April 3, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 24+ : Driving Down and Climbing Up in Phoenix

After a short stay in Holbrook, Arizona to visit the Petrified Forest, we had hoped to head to the Grand Canyon.  Unfortunately, it was December, and the weather at the Grand Canyon was literally freezing (and also snowing).  Rather than freeze ourselves in our little metal house, we decided to take the lead of snowbirds everywhere and fly south for the winter.  We changed our destination to Phoenix, via Flagstaff, Arizona.

Diminishing Turns

We knew nothing about Flagstaff before we traveled through it, but now we know one thing:  it’s really high.  Flagstaff sits at an ear-popping 6,900 feet, and as a result, the landscape is more “alpine forest” than the Arizona desert landscape you probably picture.  As it turns out, Flagstaff sits along a mountainous ridge that extends over most of Arizona; Phoenix, much lower in the Valley of the Sun, is more of an outlier than Flagstaff!

Since we performed our typical “none” level of research, we knew “none” of this at the time.  However, we could tell the elevation was high as we were driving through Flagstaff, due to our homemade altimeter: a bag of Tostitos we bought in Florida and never opened.  We leave it in the RV now because it is pressurized at sea level, and it’s fun to watch it expand when we travel to places at a higher elevations.  As we passed through Flagstaff, we genuinely thought it might explode.  [Ed. note:  we took pictures, but sadly lost them.]

From Flagstaff, we descended 6,000 feet in about 100 miles to get to Phoenix, which sounds scary but was quite well managed.  It took longer than expected, but we did make it to our beautiful campsite at Phoenix, spirits high and Tostitos bag deflated.  This would be as far as we would go for the next month.

Aged Like Fine Wine

Our first impression of Phoenix was that it was much nicer than we imagined.  It was winter, so unlike this classic Arrested Development bit, it wasn’t hot.  In fact, the temperature was quite comfortable, and since we were staying at a county park outside of the city proper, the landscape was surprisingly green.  All the buildings were nice and new (thanks, housing bubble!), but retail signage was subdued, with most of the stores located in brown, adobe-style buildings.  (Aesthetically pleasing, although a bit confusing in practice.)

Almost everyone we met was friendly and relaxed, in part we were pretty far outside the city center, but also because everybody around us was a retiree.  Now, we certainly expected there would be a fair number of older folks around, but the sheer uniformity of it was staggering.  The deli counter people at the (gloriously huge) grocery store we went to were retirement age, as were the checkout clerks at Target.  (Gotta make those balloon mortgage payments, we guessed.)  Everywhere we went, the grey-haired workers were friendly, hard-working, and slow-moving.

It wasn’t bad, really, but it was certainly unique.

Cactus Fight!

We were in Phoenix in early December, and as the holidays approached, most of our time was spent running errands and making preparations for our upcoming roadtrip-within-a-roadtrip. We then returned to Phoenix in January, but after traveling across the country twice (see next blog post!), we didn’t have the stomach for much travel sightseeing.

In other words: we didn’t take many pictures.

However, we did spend a fair bit of time hiking within the park we were staying at.  There was a nice trail which went up and around a mountain, offering beautiful views of the valley Phoenix sits in, along with many very tall cacti.

Obviously, we enjoyed this all in a classy and respectful fashion.

My money is on the Saguaro.

The Straw That Broke

We did do one adventure while in Phoenix, climbing Camelback Mountain, a tall mountain which sits very close to downtown Phoenix.  Before we went, we read online that it was tough, but as seasoned-ish hikers, we assumed it wouldn’t be a problem.  We didn’t even bat an eye at the “double black diamond” designation at the base of the trail.

Friends, let us tell you, Camelback Mountain is no joke.  It climbs to a height of 2,700 feet very steeply, and the final section involves scrambling around and over huge boulders, propped up precariously and proximately to a cliff.  They try to make the trail clear by marking it with blue paint, but it’s pretty easy to lose it, especially near the top.

Oh yes… there’s the trail.

The hike is as exhausting as it is legitimately dangerous – multiple people have died, and dozens have to be rescued every year.  In fact, a man saved a woman from falling off the edge by grabbing her ankle just a month ago!

In other words, Camelback is intense.  That said, the view from the top is truly spectacular.  Definitely recommend, but be ready for a workout – and tread cautiously.

