Our Nest on Wheels

This is why I (Jane) have such trouble writing blog posts: I am a fact checker. I love tracking down information. In fact, when I was working as an editor, I would make a deal with a colleague (naming no names, but her blog is called Brittany L. Bergman) that I would fact check the manuscript she was editing if she would style (put in all the right codes so subheads come out as subheads, etc.) mine. 

In the process of fact checking, you so often come across other interesting, tangentially related things. While fact checking Saving My Assassin, I learned not only about Ceausescu and his regime, but also, along the way, about the healing properties of mud from Lake Techirghiol, and the word balneotherapy. 

While fact checking The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told, I learned about Beat poets, City Lights bookstore, anchor chains on sailboats, and when lilacs bloom in New England, among many other things. My love of tracking down information made me a very good editor, at least in that portion of the job.

It also makes me a very slow blogger. 

I was trying to post a simple photo gallery of Long Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans—this one a restful contrast to the crowded city of our previous New Orleans photo gallery. It was meant to be a quick and easy post to create: upload some pictures, maybe write a caption or two, and hit "publish."

And then . . .

I thought I'd better write an introductory note about the place. So I went to the Long Vue website and found that the gardens date from a period called the Country Place Era in landscaping. I didn't recall that from our visit, but it sounded interesting, so I googled "Country Place Era." About 12,600,000 results. Who knew? Even without Wikipedia (which I never trust, and neither should you without verifying it against several reputable sources), that's 12,599,999 potentially interesting and informative websites about the topic.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (about whose existence I was shamefully unaware until now) defines landscapes from the Country Place Era as "Large residential properties designed with an obvious, sometimes ostentatious, expression of affluence. Characteristic design features include formal garden styles, such as allées, terraces, fountains, and garden sculpture."

(Incidentally, I've never been confident of the pronunciation of allée and I've always wondered about its relationship to alley, so I took this opportunity to look it up. It's pronounced \ä-ˈlā\, which you probably knew, and comes from the French. "See more at alley," Merriam-Webster instructed, so I did and was shocked to find that the first definition of alley is not, as I have always thought, that little street that runs between backyards in the middle of a block, but in fact the horticultural definition. The narrow street is the third definition, after lawn and indoor bowling. Who knew?)

(But truth be told, I was brought up to trust the American Heritage Dictionary above all others—my father considered Webster's for instance, to be far too lenient in the matter of usage—and only converted to Merriam-Webster because it was the standard for the publishing house where I was an editor. I needed to see whether my narrow street ranked third with them as well. Ha! There my definition is first and those bowling venues have fallen to third. I am vindicated and no longer ashamed. What a joy is fact checking!)

Now where was I? Oh, yes—the Country Place Era. You can find a very helpful summary about it at the Library of Landscape History if you're interested. (And who wouldn't be?) Go to this list to find a Country Place Era garden near you once you've had your appetite whetted. (I wonder: which definition of whet is listed first—the kind having to do with knives or with appetites?)

By now I have 15 tabs open in my browser (and I've already closed quite a few), all because I wanted to write a simple introduction to this quick and easy blog post.

Which I have not done.

On the other hand, I've learned a whole lot of interesting things about landscapes, the late 19th century and what American societal influences led up to the Country Place Era (I didn't have room here to tell you all about that), significant landscape designers, and the role of Edith Wharton (did you know that she designed formal gardens and championed dividing gardens into "rooms" long before that became popular?).

So here are some lovely photos from Long Vue House and Gardens, an excellent example of the Country Place Era in late 19th-century American landscaping.

With no captions, because I want to look up a few more things about Edith Wharton and maybe re-read a novel or two.

As long as I'm writing a few captions, I may as well mention that the iris garden at Longue Vue is a big deal. It wasn't until I started trying to figure out why that I came across a magazine devoted to Louisiana irises and titled Fleur de Lis that I realized that—duh—the fleur de lis, that omnipresent symbol of New Orleans, is an iris. (By the way, if you google "fleur de lis magazine" the top dozen or so results will be for AK-47s. I wonder which definition of magazine is first in Merriam-Webster.) Anyway, we were either a little early or a little late (I've forgotten which) for the peak iris season, but here are some pictures.

