes in the vessels that convey us to eternity. Our family will again be together, enjoying the life we knew and loved.

Only if you understand the contribution to human existence that a dog can deliver, will you understand the depth of our loss.

We have this Tazzy, forever.

SR