Previous Post: We Finally Made a Plan

Next Post: Week 25-28: The Great Inception Road Trip

Roadtrip Status

Still alive?  Check.

Where are you now?  The tiny town of Trinidad, California, in the land of old-growth redwoods.

Next location?  We’re here for a week, then heading further up the California coast.  Get ready for a lot of redwood pictures.

Follow Us On Social Media

FacebooktwitterinstagramFacebooktwitterinstagram

Latest Posts

(all roadtrip posts)

1
March 7, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 17.1: Around The Big Bend

We talked in our last blog post about our week in Marfa, a cool desert art town in the middle of nowhere, but our day trip from Marfa to Big Bend National Park deserved its own post.  Big Bend is a remote desert wonderland, a giant wilderness preserve chock full of crazy mountains, beautiful vistas, and incredible surprises.

It’s so spectacular, it nearly made us sick.

Location, Location, Location

Let’s start with location: to say Big Bend is “remote” does not do it justice.  The park is about 100 miles south of Marfa, which we have already established is in the middle of nowhere, so it is fair to say that Big Bend is 100 miles south of the middle of nowhere.  You might call it the edge of nowhere.

The edge of the edge of nowhere is the Rio Grande, which is also the U.S.-Mexico border.  The other edges are desert.  There are few roads that lead to Big Bend, and the closest airport of any size is in El Paso.  The closest “city” is Alpine, Texas, population 6,000, about an hour away.  As you will see, the only nearby town, Terlingua, is part ghost.

Suffice it to say, getting to Big Bend is not an easy task, and we saw few other people when we visited (probably less than 100 total).  Adding to the feeling of isolation is the park’s huge size:  about 800,000 acres, slightly larger than Rhode Island.  Unlike Rhode Island, of course, there are no cool hippy markets or walks along fabulous oceanside mansions, but on the plus side, there are a lot of bears.

Wait.  Is that really a plus?

Ye Olde Ghost Towne

Our first stop on the way to Big Bend was at Terlingua, a ghost town with a twist.  Terlingua was once a mining community, before it went bust, and the ruins of the town still remain, slowly decaying in the desert.  Spooky ghost town graveyard?  Sign us up.

Terlingua’s twist is that some flesh-and-blood humans still live there, right alongside the ruins.  These hardy folk provide services to park entrants and visitors to the edge of nowhere, running a few restaurants, a cafe, and a gift shop.  We might have thought they were ghosts too, but no ghost would have the gumption to charge $4.50 for a large iced coffee.  (We would have been mad except that the coffee was delicious, and also, there were no alternatives within 60 miles.)

One of the few shops in town is an art gallery, and surprisingly (?), they had some cool sculptures on display outside.  Our favorite was a piece called “Blow Out Survivor,” which the accompanying text explained was created from the melted remains of a natural gas well that caught fire.  It burned for three days, and at the end, portions of the crankshaft, engine, and gearing were fused together.

We don’t have a gas well, but we were reliant on modern engineering, in the form of our poor Honda Fit.  The question of whether it would be “blowout” or “survivor” was yet to come.

Bear Patrol

After we had finished being gouged by the local merchants, we headed into the park itself.  On the way in, we got to live the dream of anyone who has ever visited a National Park:  we bought a National Parks Pass!  $80 for one years’ free access to every federal park and national monument.  Access fees are normally $10-$25, so it’s a decent deal if you plan to visit 4 or more parks in a year.  It’s an extraordinarily great deal if you do something crazy like, say, quitting your job to travel around in an RV for a year.

And so, pass in hand, we were ready to Big Bend it like Beckham.  As we mentioned before, the park is massive, but there are essentially three distinct regions:  mountain, desert, and river.  Part of the charm lies in how they all pile up on top of each other, particularly the mountains and the desert.

The remainder of the charm is how stinking beautiful it all is.

Our first stop was at the visitor center, located in the mountains.  We had planned our trip to Big Bend the way we usually plan things – which is to say, not at all – so we asked about the hikes and the best places to see.  While there, we noticed a map on the wall with lots of yellow sticky notes:

The sticky notes turned out to be recent bear sightings.  We ended up doing the Lost Mine hike, which is relatively short but offers an amazing view of the nearby valleys.  As you can see, the hike also was smack dab in the middle of a field of bear-related post-it notes, but we trusted to blind luck and nobody got mauled, not even a little.  There was a tense moment where we heard leaves rustling right next to us on the trail – a moment in which we considered whether cacti could be used as a weapon – but it just turned out to be a family of deer.

