Life in The Slow Lane

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

Louisiana

Louisiana - November 2017

At the Vineyard

At the concert

November 8....

Today is the anniversary of the demise of our democracy. The day when the autocracy became firmly entrenched and I find myself here in Shreveport, LA at the very same RV Park in which we spent election day 1 year ago. It is not what I really planned but once I made the decision to spend the weekend at Landry’s Vineyard in Monroe and Don refused to backtrack to we could check out Natchez, this was the logical place. Last year we came here because they had cable television. This year we needed electrical hookups for air conditioning. Nothing like revisiting the site of trauma. We will get out of here today and do not need AC as it has cooled off.

Nov. 4-5 Landry's Vineyard, West Monroe, LA
Nov. 6-7 Diamond Jack's RV Park, Bossier, LA

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Montana by RV and Pennsylvania

Thanks Doug for helping us out!

Montana and Pennsylvania 2026

Today I drug myself to this computer to do some writing whether I feel like it or not. The battery was dead from neglect. I left it unplugged and apparently left it on. I hope that it can fully recover. There is much to write about. We’ve traveled out west with our RV, visiting family and friends along the way. We came home and rested for a week and then went to Pennsylvania to take care of our granddaughters and allow Kelly to get in some extra hours of work. We are just now recovering from that trip after 6 days at home. We’ll have another couple of weeks off before we head up to the Jug Band Boogie and our trip up the North Shore in September. I’ll write about those things and post some pictures.

We drove up to my brothers’ house by Brainerd on July 24th to pick up our camper. We had BLTs with Mark and Byron and loaded the camper to head up to Fargo on the 25^th where we stayed in my brother Doug’s driveway. We enjoyed a lovely dinner with Doug and his wife Georgene at Doolittles Woodfire Grill after spending the afternoon visiting. It was in Doug’s driveway that one of the stabilizing jacks of the camper broke, so we continued our journey with 3 working jacks. Doug gave me 4 books to read along the way with instructions to pass them on to others when I finished them. The first one I read was My Other Heart by Emma Hanami Strenner about a baby who is picked up at the airport when her mother was trying to get back home to Viet Nam. The second was Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog about the Sioux experience at Wounded Knee. Both of those books are now with Peggy and Edith. The third book was The Hill: A Novel by Harriet Cark about a girl who visits her mother who is serving a life sentence in prison. I left that one in Pennsylvania with Kelly. The book I finished last week was Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn. I remember those stories from the news. I’m still processing that story. It came to me that the fight against racism, imperialism and unnecessary war is back bigger than when those kids took it on. I will pass that book on to the next person I see who wants it.

On Sunday, we headed west. We stopped in Lisbon, ND and had lunch with our Palmdale neighbors, Lyle and Judy. They gave us a tour of their city where they’ve lived all of their lives. That was a lovely day. We headed down the road to Dickenson, ND where we stayed at the Phat Fish Brewery (A Harvest Host venue). We, of course had to try out their beer and have dinner at their restaurant. We ran the generator that night to have AC as it was about 100 degrees during the day. The next morning, we realized that our batteries had not charged overnight. Our converter was not working. Fortunately, Don brought along his battery charger and trickle-charger, so we stopped in Dickenson and ran the generator to run the chargers and charge up the batteries. We’re lucky to have a refrigerator that also runs on propane, so we used that feature when we didn’t have shore power. We had canceled reservations at the National Park because of restrictions on generator use. It was so hot we had to have AC to sleep at night, so we spent 2 nights at the Medora Campground where we had full hook-ups. There, we could plug the charger into shore power to keep our batteries charged.

At Medora, we toured Teddie Roosevelt National Park one afternoon. The next day we spent several hours at the TR Presidential Library and in the evening enjoyed the Medora Musical at their amazing outdoor amphitheater. That experience was well worth our stop. We have driven to Montana many times throughout our life and have never stopped in Medora. This was a treat.

On Wednesday we headed to Montana. We spent our first night at the Itch-Kep-Pe Park in Columbus Montana by the Yellowstone River. We have stayed at that campground many times in our motor home and in a tent years ago. The next day we drove up the road toward Mystic Lake but never made it that far. We toured around the places where Don grew up and visited the cemetery where both of his parents are buried.

