Planning for New York

We arrived today at the campground that will be our home for the next month or so. In 2003 we began taking “extended trips” which were 6 months in length (May to November). We quickly realized that this was something we liked to do and could visualize ourselves living in an RV and traveling fulltime. It wasn’t until this year that that dream has become a reality. Even though we have been living in our Montana for almost 3 years, we were only traveling 6 months of the year. The other 6 months we were in Nashville at our jobs. We think we will finally be able to put into practice what has been our goal since we began RVing. We want to see America but we also want to have fun doing it.

In those early years our trips were almost more stressful than our jobs. We approached that time off as if we were on a 2-week vacation. We ran ourselves ragged trying to see and do everything there was to see and do. After a couple of years we finally shed the “vacation mode” and began to relax more—sip coffee, sit in a lawn chair, read a book. But our type “A” personalities continued to nag at us to get out there and do stuff. It is been an ongoing struggle, but we try to focus more on relaxing and enjoying ourselves and less on “area attractions”.

Many RVers plan their trips around a particular theme—Route 66, Revolutionary or Civil war battlefields, the Lewis and Clark Trail. We haven’t done that. Our goal is to visit every state and, if the opportunity arises, as many Canadian provinces as possible. That leaves the area wide open for exploring (and perhaps is the pitfall that leads us to try to do more than is humanly possible). In more recent years, when we pick a place to visit there is some feature that has drawn us to that area and we focus our attention on that.

We have 4 months to be in New York State before we return to Nashville for the holiday season. There are only two areas we will be concentrating on—first the Finger Lakes in western New York and then the Adirondacks in north eastern New York. You could probably spend years in each area and not do or see it all. It will be difficult to choose.

Gene picked up some brochures today when we stopped at the rest area. I stayed in the car with Peanut while he went in. Many minutes later when I saw him walking across the parking lot, I thought he had gone shopping. He was carrying a shopping bag which turned out to be full of brochures. My goal for tomorrow is to come up with a rough plan of what we will do while here.