After catching our breath and cursing Bambi, we continued up the trail and were treated to some spectacular views.

However, the Lost Mine hike is where we discovered one of the iron laws of hiking:  if you ever start to feel like a badass, for example by hiking up a mountain full of bears 100 miles south of the middle of nowhere, you will immediately be disabused of that notion.  In this case, it was via the couple that passed us, with an infant strapped to their back, hardly breaking a sweat.

We really wanted to ask why you would ever bring a baby to Big Bend, but they seemed like they knew what they were doing.  Instead we just had them take a picture of us, shortly before before they continued on the trail and we wussed out and headed back.  Thanks guys!

Just Deserts

After a picnic lunch, we headed down out of the mountains and began exploring the rest of the park.  Or, at least, the small slice of it we could see in one day.  For two people raised in the temperate Northeast, the desert sights were fascinating.

Colorful mountains and cacti!

Endless wilderness!

Road runners! (!!!)

It’s nearly impossible to capture the grandeur and the magic of Big Bend; whatever you’re picturing, it’s much cooler than that.

Unfortunately, we ran into a small, slightly murderous issue.  A day that started off comfortably warm, around 70 degrees, continued to grow hotter as the sun progressed across the sky.  By mid-afternoon it was approximately 90 degrees, and even though the park is mostly traversed by car, we had spent a deceptively long amount of time walking around at each of the different stops.

Dehydration is always a special concern in the desert, because of the heat and the sun, but it can sneak up on you.  Your sweat evaporates so quickly in the intensely dry air that you don’t realize you’re sweating.  We had brought two Nalgene bottles full of water, but they were draining at an alarming rate, and the extreme size of the park meant that we were miles away from refilling stations.

Oh, and remember how we mentioned we don’t always super-plan ahead?  Yeah, well, it’s normally fine, but every once in a while, it really bites us in the ass.  This was one of those times, because we stupidly split a bottle of wine the night before we went to Big Bend.  There was probably a good reason for it, like being a Monday, but we were definitely a bit dehydrated before we ever arrived.  Combine with the sun and the heat and that oh-so-dry air, and you’re gonna have a bad time.

Well, one of us, anyway.  We both have our strengths and weaknesses:  Jake doesn’t get blisters or sunburns, and he can open jars, but he’s bad with heights, or anything requiring “stamina” or “dexterity.”  Heather is pale like a ghost and can’t reach the top of our cabinets, but she’s graceful and a trooper, and, as it turns out, immune to dehydration.  So she continued driving and taking photos of the beautiful landscape, as Jake slowly curled into a ball in the passenger seat.

We did eventually get more water, at one of the park’s campgrounds – after first refilling a bottle from a bathroom faucet with water so awful-tasting, it must not have been potable – but it was a little too late, and things were progressing from bad to worse.  Our final stop of the day was the beautiful Santa Elena Canyon, split by the Rio Grande and therefore standing in both the United States and Mexico.  Heather wanted to ford the river for more photos, but the shadows were growing long, so we decided to head back.

A Bump In The Night

Just one problem:  actually getting back.

You see, the Big Bend scenic drive is about 45 miles long, and although it looks like a loop, the paved part ends at Santa Elena.  The final leg of the loop is actually a dirt road, recommended for four-wheel drive cars only, although a ranger had told us regular cars (like our Fit) drive on it all the time.  There’s no other exit there, so the only options were to drive an hour back the way we came to the park entrance, or take a short, 12-mile drive over Old Maverick Road, which is unpaved.  (lower left on this map)

With Jake feeling really awful, we picked the dirt road.  Let us advise you if you ever visit Big Bend and face a similar scenario:  do not pick the dirt road.  Why, you ask?  Well, it’s more like a “loose fist-sized rocks” road, and every single one of the twelve million bumps will (1) cause you to think your tires are going to explode, just like that gas well in Terlingua, leaving you stranded in the desert emptiness; and (2) make your sick passenger’s stomach do flipflops, to the point where you both begin to wonder whether throwing up in a National Park is a violation of federal littering laws.