We stayed the night at the Yellowstone Cellars & Winery in Billings. Before we parked the camper, we stopped by Don’s brother Bill’s new house. We visited with Bill and Carol and got a tour of their lovely new home. We went to park the camper at the winery, and they joined us for a very enjoyable dinner. We had hoped to spend another day in Billings, but the forecast was another blistering hot day, so we decided to head up to the mountains where it was cooler.

Don’s hearing aid battery went out so we found some help at The Hearing Aid Institute that services Starkey Hearing Aids. Apparently, our charging cord wasn’t working. He charged it up for us and gave us a new USB plug for our cord. We were on our way up to West Yellowstone. We stayed 2 nights at The Gallatin National Forest Campground near the entrance to Yellowstone Park. There, we shared a double campsite with a young woman named Martha Robinson and her father who are traveling around to National Parks and Forest Protection Tour. You can follow them at a QR code that I will share in a picture. We enjoyed sitting down to dinner with them and hearing about their travels. Their next stop after Yellowstone was going to be Olympia National Park in Washington.

We toured the North Loop of Yellowstone on Saturday. On Sunday we hooked up the camper and traveled the South Loop exiting the park at the South Entrance. We traveled to the Tetons and stayed at Jackson Hole Still Works in Jackson WY. You can drive up and pick up a Sloshie (made from their spirits) to go from their window. The next day we drove around and enjoyed the beauty of the Tetons before we started heading back east. We stayed at another Harvest Host venue up winding switchbacks and hairpin curves to Troubles Line Shack in Dubois, Wyoming where we enjoyed amazing views and a good dinner.

Then we got serious about heading east. Our next stop was at The Big Lost Meadery in Gillette Wyoming. There, we were invited to join the team “The End of The Bar” in a game of trivia. We were actually able to contribute an answer on a key question about the snowiest places and won the team a free drink. We held our own with a bunch of Gen Xers though we had no clue when it came to the music.

After that we were on I90 beating our way across South Dakota. Motorcycles were beginning to gather around Sturgis. In Sioux Falls, our next-door neighbor was a rental RV from Florida with 2 Brazilians who had reserved motorcycles to ride to Sturgis. We landed at Tower Campground in Sioux Falls. We wanted full hookups to empty and flush out our tanks so we could go park that troublesome camper after we fixed all the things that needed fixing. New jacks, another converter and a few other things. It is now parked back up at Marks’ waiting our next adventure.

We had a week to fix the camper, do laundry and get a little rest before we headed off to our next adventure.

Lyle and Judy

At the Phat Fish Brewery

At TR National Park

This time we flew to Philadelphia to hang out with Kelly and her girls for a week. Kelly wanted to get some extra hours of work, and we had a wonderful opportunity to hang out with Jett and Andalusia for the week. Some highlights of the week included a day at the pool, dinner at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord in East Earl Pennsylvania. It is the largest smorgasbord in the world and if you can prove it’s your birthday, you get a free meal. Don was able to do that, so we celebrated his birthday there. Jett and Andalusia ran a successful lemonade stand so they had some of their own cash to shop at the most amazing gift store you can imagine. We put together a Lego set and took Jett to the pottery studio at Pendle Hill where she learned how to use a pottery wheel and made a present for her friend. We took Andalusia to the Swarthmore Farmer’s Market while Jett went to a birthday party. It was a really good week, but we needed to rest when we got home.

Unfortunately, I never thought to bring out my camera so I didn't get any pictures of the wonderful meal that we shared with Doug and Georgene.

Jett in the pottery studio at Pendill Hill in Media

Front Porch Entertainment - Media, PA

The Shady Maple Entrance

Just some thoughts July

7/21/26

Not much to write about anymore. I have totally lost interest in much of anything. I spend my time during the hot summer days sitting in my chair reading murder mysteries. I pay some attention to the things going on in the world but no longer have much to say. Everyday there is some news that is more outrageous than the previous day. So, I read books that are set in different places and times.

On the other hand, I am reading “The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently” by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettle, with my Methodist book group. Last week the group was not particularly pleased with this book. It is scholarly and academic… not exactly what we are used to. I was put off by the use of the word different about 6 times on the same page and twice in the same sentence. I guess the point is that Jews and Christians read some of the same texts with different interpretations and even though the Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh have some of the same stories, they are different.

