Buena Vista, VA

Buena Vista, VA exists in a sneakily beautiful area of the U.S. with a sneaky habit of bastardizing pronunciations in a manner that shouts: AMERICA! Beuna Vista, VABeuna Vista, VABuena Vista, VA… okay?Beuna Vista, VA We arrived at a first-come, first-served camping area in the town of Buena Vista, which is pronounced Bunna Vih-sta, and were greeted by Billy Bean, the director of Guy’s Jam, a BlueGrass gathering that just happened to be taking place when we pulled into Glen Maury Park camping area. He coaxed me into this golf cart, shuttled me around an open field lined with posts…

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Kingsport & Johnson City, TN

Johnson City, Tenneseeeeee! Johnson City, TN That song is the reason why we knew Johnson City was a place. (Thanks Old Crowe Medicine Show and mostly Darius Rucker.) We snagged a couple of campsites at Warriors Path State Park for Wednesday through Tuesday, tossed Scott and Lucy in the rig, and left Knoxville for the Johnson City/Kingsport area. Warriors Path State Park was interesting. The sites were a bit jumbled, seemingly plopped willy-nilly, and often at strange angles. A busy park, it was packed on the weekend with happy campers and their herds of cyclically giggling/crying children who seemed to…

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Knoxville, TN

Knoxville is a smelly, unmuffled, scrappy city with good ice cream. City on the left, Dyna on the right. We parked Dyna on the top of a parking garage at the convention center downtown for 2 weeks and were treated to a (sometimes barf-inducing) bouquet of aromas for the entirety of our stay. Overall, I reflect on Knoxville fondly. Mostly because it is one of the few cities in the U.S. that provides RVers a place to live pro tem within walking distance of its fun stuff. My heart hosts a (currently mostly vacant) spot that can only be filled…

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Chattanooga, TN

I have a difficult time thinking of Chattanooga without the Chattanooga ChooChoo song invading my mind and then hanging around for hours on repeat. If you do not know this song, then I’m not going to recommend clicking that link. If you do, I am sorry that it is now on loop in your brain too. I know this song because I grew up with parents who dabbled in the world of antiques. Throughout my childhood years, I spent many many hours in antique stores. Some, my parents owned and operated. Others, they rented space to sell their treasures in.…

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Helen, GA

There is so much meat in Helen, GA. Meat (Jake + in front of Jake). Spaetzle. It’s pretty much the only thing there is to eat. That, and buttered soaked noodle dumplings, otherwise known as spaetzle. I don’t eat meat, although Jake does. But, I completely agree with everything about spaetzle. After nearly two weeks of spaetzle, however, I was probably sweating out butter on my runs. Therefore 10 days was probably about enough time spent in Helen, GA. Which is adorable. Helen, GA is adorable. Meaty, buttery, touristy, and adorable. Formerly a struggling logging town, and briefly a mining…

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Greenville, SC

We’ve been meaning to check Greenville, SC out for a while. We’ve heard good things. But somehow we just kept tootling past the place. Not this time. This time we stopped. And stayed. For a week. In an ‘okay’ RV park, that was outside of the city, but as close as we could get. Ivy Acres RV Park Limited RV park options in the vicinity are one of the several reasons we hadn’t popped into the city before. On our inaugural trip to the little city, we felt the limitations that being a 15-minute drive into Greenville imposed. We often…

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Myrtle Beach, SC 2021

We are coming to terms with the idea that maybe we actually like Dirty Myrtle. We seem to end up here at a frequency that would indicate this actuality, especially since Myrtle Beach (#dirtymyrtle) is not on the way to anywhere. So our ‘Nashville’ excuse (we have stopped there a few times too – but Nashville is usually ‘on the way’) doesn’t elucidate the fact that we have now spent over three months of our traveling life parked in Dirty Myrtle over the span of 5.5 years. If I was Jake, I would give you that in percentage form, but…

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Carolina Beach, NC

We’ve been a bit rudderless in deciding where we want to be, and where we are going to head to next. A few days before deciding we were ready to relocate somewhere, we decided the ocean sounded nice. Carolina Beach State ParkCarolina Beach State Park We hadn’t stayed near Wilmington yet, so we set about snagging a campsite at the state park in Carolina Beach, which is just outside of Wilmington. We rolled in on a Friday afternoon before the park’s gates were to be locked. The powers that be at Carolina Beach State Park lock the gates at curfew…

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Durham/Raleigh, NC

We spent the month of December and a bit of January in the vicinity of Durham and Raleigh North Carolina, enjoying some outdoor type activities, but still limited by the virus which continued to bully the U.S. While I typically break my blog posts up by city, we just haven’t done enough stuff outside of boring stuff to report in on. Over the past months, most of our time has been consumed with regular non-travel life stuff like puzzles, reading, and binge-watching terrible television shows. And honestly, that stuff is fine and great. But it’s not ‘hey, look at this…

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Chesterfield, VA

Continuing on our route to somewhere South, but not anywhere specific South, we found ourselves in Chesterfield, VA, which is situated about 30 minutes South of Richmond. We scored a cancellation at Pocahontas State Park over Thanksgiving, which was a bit of an accomplishment. While I grew up where it gets cold by mid-October, therefore putting the kibosh on camping opportunities, these Southern folks camp all the way through the winter. They especially like to camp on holidays, which makes our lives a bit trickier. But, lucky for us, some shlep had to cancel their reservation, meaning we got to…

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