Oh, and because the road is in such horrible condition, your max speed will be something like 10 miles per hour, meaning that the route is actually slower than just driving back on the well-maintained, non-tire-exploding scenic drive.  Except you’re also racing the setting sun, because the only thing more difficult than driving on that spin cycle of a road is doing it in the all-encompassing darkness of night in a desert National Park located 100 miles south of the middle of nowhere.

via GIPHY

Not to spoil the ending, but we did eventually make it out alive, thanks to Heather’s skillful driving, a Honda Fit that didn’t quit, and our old friend, blind luck.  Plus, Jake avoided littering in a National Park!  Once we made it back to Terlingua, some general store aspirin and Pepto Bismol set him right as rain, and the drive back was smooth sailing (emphasis on smooth).

We finished off a looooong day with food from the Sonic Burger in the big city of Alpine, tired but happy.  Big Bend is an extraordinary place, but it will likely be a long time before we go back – which is just fine with Jake.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now:  We are leaving Morro Bay to visit Pinnacles National Park.  Another notch for the National Parks Pass!

What’s next:  We’ve got a few short stays planned, because everything in California is brutally expensive.  Monterey (and Big Sur), San Francisco, and then YOSEMITE!

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  We promise, no Big Bend sink water.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.  To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Weeks 18-21(ish): Docked in El Paso

1
January 21, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 14: Flo-Ride-Ah

We left beautiful Savannah behind and turned the corner on the United States, officially transitioning from I-95 South to I-10 West near Jacksonville, Florida.  Exciting!  At least if you’ve basically been driving on just two highways for the last six months.  In fact, we’re still on I-10 today, very close to Los Angeles, after (slowly) taking it across the entire country.

Tallahassee Rain

The first stop on our westward journey was Tallahassee, Florida, basically just as a quick stop before heading somewhere more interesting.  We stayed for two nights, which is about the minimum we try to stay anywhere, since packing up and moving the RV can be kind of a pain.  Two nights turned out to be more than enough:  it rained continuously the entire time we were there.

At least we had a pretty campsite.

The RV’s bug shield is constantly tilted, making it look even more like a moustache.

Incidentally, there was a private walkway down to the lake we were parked above, but we never headed down there.  You see, Florida has a certain reputation for… crazy.  And not even just crazy, but ultra-, bath salts-level crazy, the kind of crazy that earns Buzzfeed lists and an entire section of the Huffington Post.  (Our favorite headline at writing time?  A toss-up between “Florida Man Breaks Into Jail To See His Friends, Police Say,” “Escaped Monkey Goes Bananas On Police Car; Eats Neighbor’s Mail,” and “Florida Man Bitten By Shark Kills It And Eats It As Revenge.”)  It’s the land of sunshine, alligators, and bad judgment.

All of which is to say that we are pretty sure we know what was down by the lake, and we weren’t going near it.

via GIPHY

Speaking of bad judgment, we visited a grocery store in Tallahassee that happened to be right next door to Florida State.  The shopping carts inside were amusing:  female college students with little but vegetables and diet soda, males with chicken breasts and protein powder, and an unwholesome amount of Easy Mac and boxed wine all around.

The parking lot was a zoo of a different kind, with the drivers displaying a combustible mixture of inexperience, obliviousness, and entitlement that made it one of the most harrowing drives of our entire trip.  Seriously – we narrowly avoided three accidents in a single row of the parking lot.  We might have driven across a mountain in the dark, but college kids with cars are a whole other level of danger.

Destin Sun

After narrowly escaping from Tallahassee, we headed farther west along the Florida panhandle to Destin, Florida.  Destin is a bit off the highway, and getting there required navigating past some giant, muddy puddles spread across the state highway.  Since we drive the equivalent of a war rig, we of course blasted straight through.  The RV was fine with this, but our poor tow car ended up covered with mud by the time we got to Destin.

“No problem,” we thought.  It had just been raining continuously for two straight days; we were still on the Gulf coast, and we figured another storm would wipe it clean soon.  Just kidding!  It didn’t rain again for 2 months, shortly after we gave up and got the car washed.

Muddy car aside, Destin was great.  It’s a beach town, with pristine white sand and gorgeous, warm, blue-green water.  We sunbathed on our awesome pirate towel (see picture in gallery), played frisbee, and considered never leaving.