The authors use a lot of big words .. prooftexts, polemics and omnisignificance.. among others. I haven’t decided whether I am even interested in this subject, but I agreed with the group to this book selection. For the first time in the history of this group, people are considering abandoning this book. I have a tendency to finish reading a book once I’ve started so I don’t know what I will do. I will be gone for a couple of weeks so by the time I get back we may be on to something else. I will probably take the book with me because it should be good bedtime reading and put me to sleep and it should expand my understanding and knowledge about the differences in the faith traditions and the history of those differences. Another story of the depravity of humans.

The other day as I was driving through some very unhealthy smoke and dangerously hot weather (also since I had read the creation story in Genesis) this thought came to me.

Jesus God! What were you thinking???

Putting humans on your beautiful blue planet.

Whatever made you think that was a good idea?

Look what we’ve done. We are not competent to handle this much knowledge and power.

We are wrecking everything.

You can probably tell that my state of mind isn’t exactly up-beat but I keep assuring Don that I am not depressed.

Camp Deer 2026

Camp Deer 2026

I would have been fine living my entire life without knowing what an RV converter was or how it worked. Unfortunately, that was not to be. The lights went out and nothing worked in the camper while we were up at Camp Deer. Fortunately, the resort had a battery charger which we used to charge up the battery, and we had a trickle charger to maintain the battery, so we didn’t have to live in the dark for the last 4 days of our vacation. Using all of our trouble shooting skills and watching You-Tube videos helped us narrow it down to a failing converter. So, we bought one off of Amazon and then watched an amateur DIY guy on You-Tube complete the task in 2 hours. We commenced the job and after 4 to 6 hours we successfully tested all of our electrical circuits and they worked. Now I know something I never really wanted to know in the first place.

We spent a week up at Camp Deer beginning on my 77^th birthday and leaving a week later. My family has started having an annual Camp Deer Week at the end of June for the last couple of years and will probably continue. We had 10 children ranging in age from 2 years old to 14 which was lovely. Kelly drove from Pennsylvania with her 2 girls and they camped near us. We had lots of time to hang out and visit and we ate amazingly well. We have good cooks in our family and this year managed to coordinate meals, so no one had to spend too much time cooking. We caught some fish and added it to several menus for breakfast and lunch. The weather cooperated.

I decided to join in a Wiffle Ball game with a couple of the children one day. They needed a batter since there was only 2 playing and one of them was stuck on 2^nd base. I picked up the bat and started swinging at every wild pitch that came my way. I have to admit that I was showing off a little bit. I lunged for a ball and my sandal caught on the ground and I took a tumble landing on my right shoulder and folding my foot backwards. My niece, Deb, who is a nurse witnessed the whole thing. She waited to see if I could stand up by myself, which I did, and then examined me. No apparent breaks in my shoulder. She recommended ice for my shoulder and foot. I had enough pain in my foot localized on my 1^st metatarsal, so Don and I spent the next day at the Big Fork hospital getting an x-ray. No breaks. Just a sprained foot. They did diagnose it with osteoarthritis on my 1^st metatarsal. So now I’m practicing walking like I will have to when I get old. Kind of put a damper on my participation in the family reunion.

People at the reunion…

Brother Bob – for 1 day

Sister Jean and her 2 daughters Pam and Deb

Myself, Don, Greg, Peggy, Edith 14 and her friend Juliette 14, Kelly with Jett 8 and Andalusia 6

Brother Ludwig

Sister Kay

Brother Mark

Brother John’s daughter Kelsey, Patrick and Solviegh 2

Sister Elaine and Jerry, Children – Andrew and Stasha, Aleatha and Kyle with children Mia 12, Marjorie 10, Maverick 9 on 6/27, Maisley 7 and Malcolm 6.

Brother Byron

That was a lot of people and a lot of bacon.

Fishing, canoeing, paddle boarding, trips to shop at Deer Lake Charlies, the teeter totter, beach, sand, walks up the road, camp fires and s’mores and the Deer Lake Sunset, a book by Marjorie and Jett, bracelets by Andalusia, endless exploring the beach by Maisley and Malcolm. The discovery of the white house which was built by our Grandpa….. great great grandpa to all of the children. We have family history at this place.