New Orleans is such a photogenic city that we ended up with way more pictures than we could use in the Big Easy Posting—so here are some more in case you'd like to stroll the streets with us.

When in New Orleans, you have to photograph the architecture. 

Many of them, incidentally, wearing hats. I was so disappointed that I hadn't worn one of mine. (By the way, this is Jane writing, not Steve. Had you guessed?)

Of course, no festival is complete without street vendors . . .

. . . and artists.

Unfortunately, we seem to have failed to get a picture of either the tintinnabulum or the canopeum, but you can see them here as part of this article about the basilica.

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We did, however, get some other photos inside the cathedral.

Lest you think, however, that the cathedral is all about making money (I imagine the ad revenue and more goes toward building maintenance), let me close our tour of the cathedral with this photo. I've often read of the "poor box" (largely in the British novels that inspire the British shows I watch to much of), but I hadn't realized just how literal the name is.

We were in New Orleans about two months after Mardi Gras, which was fine with us—crowds, drunkenness, and public nudity don't particularly appeal to us—but it was lots of fun spotting evidence of that famous party in the form of beads in sometimes unexpected places.

If you'd like this kind of "photo gallery" post, let us know, and we'll see about doing more of them about other places. We have plenty of pictures . . .

Until this year, I had never been to New Orleans. Neither had Jane. So, since we were crossing the southern states in April on our way from Florida to Arizona, we were way overdue to visit the Big Easy.

We had heard that the roads in Louisiana were awful, and they lived up to their reputation. It's not uncommon for RVers to go around the state, rather than deal with the bad roads, but then you don't get to visit New Orleans, so we toughed it out. We stayed in a State Park that's just about 10 miles from the French Quarter, but much quieter. We could then easily drive to the city, or drive to the river and take a ferry boat across the Mississippi. We did both.

One thing that we didn't know about when we made plans for New Orleans is that we were going to be there during French Quarter Festival. Pretty much every street looked like this one:

At least we weren't trying to drive in it, or drive our motorhome in it, although we did see someone pulling a 40-foot 5th-wheel trailer through the French Quarter Festival! We spent a half day in the French Quarter, and given the crowds, that was enough. I think that if we want to really experience it, it will be better to go back when the place isn't wall to wall people. The other half of the day we rode the streetcars and did a walking tour of the Garden District.

New Orleans is also home to the National World War II Museum. This relatively new museum (opened June 2000) is really well done, and you can easily spend a full day here, as we did. The museum is spread over several buildings and includes many innovative displays. There's even a building full of vintage war planes used in WWII. When you first enter, you get an electronic card that represents the dog tags for a real soldier in the war. At various stages, you can scan your card and see how your guy is doing, what roles he played in various areas of the war, and whether or not he survives it. You can later review these videos online at dogtagexperience.org. My guy was "Barney Old Coyote," and he survived the war.

We spent our last day in the big Easy at a lesser known attraction: The Longue Vue House and Gardens, which we found through the American Horticultural Society membership that we have. This little gem gave us an insight into how the moneyed class enjoyed life in New Orleans back in the day.

It was a nice respite from the hustle and crowds of downtown, and another nice garden and house to visit. We received this AHS membership from Jane's friends at work, and we've made good use of the free admission to member gardens all along our travels.

So we got to enjoy four distinctly different aspects of New Orleans in our short three-day visit. We might want to return someday. I had always thought about taking the train from Chicago to New Orleans, spending time in the city, and then taking a cruise from there. But we never did. Maybe another time.

(For more pictures from our New Orleans visit, check out our New Orleans Photo Gallery.)