I was trying to take a hot dog legs beach pic, but then Jake happened… #devotionstothefrisbeegod

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

We stayed at a state park that was built right on the beach, in a space previously occupied by a freeway.  It was beautiful, quiet, and surprisingly private, and we wholeheartedly endorse the road-to-beach conversion.  However, we got hilariously lost on the way back from the beach to our camp site.  A long boardwalk connects the two halves of the park campground to the water, and we accidentally missed our turn.  We ended up on the wrong side of the park, and since it looks virtually identical (the park is symmetrical), it took us a while to realize it.

Fine, it happens.  Well, the campground on each side is built in roughly a figure 8 loop, and we walked the loop about 3 times before realizing what was wrong.  As it happens, the center-point of the 8 is a laundry station, and the people doing their laundry there expressed quickly-increasing bafflement as we proceeded to pass by six times while trying to find our RV.

Yeah… let’s just say we’re grateful to have GPS when we drive.

A happier highlight for us was having dinner and drinks right on the water, at a bar made from an Airstream trailer.  We sat outside where a local musician was playing the guitar and singing to, well, nobody else, and he was so grateful for our polite applause that he ended up playing some of our favorite tunes.

Listening to Sublime and drinking delicious craft beers by the ocean – does it get any better?

(That’s not rhetorical.  The answer is no.)

We can’t lie – this trip has been pretty awesome.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now:  Currently, we are staying on the Salton Sea in Southern California, a saltwater inland lake that looks pretty but has become extremely toxic.  A beautiful sunset over a shoreline covered with dead, rotting fish; it’s an interesting juxtaposition, to say the least.

What’s next:  We are staying for two weeks just east of Los Angeles.  San Diego and Death Valley await.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  We promise, no rotting fish pictures.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.  To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 14.5: New Orleans

1
November 4, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 10: Hitting the Brakes in New York & New Jersey

The White and Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont are quiet places, with lots of nature but not a lot of people.  For our next stop, we headed towards the complete opposite: New York City.  We made it in one piece, but the trip there was anything but easy.

All Hail the Storm King

Our first destination was the Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park about an hour north of New York City.  The drive was pretty rough, as the bucolic rolling hills of Vermont transitioned quickly into the construction zones and potholes of Troy and Albany, New York.  If you’ve never been to Troy, it’s basically the crackhead younger brother of Albany, which is not so nice to begin with.  The roads in Troy were in terrible condition, but if you need to pawn something or get a payday loan, we recommend checking it out.

Storm King was extremely cool, however.  It’s a huge park with numerous installations, including some truly gigantic pieces set in grassy fields.

It was a little less intimate than the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, but the scope is vast, and it features works by famous artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder, Maya Lin, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, and many more.  Unfortunately, it was punishingly hot when we were there, but the upside is that almost nobody was around.  We may have seen more animals than people.

We’ve got pictures of some of our favorites below.  If you’re in the New York area, Storm King is well worth a look – it’s really spectacular, and you can take a bus from the city or drive in.  If we did it again, we would probably rent bikes (which you can do on-site), as the park is so big that we barely got to scratch the surface.

Also, we could have watched this sculpture do its thing all day long.

An Unexpected Side Trip

We left Storm King, which incidentally is the name of the town and not the local deity, and headed to a nearby Wal-Mart to stay for the evening – the same one we stayed at on our first night in our RV, in fact.  But when we got there, we found that our tow car smelled overwhelmingly of burned brakes – and to our amateur eyes, it seemed like the front brakes had been completely destroyed.

We’re still not completely sure what happened, but most likely there was a malfunction with the supplemental brake system installed in our tow car.  This is a big plastic box that sits in front of the driver’s seat in the tow car, and clamps onto the brakes.  When we push the brakes in the RV, the brake system is signaled to physically and proportionately push the brakes down in the tow car.  Considering the relative sizes and weights of the vehicles, this is kind of unnecessary, but we are required to have it installed under New York law.

The weird part of the brake system is that it’s not attached to anything.  It just sits in the driver’s side in front of the seat.  So what we think happened is that it rode slightly forward somehow and ended up pushing down on the brakes continuously, just a little tiny unnoticeable bit, maybe even for just the 13 miles we drove from Storm King to Wal-Mart.  This created enough heat to totally destroy the brakes – as the mechanic who replaced them said, “It’s not that your brakes were ground down.  It’s that they were burned to death in a pit of fire.”