June thoughts

6/2/26

Today I went for a walk in the park twice. The first time, with Don, we came upon a good-sized toad sitting on the path. His color was much like the asphalt where he sat so we almost missed seeing him. He did not move even though I tried to disturb him a little. I thought he would be safer if he moved along and wasn’t sitting where everyone walks. He didn’t budge so we left him alone.

When I went back for a second walk, the toad was gone. I assume he made it safely across the path. I met a woman named Linda who lives nearby. She was walking with her parrot named Sunshine. The right name for a beautiful yellow parrot who came from Brazil. Sunshine was quite noisy and I turned on my Merlin Bird Identifier. Merlin did not identify Sunshine. Linda told me the kind of parrot she was but I didn’t write it down so I don’t remember. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny perfect day in June today.

My book group is reading about the 23^rd Psalm and this week’s chapter is… “thy rod and thy staff comfort me”. I guess that knowing that having a being with the tools to keep me in line and protect me should be helping me feel safe and comfortable, if I could only trust and accept that being (Christ the Good Shepherd). Not sure what that would look like.

May in Minnesota

5/26/26

I fancy myself a writer. But I almost never write. Last year I replaced my old laptop because it was no longer supported by Microsoft. I don’t know if that was really necessary. But I have seldom used this computer since I bought it. My current reading list includes:

Gilead by Marilyn Robinson (I read this before, but it is one of my favorite books so I’m rereading it. I learned that Barak Obama really liked this book and invited the author to the
White House. How cool to be in a position to do that.

A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, by W. Phillip Keller. It was first published in 1970 or so. I’m reading this with my Methodist book group. I like this Psalm (I think it was on both of my parents’ funeral programs) and I like the people in the book group. If I’m wrong, I will be corrected by one of my siblings with better memories.

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, by Dan Flores. This has been by my chair for about a year and I pick it up from time to time. Eye-opening history of North America.

El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, by Jazmine Ulloa. I have this in digital format from the library and have read the first couple of chapters but am waiting for it to be available to check out. I’ve thought about buying the book but not sure about adding it to my library. El Paso shares much of the same story as the area I live in the Rio Grande Valley. I own the other 3 books on my list.

This is the heaviest reading that I have done in a while. Most of the time I prefer getting lost in fiction where I can escape to another time and place. When I hang out in ancient Rome or World War II, it helps me realize that we are not living in such unusual times. Murder mysteries or crime novels are just good distractions. I’m waiting for some of those books to be available from the library.

Tomorrow, we are heading up to Brainerd to do a little fishing and de-winterize the camper at my brother’s house. That will be a good getaway from this place. We have done quite a bit of work around here getting the place cleaned up. Don is working on greasing the boat axle which we replaced a few weeks ago.

Yesterday, Greg and Peggy hosted a backyard cookout with brats, potato salad, watermelon and beer. Nephew Ken and his wife, Lori came over. My brother Ludwig also stopped by. We had perfect weather for the event.

Today marks the one-year anniversary since we returned from our European travels. It has been almost that long since I posted on my blog. Wow! Scary how time just seems to pass. In less than a month I will be 77 years old. My grandparents were pretty old when they were this age.

I have not chronicled the last year because really, it was much like the year before that. We did a lot of the same things, hung out with the same people and participate in the same activities. We don’t have many travel plans. We are going to the family gathering at Camp Deer at the end of June… a lot like last year. Peggy, Edie, Kelly and her girls are coming and that makes it special. We are planning to take our RV to Montana sometime but haven’t got that scheduled. We may even take it back to Texas this fall if it works out well on our Montana trip. We’ll probably go up to the North Shore again in September like we have for the last several years.