Today, August 3, marks the one-year anniversary of our full-time RV adventure. So it's a good time to review and reflect on life on the road.  A few things stand out immediately.

1) We haven't found where we would want to live yet. I (Steve) mentioned in "The Big Idea" post that we didn't know where we wanted to live in retirement, but we knew that it wasn't the Chicago area. So we are trying out different places to see what we like. We've found a number of places that we enjoy but probably would not like for year-round living. So far we have stayed in 50 different locations in 20 different states (we've traveled through 25 states but didn't stay in all of them). Our intention was to stay for a week to a month in various places to get a feel for what it's like to live there. As you can see, 50 locations in 52 weeks is an average of one week in each place, but that does include a number of one- or two-night stops when we were trying to get somewhere else quickly. We are now in the fourth location where we are spending a month. So far that has included Wisconsin (Door county), Virginia (Williamsburg), Arizona (Overgaard), and currently Colorado (Gunnison). But along the way we've been in many places for one- or two-week stints and gotten a pretty good idea of the area in that time. So far, we're still looking. I'm holding out for the Pacific Northwest, where we hope to be next summer. [Jane's note: I could be pretty interested in living on the beach in the Florida panhandle. But it would have to literally be on the beach; I'm not sure we can afford the housing there!]

2) We're not constantly on the move, and that's by design. We have tried to learn from other people's experience by doing a fair bit of research in advance. We've joined several Facebook RV groups, and that's been a big help. It seems that full-time RVers tend to fall into three groups: those who are stationary, those who move seasonally between a couple locations, and those who are always traveling to new locations. We are in the latter group. But we've learned that it's fairly common for full-timers to travel a whole lot during their first year on the road as they try to see the whole US. After a year of constant travel, they realize that mostly what they are seeing are the Interstate highways, and they need to slow down. We are trying to take that slower approach from the beginning. When we are in a spot for an extended time (two weeks to a month), we are not out sight-seeing every day. Some days we just hang around the house and do stuff that normal people who live there do on a typical day.

3) This lifestyle is not a constant vacation. But it's pretty close! We're not out seeing and doing stuff every day, but we do get out a lot. That's sort of the point of this: getting to see a lot of different places and interesting things. But just as our friends who live in the Chicago suburbs are not going into downtown Chicago every day, we aren't out hiking or rafting (or whatever) every day. Some days we are just living.

5) We are saving money. We're not in this primarily to save money, but it's a nice side benefit. We don't have the costs of a large house with high property taxes (ours were over $11,000/year when we sold). We do have site rental expense and some repair expense, although mostly those have been covered by warranty. And we spend more on diesel fuel than if we were stationary, but at 10 mpg (for the motorhome) it's not too bad. We save the most when we stay a month in a spot. RV parks typically charge a whole lot less per night on a monthly rate than they do for a week or a single night—often 40% less. And when we're not on the move, we're not burning diesel. Most other costs have stayed the same or similar to what they were before hitting the road, so it's really the housing cost that's the big change.

6) There are a lot of full-time RVers out there. We are always meeting others who are also full-time. The RV industry has been setting sales records for the past couple years, and while this is good for the industry, it's not so good for the rest of us. There aren't that many new campgrounds, so getting a spot in a popular location may require a fair bit of advanced planning. It's not quite as carefree as we'd like. For example, if you want to be in south Florida (south of I-4) in January, February, or March, you better get your spot booked a year in advance. Summer in the Pacific Northwest fills up fast, too, as we found this spring when we were unable to get reservations.

7) We've never camped in a Walmart. Yes, you are usually allowed to park overnight for free in most Walmart parking lots unless local regulation prohibit it. And for people who are traveling a long distance and just need a place to park overnight, it can make sense. But seriously, would you want to live in a Walmart parking lot? Instead we joined Harvest Hosts, which allows us to stay for free at participating farms, breweries, and wineries/vineyards. We've used them only a of couple times, when were were trying to get out to Maine quickly, but the views were much better than a Walmart.