Basically what happened to our brakes. (via GIPHY)

But the story of how we got to that mechanic is pretty crazy.   While examining the brakes, we found out the battery in the tow car was also dead, from the daytime running lights being on while the car was towed (we later disabled those).  Lacking jumper cables, we called for roadside assistance and asked the friendly responder about the brakes.  He agreed they seemed to be destroyed.  Then, without asking, he called a mechanic he knew who does auto repair work and had him buy replacement brakes, then told us to follow him over to get them fixed.  Now, it was dusk and we had had a long day, plus we were already at a place that fixes brakes (Wal-Mart).  Also, according to Google Maps, the place was 45 minutes away – but the responder insisted it would be only 15 minutes, and peer-pressured us into following him there.

Of course, it actually was 45 minutes away, through deep darkness on actual mountain roads – the route went around the peak of Bear Mountain.  It was terrifying driving, especially since we were pretty new to driving with the tow car.  Driving the RV at night is always scary anyway – it just doesn’t have the ability to stop like a normal car, so the lack of visibility is stressful.  When you’re hauling a car with no brakes up and around steep, curvy, and completely unfamiliar roads, to an unknown mechanic who you are starting to worry may be planning to rob you, the stress level is… heightened.

Even our cool hat didn’t make us feel better. (via GIPHY)

But we did eventually make it!  At 9 p.m.  And the mechanic was good, cheap, and fast, and he didn’t try to rob us even once – although he only accepted cash, and was located in a locked, gated business park in an extremely sketchy area.  He actually offered to let us sleep in the RV outside his shop overnight, but we saw a few too many “ladies of the night” around for that to be an attractive offer.  Although, according to the mechanic, it was safe because “the cops drive down here constantly…”

Alone at Last

After staying at a different Wal-Mart than the one we intended, we finally made it to our campground for the week – Voorhees State Park in New Jersey.  Because these were apparently our unluckiest 24 hours, this park – right near the interstate – turned out to be basically on top of a mountain.  After twisting and turning our way up there, Google Maps attempted to send us under a very low bridge that would have ripped off our roof.  Luckily we noticed and turned off in time, and the path we then took happened to be the only reasonable way there.

Narrowly avoided this fate.

The campground itself was nothing special, but there was something special about it:  it was totally deserted.  The bathrooms were closed for construction and there were no other hookups, and apparently, everyone else just stayed away.   At times, we were the only people in the entire park, which has at least 80 camp sites.  Of course, staying by ourselves in a place which shares a name with the killer from Friday the 13th – and which has active bear warnings – was a little unsettling, but frankly, we weren’t really staying there either.  We just needed a quiet place to park our RV while we headed in to “The City” for Labor Day weekend, and Voorhees was great for that.  No hockey mask required.

You can see our motorhome in the back if you look closely, and… nothing else.

Eating Our Way Through The Big Apple

As former New York City residents, we didn’t do much touristy stuff while we were there, instead taking the chance to see friends and eat some great food.  Our friend Brian and his girlfriend Kim put us up, and put up with us, for the weekend, and we got to revel in the decadence of 24 hour grocery stores and Seamless.com.  We even made the trek all the way to Brooklyn for Smorgasburg, a giant weekly food fair, which is always horribly crowded but incredibly delicious.  We ate way too much, way too fast, and paid way too much for it (lousy NYC…), but it was awesome.

We also had lunch with Jake’s Dad, and met up with a lot of old friends and some old co-workers.  We also got to have some wholesome family fun with the Browns again (of Maine fame).  We rode the carousel with Kaia (and our friend, Alex), and smashed some blocks with Captain Rhea.  All in all, it felt a little bit more like home than we expected – although we’re still unsure whether it will be our next home.

Penultimate Bits

Speaking of old friends, on our last night in New Jersey we stopped by to visit Jake’s college roommate, Mike, and his wife and two young kids.  They were cute!  But we forgot to take pictures.

We also got lost in a strip mall parking lot where almost none of the roads actually lead out – the New Jersey version of a hedge maze.  The legends say that on a moonless night, you can still see the ghosts of dead shoppers trying to make their way out at Christmas.

This is probably what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

LAST BITS

What’s next:  Currently, we are staying at Jake’s mom’s house in El Paso, Texas, where the wifi flows like water, which incidentally also flows freely.  There are some benefits to houses that never move!  We are doing some heavy renovations to the interior of our RV, so stay tuned.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  We literally feed on your love.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of them just for you.

Next Post: Week 11: Address – Gettysburg

1