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Trains, buses, subways, ferries, gondolas, boats

Boat ride in Amsterdam

Berlin Central Train Station - Hauptbahnhof

A lock on the Danube River

In Switzerland

We had a Eurail pass which provided us with an app on my phone in which I could schedule trains from just about any city in Europe to any other city. The pass pretty much covered all of our transportation around Europe. Trains were almost all on time or within a few minutes of their scheduled departure. All we had to do was figure what platform to arrive at and wait for the train with a bunch of other people. It pulled up to the platform, we got on and it took off. We realized pretty quickly that the trains wouldn’t wait around for both of us to get on so we were careful that both of us were ready to board at the same time so as not to lose each other. Fortunately, we never got separated though Don was hit by a closing door on the Paris subway. He didn’t get hurt but it could have been bad. It took me a while to figure out how to get our tickets up on my phone and a few times the train officials just let me go seeing as I had the pass. But eventually it caught up with me. On the train from Switzerland into Italy, the conductor was having none of it and we ended up paying unnecessarily for that trip. It didn’t take me long to figure out what I needed to do to avoid that happening again. Some trains, especially the high-speed trains required that we pay extra to reserve seats.

We also used buses and subways to get around cities though sometimes we use a taxi especially to get to hotels that were farther than we wanted to walk from the train station. We got pretty good at finding hotels close to the train stations by the end but had some not very pleasant experiences trying to find public transportation. In Trieste, we got some bad advice from someone on the bus stop as to which bus to take and we got on the bus, not realizing that we couldn’t buy a pass on the bus. We got off that bus and waited for another bus. A bus “police” official confronted us and made us get off the bus. She was joined by about 4 other uniformed officials who informed us that “ignorance is no excuse”. We were fined 70 Euros each and they were happy to accept our credit card. Then they were nice enough to tell us which bus we needed to get to our hotel. Actually, it wasn’t a hotel really but that’s another story for my page about hotels.

Lots of learning experiences and stressful moments.

We learned pretty quickly to look both ways and make sure that we didn’t stray into bicycle lanes all over Europe. In most cities there are many more bikes than there are cars on the road. In Italy, there were thousands of Vespas and other small motorcycles. I particularly liked Paris as there weren’t so many cars on the road. On Monday morning we came out of our hotel and looked to the right to see hundreds of bicycles coming down the street on their morning commute. Bikes everywhere. I told Don that I thought all of that French bread at the breakfast buffet is “bike fuel”. That’s why no one is fat.

Hotels

We used Booking.Com a lot and finally learned to specifically name the train station which we wanted to be near. It took some time to learn. We stayed in all kinds of places from privately owned apartments and B&Bs to big chain hotels, modern hotels, a particularly luxurious hotel in Venice, quaint little places with narrow steep stairs (we learned to avoid those). I think my favorite place was in Paris because it was so close to Gare St. Lazare (train station). When we walked out of the station, my GPS said that we had arrived. Can’t get any better than that. The room was small, the shower small, but it was in a perfect location and it had a lift and included breakfast with good croissants, and the Metro was right there along with buses to take us wherever we wanted to go in Paris.

Another favorite was the hotel in Calais because it was on the beach. Could have stayed there for a week.

Residence Montinelli was the room in Trieste that we were trying to get to when we got the bus fine. Needless to say, we were late getting there, and I hadn’t looked at the complicated check-in process on my email. It was a private rental in a big apartment building kind of off the beaten path. When we finally made it to the place, we couldn’t tell which building we were supposed to be at. There were some kind people who lived in the neighborhood who helped us narrow down which building we were supposed to be at. They lived in the neighborhood and even they had a hard time figuring it out. They were kind enough to contact the owner by phone and figured out how to get in the building. They had the advantage of speaking Italian. Then another tenant in the building helped us figure out the complicated process of getting through a security door, getting the keys from the lock box and finally getting into the room. The room was one of 3 rooms in the area with a shared kitchen area for cooking. As it turned out it wasn’t a bad stay though we walked uphill on cobblestones for a couple of blocks every time we came and went. It wasn’t far from the Adriatic coast and there was a nice area with restaurants and outdoor seating and near the bus stop. We learned to use the buses and how to buy passes so our stay in Trieste was pretty nice. It is a beautiful area on the coast.

Speaking of kind people. We were blessed with meeting many of them on our trip. They helped us get on the right buses and subways and find our hotels.

Here are the places we stayed:

3/31-4/14 – Norwegian Epic cruise ship

4/15-16 – Palazzetto Trevi, Rome

4/17 –Citizen M, Geneva Switzerland

4/18 – Hotel Eden Palace du Lac, Montreux, Switzerland